Venice (and a little Rome)

I have a general rule when traveling alone that pictures are to be taken only in the very most select and deserving of circumstances; I hate the feeling of being singled out as a tourist, especially as one unpopular enough to be traveling without a group of friends. Venice, therefore, was a real problem. I’ve never been anywhere else where every single back alley, broken down bench, and beat-up boat was worthy of its own coffee table book. From the second one descends the stairs from the train station, the views are spectacular, the Grand Canal opening up like a Main Street on the Mississippi floodplain with better architecture. Though why, I ask, did someone think it was great urban planning to put four flights of stairs up to a train station with no ramp for luggage or wheelchairs? Venice’s “subway” is a network of boats called vaporetto, which zip around on a number of different routes, the most useful of which makes a large circle of the Grand Canal. They’re wonderful because, although expensive at 6.50 euro per ride, they offer the only real way to see the Grand Canal as it was meant to be experienced (from the water), they save quite a bit of leg-work over the bridges with luggage, and they’re a huge savings over the private taxi boats or the gondolas, which cost something like 80 euro per 40 minute ride. Needless to say, I took a vaporetto, and left the gondolas to the happy and significantly poorer couples.

I took a bit of a chance on my hotel in Venice; its reviews online said its renovated palace offered spectacular rooms, though it was nearly impossible to find. Knowing this going into it, I braced myself for some fruitless stomping around with my luggage, but after half an hour in the piazza where the hotel should have been, I gave the reception a call. The man on the phone directed me to a green door in another plaza that sported a sign, the San Lio Guest House. This was not my hotel. I informed him of this, when he assured me that it was indeed where I needed to be. After two flights of stairs, I found myself in a near-empty room with a chair, a video camera pointing in my face, and a sign dangling from a thread on the ceiling. The sign instructed me to take a map from the box on the chair, because the check-in for the San Lio Guest House was at a newly-opened inn, my hotel, only a short walk from this bizarre interrogation room. The effort was worth it, thankfully, because my beautiful room had soaring 15-foot ceilings, a private patio with table and lounge chairs, and a plasma TV – this was all for about 10 euro more than a hostel in Venice. Like someone wrote in their review of the place which I read before I left, I’m pretty sure the hotel is a front for some sort of illegal activity – the receptionist was odd, the room was too good to be true, the back alley down which I had to travel alone to get to the place was scary, and the extensive video-surveillance system throughout its hallways in combination with the very secure entry procedure was disconcerting. But, I had a nice stay, when all was said and done.

Venice was breathtaking. I’m kicking myself for not being able to put pictures up, because I simply can’t describe what it was like to walk around its streets. Nearly every building is surrounded on three sides by water, covered in sculptures, stained glass and balconies, and is pleasantly and atmospherically in disrepair or listing to one side, adding to the magical feel of the place. Much of the time I felt like I had slipped into the 18th century, walking through covered porticoes with the water from the canals lapping over onto the sidewalks, poking around shops which sold ceramic carnivale masks by gaslight, or sipping my espresso in a café on St. Mark’s Square to escape from the drizzle. Unfortunately, the only two cafés on the square, Caffè Florian and Caffè Quadri, both from the 17th century(!), are highly competitive, highly pretentious, and insanely expensive. But of course I had to try them. I popped into Caffè Florian for coffee one day while waiting to visit St. Mark’s Basilica, the church on the square which is amazing for its interior, entirely covered in gold mosaics. Florian is the more ostentatious of the two, with frescoed walls and servers in white tuxedos who needed to be tripped to pay the customers any attention. At 8.50 euro, I was expecting the best cappuccino of my life, which I didn’t get, but my vegetable quiche was OK. The presentation, though, is beautiful, everything served on silver with silver utensils. I went into Caffè Quadri my last night in town because I was lonely, cold, and all I wanted for dinner was good coffee and a piece of chocolate cake. The interior is brighter, the servers wear black tuxedoes (note the contrast from the white ones across the way), the presentation is identical, and they offer copies of the International Herald Tribune for lonely individual diners. Also, my 8.50 euro cappuccino at Quadri was perhaps the best I’ve ever had, with foam so perfectly steamed that the bubbles were all but invisible and a spoon would stand up in it. This place won.

Venice has a fascinating history, owing much to the fact that it was a sovereign republic for many centuries, before succumbing to the Spanish, the Austrians, the French and, finally, the Italians. When it ruled itself, it had a highly developed and complex political system, headed by the Doge, something in between a king and a pope. I visited his palace overlooking the lagoon, which contains one of the largest rooms in Europe, the Sala del Maggior Consiglio (Great Council Hall), where the Venetian equivalent of the Senate would meet. To give you an idea of the scale of this place, one of the hundreds of paintings in there is a 73 by 23-foot oil. They used it every Sunday for their meetings, but I thought it would be ideal for a ball. Unfortunately, I could never have thrown one in there, since everyone in the world whom I like would have fit comfortably in the doorway. I also, thanks to a very helpful conversation I had in French with the ticket woman at the beautiful Chiesa Miracoli (ask me sometime about my spontaneous nosebleed there), got myself the six-euro Chorus Pass, which granted me admission to sixteen churches across the city. I wish I had known that earlier in the day, because it would have saved me some money at the massive Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, where there is a fascinating statue in its courtyard of Jesus and God the Father above a well. This doesn’t mean much unless one bears in mind that, for centuries, the patron of Venice was Neptune, and God, hanging out up there suspended over a well, has a flowing beard of seaweed down to his knees. I think the artist was making a statement.

So now I’m in Rome. I left Venice on the train, and while I don’t think it beats Spain, necessarily, Italy is beautiful. Especially Tuscany, where there really are villas everywhere and those weird, conical pine trees. I’m starting to hit my stride with Italian – at least I can make my way through ordering now without using English – and I can understand just about everything I read. I’m also starting to get the hang of restaurants. It was pretty hit-or-miss in Milan and Venice (the low point being the tourist-specific dive in Venice where the menu was in five languages, always a bad sign, and nearly everything was pre-frozen). Last night I attempted to find a specific restaurant from my guidebook; it had closed, so I moved onto my second choice, under the “budget” category. That one was in someone’s garage and looked like a brothel. My third choice was on a street down which I wasn’t about to venture alone, so, now three hours into my search which had taken me back and forth across the city twice, I stopped at the first place where I didn’t feel like I would die from the food or be molested while trying to eat it. Leave it to my discriminating standards to pick a place which falls under the “very popular - reservations required!” category in my guidebook. Not that I knew until I was back in my hotel room last night, but it did explain a lot. At 7:30, they were just opening, so when I walked in and the host was busy, I sat myself down at a tiny little window-side table. He asked if I had reservations, I asked if I needed them, and I was grudgingly moved to the table onto which the front door opened. Still, I think it was worth it. I tried the bread pasta (a first for me – a little like a weird French toast) with pesto sauce and a sirloin steak. As much as I try to assimilate, I’m still American, and it had been way too long since I had eaten red meat. Today, like a true Italian, I had a croissant for breakfast, pizza at 11, pizza at 3, and gelato for dinner. The pizza this afternoon was phenomenal, from a local bakery where nobody spoke English and my portion was cut off from the oblong, paper-thin pies with kitchen shears and weighed. I thought the businessmen in ties, standing around outside the bakery smothering themselves in tomatoes sauce was a good sign, and I was right. I needed about half of what the woman gave me to eat, but she was very friendly, and I couldn’t explain what I meant anyway, so of course I just had to eat it all. The dough was perhaps the best I’ve tasted. I’ve also been extensively testing gelato around the country, and I asked my hotel manager where I should get some in the neighborhood. He directed me to a “factory – very famous in Rome!” which didn’t look like much but had huge lines. For two euro I got a tre gusti – three flavors, a quantity at this place which would be equivalent to a four or five scoop sundae in the US. My niocioccolato (Nutella), stracciatella and pistachio gelato came in a fresh cone topped with a mound of freshly whipped heavy cream. I haven’t eaten anything since.