Italy Complete Record: Day Three

Venezia
March 29, 2006
Hotel Antico Doge
2:15am

I start out of sleep, flustered, wide awake, and cursing jet lag. I can hear Anna’s even breathing downstairs which confirms that I am alone in this. I go to the bathroom, fetch a bottle of mineral water out of the mini-bar, and finish “The Talented Mr. Ripley,”

before trying (and failing) to fall back to sleep for about three hours. Every time I close my eyes I’m spinning in these swirls of Baroque detail—grand architecture and curlicues and busy trompe de l’oeil paintings. This kind of insomnia is incurable without drugs or alcohol, neither of which I have on hand. Instead, I lie back on the bed and contemplate the crude, white-washed ceiling beams above me, put in place by medieval hands. I stand up in the dark to run my hand along the ledge, half-expecting some haunted transmission, but instead only amusing myself by imagining melodramas taking place in this house three centuries ago. The mayor’s son. The doge’s daughter. A pregnant serving girl. The Spanish Inquisition. The alleyway outside the window stays busy all night, and I hear someone toss a bottle at our wall. The glass cracking and clanking against the cobblestones below.

I try to fall asleep again.

Still doesn’t take.

At four am, I contemplate Christianity, after failing to induce sleep by way meditation (usually works, which is why I’ll never be a mystic). It seems to me that all the great things (art, music, philosophy, architecture) Christianity (and in particular, Roman Catholicism) produced came out of the need to justify how you (and by extension, everyone else) should put aside all skepticism, rationality, and native intelligence in order to put all your faith into a bunch of Middle-Eastern fairy tales about a vicious, unforgiving, and unintentionally hilarious god and his eager, self-effacing hippie son. It’s certainly a challenge. And Italy, the cradle of Catholicism, provides a wonderful example of just how bizarre Christianity actually is. Like, how on earth did the descendents of Caesar, Virgil, and Ovid ever accept this shit? At what point did the general population just decide that Bacchanalia was uncivilized, but that drinking the simulated blood of a Hebrew radical was something to be praised (and in some cases, rigorously enforced)? I think most of the Romans probably agreed t

hat Jupiter probably didn’t have sex with the Lady of Sparta in the form of a swan, and that Castor and Pollux were probably not hatched out of shells. That was just a metaphor. But the Virgin Mary? Hey man, that’s the gospel truth (no pun intended).

But you have to love the holdovers from the ancient world. Italy’s writers for millennia have prided themselves on knowing exactly how to get to the gates of hell, and getting clearance to stop by for a friendly chat with their dead friends (all damned, by the way). They don’t get stuck ther

e—no getting eaten by a three-headed dog, or drowning in the river Styx, or pissing off the demons—but instead go home to report the experience as some kind of rollicking anecdote. It doesn’t matter if you’re a defeated Trojan who can’t keep a girlfriend alive or a malcontented Florentine in love with a dead nine-year-old. Hell is at your command!

*****

Antico Doge

5:20 am

On my fourth trip to the bathroom, Anna stirs and asks if I can sleep.

“I’ve been wide awake for three hours,” I say.

She sighs. “You wanna do something?”

“Like watch the sunrise over the Grand Canal?”

She shrugs.

I get my coat.

*****

5:30

The night desk clerk gives us a puzzled look when we tromp downstairs to hand in our room key well before dawn. We unlatch the great wooden doors and head out into the cool, damp alleyways around the hotel.

The streets are empty but for a small battalion of grumbling men and women in coveralls, armed only with plastic push brooms, against a truly amazing amount of litter. The canals are oily black, and the view down the small bridges is shadowy, but not sinister. It’s too peaceful to be sinister. I climb the steps to the top of Rialto Bridge, careful not to disturb the chorus of sweepers, and let the cold wind off the canal burn my cheeks and dry out my eyes.

A young British couple, very enamored of each other, appears on the bridge, travel-weary and dragging suitcases, and asks us to take their picture against the lightening Eastern sky. I oblige, and watch them walk away, my arms over the edge of the bridge. We take a lot of pictu

res, and I am hyper-conscious, as we walk back at the sound of my boots against the cobblestones and wooden walkways. The way every sound echoes throughout the campo.

Back at Antico Doge, I find our favorite bench is occupied by a sleeping young man, who is either passed out from drinking or the most fashionable homeless genius I’ve ever seen. We stand on the bridge speculating for a while, until he stands suddenly and wanders off in the general direction of the Canal. We claim his bench, still warm from his body and sit there unt

il the sky turns blue and the chimes in the belltower ring for six o’clock.

I leave Anna awake downstairs studying maps and I return to bed finally able to sleep.

9:00am

The included breakfast at Antico Doge is served in what was once, reputedly, a ballroom. I admit to having little experience with ballrooms, but I’m not buying that the small, windowless, gold breakfast nook was ever anyone’s idea of a party room.

Certainly the breakfast crowd is not in the mood to party. It strikes me as we walk into to the virtually (and awkwardly) silent space that we are the youngest people staying in the hotel by at least twenty (if not thirty) years. We take our plates to the bar in a veritable vacuum, passing several couples with facial expressions broadcasting: “Oh Bloody Hell, the barbarians have arrived.” I try to make as little noise as possible, which is challenging, as the more polite we try to behave the more hilarious the conditions seem. By the time we leave, I’ve spilled coffee on my lap and announced, “Fuck, I think I just ate half a ham” (the latter was supposed to be a whisper, but the acoustics in that room were such that I think the other gu

ests could hear my hair growing).

We drop the room key again with the young, American girl at the front desk:

“How in hell did she get that job?” asks Anna.

“Maybe her parents were Italian. There are family loopholes in the whole EU thing.”

“How can I get tha

t job?”

I sigh, and take off on a convoluted narrative in which I remind Anna that our respective familial connections to Europe are distant, to put it mildly, and I’m pretty sure we can’t get working papers because somebody 9 generations ago might have lived in Scotland.

“Did live in Scotland,” says Anna. “My mother’s maiden name is Stewart. My ancestors were related to the royals.”

“How bout that?”

“True story,” says Anna.

“Well in that case, can we start calling Charles the II “Uncle Charlie,” because I really like the way that sounds.”

“And James the First can be Uncle Jaime.”

“The Holy Bible—Uncle Jaime Edition. Sounds good,” I say. “I still don’t think you can use that to get a job in Italy though.”

“Probably not,” says Anna. “Damnit.”

9:30 am

We step onto RialtoBridge, to see the shuttered doors coming off the stalls and stores we’d passed earlier in the day. The sky is cloudless, full blue, and from the top of the bridge we can see the flowers and fruits of the street market on the other side of the river. Most of it is crap—shitty tourist stuff—plastic masks, bad t-shirts, but we walk slowly in case we miss something.

The other side of the Canal is quieter, and once we’re a few blocks out of the market, less clogged with tourists. On otherwise empty alleyways, we pass waiters in white aprons taking cigarette breaks from side work against high terra cotta colored walls. Venice has a lot of the following things:

1. Mask stores
2. Lingerie stores
3. Stationary shops
4. Restaurants that advertise both Pizza and Gelato. (In fact, one was actually called simply: “Pizza and Ice Cream”)
5. Hot men.

So many of the last in fact, that it becomes almost impossible to not be distracted by eye-candy at every twist and turn. It’s not just that men in Venice are tall, slender, dark, and handsome. It’s that the tall, slender, dark and handsome men in Venice are extraordinarily well dressed (even if they’re wearing hoodies and jeans—the jeans fit well), congenial, and inclined to smile appreciatively at every passing woman. When they speak, they look you in the eyes. And even hecklers from across the Canal are pretty flattering. (“Bella! Bella!” being infinitely preferable to “Back that Ass up!”) This has the benefit of making you, as observing/ed female, feel infinitely more confident, beautiful, and desirable than you may even be. This is not a talent that most American men have, and romance on this side of the Atlantic suffers for it.

On the way to Frari, we stray too far into the wrong direction and end up by a University where a bunch of students are participating in what looks like a Fraternity initiation, involving stripping, getting doused with all manner of shit, and then awarded a black robe and laurel wreath. There’s quite a crowd gathered, including a perambulatory band with accordion. Anna and I promise ourselves we will figure out what’s going on, and head back in the right direction to Frari.

10:45 am

Though spacious, high, and true to its architectural era, Frari isn’t a grand cathedral, but what it lacks in architectural opulence, it makes up in quality of featured art. Titian’s “Assumption” stands in full, brilliant glory over the altar, and each corner features pieces—both paintings and sculptures—of similar beauty and craftsmanship. Donatello’s John the Baptist—skeletal and decked out in animal skins. The Bellini “Madonna in Child” in the smaller chapel, which is truly magnificent. The Venetian painters, unlike their Florentine peers, had a gift for capturing beautiful women. This seems as if it shouldn’t come as such a surprise, but the fact is: most Renaissance art is all about glorifying the masculine. After days of seeing dulled female heads on lumpen, androgynous bodies, the business of the women in Venetian painting seemed all the more remarkable. Titian’s women are perfectly beautiful and remarkably human for their time, and Bellini, his teacher, painted the most gorgeous Madonna I saw in Italy, whose puzzling facial expression—acceptance mixed with regret mixed with tedium mixed with sadness and exhaustion—is truly remarkable to see. When I stepped in to see her, in that tiny Chapel, in the company of two elderly English tourists, I felt like I’d earned some rare glimpse into the real character of the mythological virgin, and found it rather heartbreaking.

We interrupted a tour group, lead by Enrique Iglesias’s mole, which has since evacuated to the face of a skinny young Italian man, on our way out. I bought lots of post cards, and we agreed to stop for coffee on the way to see the Tintoretto Chapel.

At a small cappuccino stand, run by two friendly women who didn’t speak a word of English, we sat outside to smoke and watched the parade of hot men. Anna determines the predominant fashion trend among young Italian women involves patterned tights and puffy jackets, and starts to revise her opinion on the latter, having previously filed it under the “Way Too Brooklyn Hipster for My Taste” heading. The back of Frari is under construction, so the entire square smells a little like nail polish remover, and every now and then you catch sight of the construction crew, who are all dressed like they came from Disco Night at the Star Trek Convention. Fuschia jumpsuits. Shiny silver stripes. Not kidding.

I drink a coffee and a lemon soda in quick succession and we head back to Scuola di San Rosso—a brilliant white building in a square of brilliant white buildings. Inside it is quite a bit darker. We wander round the first floor, looking up at Tintoretto’s often creepy and certainly elaborate biblical scenes before realizing that the real show is upstairs. This ballroom of a chapel with high gilded frescos on all sides, including ceiling. (They give you mirrors so you can see what’s above you without straining your neck—and this is a great idea, except you end up looking at all the pictures in reverse). I marvel at the opulence of the space and the, to be blunt, bat-shit crazy quality of Tintoretto’s work and subject matter. I get “Let’s Get It On” stuck in my head at the top of the stairs, and probably irritate the other patrons by humming the line “We are all sensitive people, with so much to give . . .” over and over, until Anna and I are distracted by a ceiling panel that appears to be God coming out of Godzilla’s nose in order to give Moses revision notes on the Ten Commandments. (This later proved to be “Jonah and the Whale,” but I had to buy a postcard in order to figure that out. And Tintoretto obviously had no idea what a whale looked like). I don’t know why—when confronted with the sublime—I am apt to devolve into a giggling adolescent. Chalk it up to my philistine tendencies, I guess.

After perusing the gift shop and finding no cheap coffee mug printed with Tintoretto’s likeness we head back out into the streets around the university and find more students engaged in the laurel wreath ritual around low-rent coffee stands and used book stores. We get turned around following two young mothers pushing babies in carriages and come out in Campo Santa Margarita, where Anna explains the history of the Rio Terre Canal (which apparently was once an actual canal, but is now a street. ) We stop in a lovely, quiet, and chilly church, and then head out through the archways to the area around the Accademia.

12:30pm

The Accademia Bridge is one of the grandest wooden bridges I’ve ever seen, rising in a high arch over the Grand Canal. From the top, you can see the view of Venice that’s printed on all the postcards. As such, it is absolutely clogged with tourists and gypsies selling ragdoll animals and praying mantises made out of palm leaves. Because we are tourists, we edge into the crowd to take our own series of predictable snapshots, and I fall into serious consideration of all the flying lions[1] around town. The water beneath us is brilliant blue green, and you could for a moment imagine it as tropical and pristine were it not for the omnipresent scent of old fish and rotten trash. After a while, you stop noticing the way Venice smells.

We go to the Peggy Guggenheim because we fear it will be our only real opportunity to see Modern and Post-Modern Art whilst in the country of ten billion crucifixion scenes. (This was, incidentally, correct). Twisting through the narrow streets back toward Ms. Guggenheim’s villa, we encounter a truly dazzling assortment of international hipsters, all of whom look like they’ve recently stepped out of an LCD Soundsystem show, except for the inevitable clutch of teenaged mohicans, who scowl when they sip their espresso and prove that, even in 2006, there’s really no place free of purple haired fifteen year olds in a safety-pinned Exploited T-shirts.

By the time, we reach the Peggy Guggenheim, there are only hipsters. Legions of them. Working at the ticket desk, lounging in the courtyard, smoking against the walls. I hear at least seven different languages, but everyone looks like they should be sitting on the back patio of OCSC on a weekend night. I do realize that I’m definitely playing the part of the pot to the kettle here, but seriously? It’s a bit unnerving.

I enjoy the art. Especially the Italian Futurist collection. It occurs to me that I’m never going to stand in awe of Jackson Pollack, and that the popularity of Surrealism at Campus Poster Sales has permanently compromised my ability to look at a Salvador Dali painting and not think about nineteen year old stoners. The temporary exhibit of B&W photographs documenting the Venice Biennale from 1948 to present is way more interesting than it probably should be, and, arguably, my most favorite piece is a recent Jenny Holzer bench, which like most of her stuff is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Peggy Guggenheim is buried there, in a grave in the courtyard alongside her fifteen lap dogs. I spend entirely too much money on postcards of the lady herself, in tricked-out sunglasses, partly because they guy working at the gift shop is incredibly charming.

2:30 pm

By this point, we’re exhausted and hungry. We cross the Canal to head back toward Piazza San Marco for lunch, and end up on the street with all the expensive designer stores (which I have no business even looking at). The plan is eat at one of the upscale tourist traps along the outside of the square, but we find, upon arrival, that they are, by and large, closed for the season. Spent, Anna and I collapse against a column in the corner to be observed by a thousand or so morbidly obese pigeons.

“These are the fattest pigeons I have ever seen,” I say.

“They look like turkeys,” says Anna.

“Tiny, fat turkeys.”

“Look, they can hardly fly even,” says Anna. “You figure they’re kickable?”

I sit back to watch a near-Hitchcockian drama play out between a group of high school students and about two hundred pigeons. They’re screaming and holding their heads.

“I don’t think anyone would stop you at this point. Might be kind of a public service. Of course, they might shit on you.”

“I’m just waiting for that to happen,” she says. “I read a whole section in the guidebook last night about how to get pigeon shit off of you. Apparently you let it dry first.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“It’s kind of gross.”

“So is eating the fat pigeons,” I say. “But in a pinch, I’m sure they’d be filling.”

“Hello Bird Flu.”

“This is like Ground Zero for Bird Flu,” I say, and quiet. An outbreak of avian flu in Venice would be like Night of the Living Dead. “Jesus.”

Sitting in Piazza San Marco is sort of like taking a sedative. After a while, you stop noticing how much time has passed or what you have to do. It becomes very hard to pull yourself away and motivate. Eventually, the hunger factor forces us up off our asses, and we wander out toward the canal, intrigued by the notion of excellent Bellinis at Harry’s (where we don’t actually end up eating due to a lack of outdoor seating). Anna balks at paying to use the toilet. I buy glass fish for my mother at the stalls by the Canal, and ultimately we end up at a pizza place about two blocks back from the Piazza, where our waiter initiates what is to become a popular thread on our trip through Italy.

He arches his eyebrows and smiles. “So you’re English, right?”

“No.”

“Scottish?”

“No.”

“Austrailian?”

“Nope.”

He puzzles. “Irish?”

“No.”

Anna rolls her eyes and raises her hand. “American.”

“No,” he says.

We shrug apologetically. “Yeah.”

He shakes his head and takes our wine order, still not convinced.

I had told Anna before leaving the States that I’ve rarely been identified as an American at first blush when traveling in Europe.[2] This is no put-on on my part. I don’t fake accents or adopt new personas. And I don’t know why this is, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take it as a compliment. Anna didn’t believe me when I told her, but when the maitre d walks away, she looks across the table and says:

“Okay, you’re right. That was totally flattering.”

I think for a moment on the semi-tragedy of how embarrassing it’s become to be an American in the Bush-era. And I try to not to wonder if the continual confusion over my nationality derives from the fact that I don’t have perfect teeth.

I eat most of a small pizza and we drink an entire bottle of wine sitting there, getting politely heckled by a table full of Italian boys in track jackets. We take off after lunch, opting out of the lines in front of the Cathedral to pay 7 euro for a cramped elevator ride to the top of the bell tower, where we gawk amid middle-aged tourists, and look out over the red tile roofs to the distant Adriatic. By the time we return to ground level, Anna and I decide to head back toward the hotel on the Vaporetto.

5:00pm

We ride up the Grand Canal watching the passing hilarity of un-self-conscious gondolier passengers. Seated on the front edge, I have a good view of what rush hour traffic looks like in a city of water. Behind me, a young Scottish couple muses about the possibility of Vaporetti-Spotting. We disembark at Ca’ D’Oro, and wander back down the Canareggio Streets to our hotel, and then onto the Rialto, where I spend entirely too much money on a leather journal, bought from a husband and wife team who make sketchbooks in an ancient style. Anna gets run out of a tourist stall by an angry proprietor for trying to take a picture of an incongruous American Civil War chess set displayed among the plastic lions and cheap glass beads.

We finally settle back for another cheap bottle of wine at a Caffe beside the Bridge and irritate an uptight young English couple by smoking. The sun is sinking lower in the western sky, and I take a short detour on the way home at a cheesy chain store to buy a skirt.

By the time we get back to Antico Doge, we’re dog-tired and fall asleep for about an hour and a half, rising late—at almost nine to wander around the corner to a small restaurant called Trattoria di Bepi.

9:00pm

In our (limited) experience, Venice is not much of a late-night town. In fact, by 9:30, Venice is pretty much sleeping save a couple of discos by the train station. This apparently has something to do with a necessary, of fairly Draconian, noise ordinance. Water and narrow alleyways do little to insulate against sound. By the time we arrive at the restaurant, literally one block from our hotel, at a few minutes after nine, the staff is already stacking chairs, anxious to go home. We settle into a communal dining area, and are seated midway down a table next to an older couple. An American woman, Brenda, who is from Atlanta and runs an international glass shop with a showroom at the High Point Furniture Market, and her attractive European significant other (we later speculate that he’s probably Greek). They come to Venice regularly to deal directly with the Murano people, but have spent the better part of the last week in rural Romania dealing with remote artisans in regions without real roads. We hear a collection of colorful anecdotes about fly fishing in the Carpathians before they offer up the location of a bar up the road called Tortuga and promise to meet us later for a drink, should we choose to join them.

Anna and I order an Italian variant of the seafood platter and are served plates brimming with tiny, crispy anchovies and squids. Anna puts her squeamishness aside and does tolerably well with the mystery seafood. I’m not squeamish, but find the meal mediocre at best.

10:30pm

After dinner, we wander the empty streets around the hotel searching for Tortuga. We find a movie theater and a lot of houses with darkened windows but no sign of nightlife. We finally surrender to return to Rialto and Signore Nefarious, who appears just as unhappy to see us as he did the night before. We sit in the far corner table, the Canal lapping mere inches from our outstretched feet.

“At risk of being cheesy, this really is the most beautiful place,” I say.

Anna nods. “Yeah.”

“Shame we have to go tomorrow.”

“True.”

I turn my head to look at the lights on the water and feel the brisk wind against my cheek. I wonder, idly, if I’ll ever come back, while somewhere inside the bar, the wait staff thumps the bar triumphantly at the end of the soccer game playing on the television.

And though we’re not leaving until the next morning, I take a moment to say goodbye to Venice.

---

[1] Not actually griffins, as I find out later. Flying lions are a symbol of St. Mark and a sign of the Enlightenment. They also, at least in Venice, bear a significant resemblance to the Cowardly Lion with wings. In other words, not terribly intimidating. I plan on dressing my cat, Maud, as a Venetian Flying Lion for Halloween this year. I’ll keep you updated on how this goes.

[2] Even in England my sister and I shared an elevator in a fancy hotel with a couple convinced we were Irish