antica venezia

(courtney)


Venice is a lagooooon. it’s not a beach, it’s a lagoooon. That’s what a bitter new york lady in a restaurant informed us just as I was picturing my aqua naturale respite from the firenze heat. She was right, though, and it was good to know it—Venice is steamy humid hot. But of all the places we’ve been, this is the one I can best picture myself staying—it’s just so weird, I want to be a part of it. In every other place, the tourists seem out of place, like we’re not supposed to see them—we all point our cameras above the baseball hats and other cameras so we can just have our iconic photo of the Pieta. But in Venice, the tourists are Venice. We all bottleneck through the alleys together (I swear the district of Venice only pays their cartographers with bottles of wine because these maps are confusing). There seems to be no unsafe zone. Just when you feel you’ve reached a sketchy area, you turn a corner and voila there is the piazza of such and such with the chiase of santo who-who and the tourists mingling and slurping their cokes.

And did you know the city of Venice is engulfed in water? I feel like I should tell someone, like the Pope or someone. It seems like a mistake. Does someone know that sludgy toxic murky greeeeen water is sloshing around on bricks and wood and spreading mold and algae and slime? I’ve only ever seen water surrounding buildings by flood, by some dramatic act of destructive nature—but here, it supposedly was intentional—the water came first, and then some rich people thought it might be an absurdly rich gesture to defy nature and build their palaces so that they could step out onto their boats and never have to use a horse.

As a tourist site, though, it is a very bad idea for those with carriages and wheelchairs: you have to maneuver narrow alleys and steps that go up-over-down-across the canals. My knees hurt by the end of the day today. And while Venice is certainly romantic, it isn’t my first thought of it. Traveling on the expensive water-bus that took us to our hotel, I just felt sorry for the buildings. The mortar between bricks is wearing away. Sculptures are losing their angles. Algae everywhere. It is impossible to keep all the lead-based paint adhered to its shutters and walls. Apparently there is a chemical plant not far from Venice and the levels of toxic something or other are 50 times what they should be. Look in the static water and feel it in the air that feels like static water—this place needs a detox. The waters rise a quarter-inch a year, and in January certain areas flood altogether. The tourists looked unhappy today with their vendor-bought parasols and bottled water, all without shade (the shade was on the other side of the canal and you have to pay 50 cents to cross). Our necks and scalps are singed like red Murano glass. Close the Venetian blinds.