Dateline June 1, 2016, Venice
Many of our friends and family have been to Italy; this was our first time, and it was everything they promised. The first thing to pass along, which we heard from everyone and found to be true, is this: order the house red. It is always excellent, and over here it almost never gives you a headache.
Venice. We got off at the Venice station and headed down along the Grand Canal to find our flat. Our host, Marcello, had told us to walk straight along the water, cross a small bridge, and carry on about four hundred meters to a yellow building with a hat shop, where he would meet us. We made the beautiful walk down the narrow streets, through a piazza, over the bridge, and kept going, until it became clear we had gone too far and turned back. The hat shop, and Marcello, turned out to be about fifty meters from the bridge.
The flat was adorable, rustic, with low ceilings, just off a canal in a real neighborhood, close to the station and a thirty-minute walk from St. Mark's Square. We learned fast to duck; the doorways stood about five feet tall, and our heads found every one of them before we caught on.
A few bridges away we walked to see the old ghetto, the Jewish quarter, which during the war held people who were later shipped off to the camps, and which is still today a Jewish neighborhood of shops and restaurants.
That first evening the restaurant Marcello had recommended looked to be closed until Tuesday, but that is a story for a bit later. We found another on Yelp, very good, with a local red at seven dollars a liter. Amazing, and no headache.
The next morning we strolled toward St. Mark's along the Grand Canal. Janice wanted to do a gondola ride, so we looked into it. We watched a good many of them backed up in the narrow canals, dodging powerboats, the views nothing special until they reached the open water.
At the gondola stop we learned the price: eighty euros a head for thirty minutes, shared with four other people, and no one to sing you a love song. We decided we were getting the same views on foot for nothing, and took a pass. They are mostly motorized now anyway, the long oar just for steering.
St. Mark's Square, when we reached it, was magnificent.
We wandered it a while and had a coffee and a tea looking out at the Basilica. The old churches over here are something else.
Then we went to find Harry's Bar, the famous haunt of Hemingway and half the writers and artists of his day. John had wanted to see it for as long as he can remember. We walked into a dim, dingy little room right on the Grand Canal, and a gentleman came over to inform us that John would not be permitted in, nor upstairs for lunch, in shorts.
It worked out in our favor. We got our look at the famous bar and saved ourselves a fortune, for we later learned it had become a tourist trap where two drinks and a grilled cheese could run eighty-five dollars. We scrapped our plan to come back.
That night was a lively one, perhaps a full moon. Around two in the morning a young person was screaming right under our window, "leave me alone, go home." Then, best of all, at five a man stood beneath that same window singing opera, and not badly either. John swears he hired him.
We spent the next day wandering the little alleys and walkways, which was a delight. It is a marvel to watch the boats pull up to deliver goods, groceries, building materials, everything, and the trouble it takes just to find a place to tie up.
As for that restaurant: it turned out the hours we had read, posted under the restaurant's sign, actually belonged to the barber shop on the corner. The place we wanted was a few doors around the corner, and yes, it was closed on Tuesday. End of story.
The whole city runs on the water, and when the canals ran high and a boat went by, the wash would come up over the sidewalk. The next morning we caught the train on to Florence.
