People have all sorts of reasons for going to Italy: food, wine, art, nature … None of them really are mine. Sometimes I catch myself wondering why I want to be there. It is a noisy place after all, chaotic, and often outright filthy. But then the bus leaves the neutral ground that is the airport. It is pitch-black and an almighty fog swallows everything more than thirty metres away. But somewhere, the eye catches some minor yet typical Italian feature; a road-sign, maybe, or the closed blinds of a remote house. And the heart takes a leap and all doubts are gone. I still don’t know why I want to be here. But, really, does it matter?
The origins of this trip lay a bit further back, when I was innocently booking plane tickets and came across a promotion for flights to Venice. Usually, these offers never allow the combination Friday afternoon out, Sunday night back. But this one actually did. Many temptations I can resist but not these.
And therefore I found myself one Friday evening in February at Munich airport waiting for my flight to Venezia, when we were informed that due to the weather in Venice the flight would be diverted to Bologna. The captain later explained that there was fog in Venice. In Trevisio, the next airport, there was ‘a problem with parking’ (whatever that means), Trieste was bad weather, too, and Bologna had also no parking. We would start by going south and then, somewhere over Bolzano, decide what to do. Which turned out to try Trieste. While going there the captain came on again and said that he had seen the runway of Venice just fine. He thus had revised his decision and would now circle for a while to see if the weather improved enough for a landing attempt. It did and only an hour late we touched down on Italian soil.
The aforementioned bus took me and a number of other late arrivals to Piazzale Roma. Visibility still was lousy. So lousy, in point of fact, that I took the wrong exit and went south instead of east as would have been necessary to reach my hotel. With the result that within three minutes of arriving in Venice I was hopelessly lost.
After tracing my steps back to Piazzale Roma, another, this time better, directional guess, and about fifteen minutes walk through muffled silence of misty Venice I arrived at my hotel in the middle of Cannaregio. The room was out to a side street, but when opening the window and looking hard right, one could actually see the Rio di Ca Dolce. I performed my traditional ritual of initiating the hotel room by throwing my stuff around and then quickly checking the available TV channels and then went for another stroll through the nightly city before going to bed rather early.
The fog was still there the next morning. Following the doubtful delight of Italian hotel breakfast I headed out again. This time I turned north towards Fondamente Nuovo which runs along the north-western boundary of town towards the lagoon. The plan was to follow it all the way to the Arsenal and have a look at it. Back in the sixteenth century, the Arsenal was Europe’s first mass-production facility. It was capable of spitting out a fully seaworthy galley each day and employed some 16,000 people.
As all plans involving walking in Venice, it was doomed the moment I came up with it. I got lost about six times but finally managed to arrive at the Arsenal’s northern wall. I should have known, though, that the entire thing is a military installation even now and by no means accessible to civilians.
I decided to visit the Naval History Museum instead. There I learned (among other fascinating facts to know and tell) that the gondola is not symmetrical. The keel is moved a bit to the port side which is where the gondoliere stands and that is why. This is also the reason why a parked gondola appears to be listing to starboard.
The rest of the day I spend aimlessly wandering about as well as shopping for food. Travelling alone has one significant drawback: You don’t have someone to go for dinner with. This is nowhere as much a problem as in Italy. For some reasons, Italians don’t really get around the concept of being alone in a restaurant. I have adjusted to this and, not being a gourmet in the first place, now usually go shopping for groceries and then feast in my hotel room. Part of this is a very particular brand of three layer cookies which since have turned into my main food supply when being in Italy.
For Sunday I was thinking about taking the train somewhere else, Trevisio maybe or even Verona. The flight back was only at quarter to eight in the evening, so there was ample time for such a trip.
When I woke up in the morning, however, the sun was shining brightly and all the mist had disappeared. I celebrated by staying in Venice. I walked down to Piazza San Marco. This main tourist area is quite crowded even on a Sunday morning in February. I really don’t want to be there in high season in June. My purpose wasn’t touristing, however, but buying a ticket for the vaporetto, the Venetian variant of a city bus. These vaporetti are a perfectly fine way to spend a day. There are lines through the Grand Canal, around the city, out to the Lido and Murano, and finally several lines all labelled LN for ‘laguna nord’ which tour the further away islands of Burano, Mazorbo, and Torcello.
This I had done on my previous trip, already. Instead, I took the boat to Giudecca which I hadn’t seen yet. The most prominent feature of this island (or rather group of islands) is the church Il Redentore. Its construction was promised in 1576 in an attempt to attract divine attention to rid the city of the plague. Which seemed to have worked. In 1577 the plague disappeared and the church was dutifully erected. To celebrate this, a procession is crossing the Canal della Giudecca every third Sunday in July for which purpose a temporary pontoon bridge is being built. This tradition was abandoned in the 1970s. But now, a huge sign at the waterfront opposite the church suggested that it had been taken up again.
I continued by boat one stop further to San Giorgio Maggiore, but apart from the (closed) church and a sailing harbour, there is not much to see. There is a quite lovely park there, but it is fenced off and not open to the general tourist.
Next by vaporetto up Grand Canal and then around the city out to Lido. Extended by getting off at random stops for a short look around, the afternoon flew by.
Back at Piazzale Roma, there is the choice of two buses. The regular city bus number five is covered by the day ticket I already had. But so did everyone else and there was an endless queue already fifteen minutes before the bus’s departure. The other option was a special airport bus that cost three euros extra and was only taken by about ten people.
So I at least left the country comfortably. Back to the neutrality of the airport and, later, to the cold north.