Venice
All ancient cities started like Venice in one particular way, as a pedestrian realm. But even the oldest of these learned to accommodate horse and carriage, tram and omnibus, scooter, automobile, train and diesel bus. Venice alone remains a city traversed only by foot aided now and then by short boat rides. It is a place where the visitor re-learns the rudimentary value of walking. But before that, you have to get there.
It’s advisable, when first visiting Venice, to approach by water. From Marco Polo airport, overpriced wooden launches are available for the film festival A-listers, or the Alilaguna waterbus for the rest of us. This is to approach Venice in a way befitting an island. But far more visitors make their entrance across the 19th-century causeway which lumbers through the lagoon barely above water, low and heavy, an awkward industrial umbilical cord. Ruskin hated it and campaigned against it, even praising its partial destruction by bombardment in 1849. But to no avail of course, given the pressures of tourism that bear down on Venice daily.
The jostling crowds spill out of the Santa Lucia Station, a low-lying Rationalist bulk with a Fascist accent, onto a wide terraced plaza. This is the introduction for many of Venice’s 60,000 daily visitors: noise, electric lines, steel rails, crowds, timetables, armed guards. These facets of the modern world make one last play for attention.
But the island nature of the place won’t be denied. The crumbling asphalt of Mussolini’s 1933 road bridge gives way to squared pavers and cobblestones. Armco barriers and concrete bollards demarcate the last of the car, the end of the bus, the start of a new world of boats and walking.
Distance at once both shrinks and expands in this strange environment as the physical accessible range of travel is limited to an island which is 4 km east to west and less than 3 km north to south. After a few days in Venice, a sort of re-calibration takes place. Your expectations about how long it takes to get places, about what is a long walk, start to change. North and south lose their meaning and “being lost” is normalized. This city seems unknowable.
It’s a common sight to see tourists standing on a corner, guidebook in hand or smart phone lighting a puzzled face, looking up in vain for street signs. They often don’t exist. In Rome, with a bit of Italian, you can ask a bus driver for your street. In Paris, the Metro stops are well-signed. But in Venice, the limited public transit on the vaporetto water-bus touches only the most outer fringe, plying the Grand canal route mostly, hardly helpful when lost in the warrens of calli and alleyways dead-ended by dark canals.
And so, you walk on. The artificial city, built on millions of wooden piles in the mud of the Venetian lagoon, is essentially flat. There are no hills to lead the eye, no distant vistas for markers. The only direction is sideways, the only landscape a man-made one.
A good map helps, but maps are of limited value in a city like Venice, despite it being one of the most mapped places on earth. Invariably, maps only add to the confusion because the calli are too labyrinthine, the intersections too confusing, the dead ends are water and not even cul-de-sacs.
Mapping Venice has always been more of an art than a science anyway. Historically, the maps that really interested the Venetians described the wider world. All roads, canals and sea routes led elsewhere: to new markets, new conquests – they were trade routes and lucrative destinations to leverage.
This city was the home of Marco Polo. Venetians travelled, traded, brought back treasures. Amongst these were architectural styles, Venice being the grand mash-up of East meets West: Byzantine and Baroque, Muslim and Christian, far and near, and that fusion has helped create a city that has for centuries been a famous celebrity of human habitation.
Maybe too famous. As Mary McCarthy wrote in her classic Venice Observed:
No stones are so trite as those of Venice, that is, precisely, so well worn. It has been part museum, part amusement park, living off the entrance fees of tourists, ever since the early eighteenth century, when its former sources of revenue ran dry…and there is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice…the tourist Venice is Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Harry’s Bar, Torcello, Murano, Burano, the pigeons. Venice is a folding picture-post-card of itself.
This might partly explain why, when an estimated 30 million people visit Venice annually, less than half that number stay overnight. Tourists have a sense of déjà vu in Venice: “I’ve seen this all before” – in a Canaletto print, on a glossy calendar of Picturesque Italy, in a James Bond film. So a quick survey of well-known sites is all that’s needed to justify another checkmark on the bucket list; then back onto the cruise ship.
But there is another side to Venice and only after four or five days of wandering does it start to reveal itself. The length of a stride becomes (as it always should have been) the natural measure of travel, and the rhythm of walking becomes the rhythm of thought.
Without the benefit of a rental car or the speed of a subway, the pace of observation slows and focus sharpens. In the shadow of the myriad canals, the nights are eerily quiet. The senses are enhanced. A new appreciation for detail and the joy of meandering sets in.
Marcel Proust described it this way: “After dinner, I went out by myself, into the heart of the enchanted city where I found myself wandering in strange regions like a character in the Arabian Nights. It was very seldom that I did not, in the course of my wanderings, hit upon some strange and spacious piazza of which no guidebook, no tourist had ever told me.”
Proust, McCarthy and Ruskin had the luxury of months at a time in Venice, something that doesn’t align with a 21st-century notion of travel. But after even a week, patterns emerge and details reveal themselves in ways that seem foreign to our modern notions of the convenient, shallow survey.
I spent 10 days in Venice a few years back, largely agenda-free, visiting the Architecture Biennale and discovering the advantages of being lost within the bounds of an island. I took moments in the echoing night-time silence to loosely map my daily wanderings on a sketchbook page. The resulting map was a free-form piece of abstract shape and colour, sinuous lines recording my routes and the punctuations of cafes, appertivo stops, late dinners; my comings and goings for a stretch of days without a schedule, compass or GPS. The shape of the main island, resembling two grilled fish sharing a plate, gave it what little structure it has and like my unstructured walks, it developed its own sinuous sort of beauty.
I too hit upon some “strange and spacious piazzas” that I have not since been able to identify in guidebooks. As Joseph Brodsky writes in Watermark, “It [Venice] surrounds you like frozen seaweed, and the more you dart and dash about trying to get your bearings, the more you get lost.” Walking in Venice is like that, like reading a poem that twists and turns with every line. And it’s never the same poem twice, but changes with every reading.
It took me a while to learn that. My first few days were filled with wrong turns that grated on my usually confident sense of direction. But I eventually gave in and enjoyed the serenity of no longer expecting anything to be as predicted. I just followed my feet and let Venice be Venice.