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As a dull individual I suffer an attraction and fascination with Mediterranean history. This fascination began with the Old Testament, something I was originally forced to read while straining through the sphincter-like crucible of my Catholic schools.
Having escaped the confines of institutionalized education since, I have read the thing some half-dozen times by now.
The Catholic high school requiring I read the various Testaments was the only one of its kind in Spokane. There were several Catholic elementary schools, but just the one high school. This proved problematic, as it tired of me not long after I tired of it.
I was given the boot halfway through my sophomore year on questionable charges of behaving altogether too sophomoric. Unfair, and wholly deserved.
I’m unsure why other kids of a similar juvenile temperament and age were overlooked. But it likely had something to do with their cowardly and craven refusals to get good and solidly drunk before second period.
Audentes fortuna juvat.
For those uninitiated in the higher mysteries of the Latin language, this means fortune favors the bold. The boldly unsteady, in this case. Latin is an endlessly malleable language in the hands of those intent on misunderstanding it.
Despite my excommunication, I did manage to narrowly graduate from an alternative public high school. Directly after my invitation to get the diddly out of my Catholic school, I enrolled in the local public offering. I did this under great duress.
I’d finally escaped, but was expected to turn myself in. The law dictated a subpar education was such a good idea it should be mandatory.
There, I learned public schools were strangely comfortable with a foreign language teacher getting goodly and solidly drunk before second period. Seemed a strange standard, honestly. Somewhat double. To this day, my German is horribly slurred.
Ich bin der fettige gurkenjunge mit durchfall. That means I love you. I think?
Other than recognizing public school standards are so far below private ones they didn’t care if their teachers were blackout, blitzed drunk, I learned nothing else of any substance. Certainly nothing about Italy.
I just waited for the interminably boring days to end so my real day could begin. I found nothing to interest me regarding history there. The inverse was invariably true.
My fascination with history nearly suffocated in its crib, the murder weapon held by institutions whose sole mission is to instill an interest in history and similar subjects.
Events around the Mediterranean for the last three thousand years are so compelling even professionals couldn’t prevent my interest.
The Caesar Salad was invented there twenty centuries ago by twenty-three Senators during rather rowdy impeachment proceedings. Turns out if you want to be dictator for life, that’s totally fine, since the natives can just kill you if they change their mind.
Lengthy and ancient tomes were penned there regarding the endless benefits of cabbage for absolutely all the worlds’ ills. It’s better than it sounds.
De Agri Cultura is our oldest surviving Latin language book, in fact. It is all about food - and the economics of slavery - on the Italian peninsula. Italians are, to this day, deeply concerned with their digestive systems in particular and labor disputes in general.
Niccolò Machiavelli also penned a possible satire here on how to get away with being a dickhead and turn a profit from doing so. Scholars are somewhat torn on the question of whether The Prince is satirical or not. I don’t know. But it is good.
Italy has what is academically known as a fuckton of history. Centuries of the stuff. As such, there are countless museums peppered about the place like pimples on a teenaged pizza delivery boy or pimples on a middle-aged travel writer’s butt.
I don’t want to describe any of them in any detail. Museums, I mean. Not my sad, sorry, butt bunions. Museums are mostly just mausoleums someone decorated. No life, dedicated to dead stuff. But they are all fantastic and well worth visiting.
If one is expecting old objects ranging from paintings to prophylactics on display within, they won’t be disappointed. My own understanding and appreciation of art is tiny, stunted, and undeveloped. Pulling out was always enough for me.
I don’t understand art and I make no attempt to do so. But I did spend fifteen minutes deciding if Pollack's Alchemy at the Guggenheim was a Nazi Bomber POV shot or cigarette ash on my contacts. Neither I decided. Or both. It is Alchemy.
To return to the present age, no travel journal can ignore the sheer inhumanity of the modern airport. I can’t, anyway.
I’m told our earth has been steadily shrinking as new methods of transportation and communication become available. There is some truth to this. But a consequence is these new manners of moving about condense what would normally be a longer, thinner discomfort, into shorter and more intense sprints. Compact and stubby.
For example, some hundred years ago, one could not jump across the Atlantic in twelve hours. One was forced to take a ship for several weeks to a month. Total drag, right? The open sea. Whales. Dancing girls. Music.
On this ship, one could also find a galley, an open deck salted in sea air, and a variety of individuals one may or may not be interested in chatting with over cigars and whiskey. It sounds horrible.
These days the discomfort is far more intense. The pain is localized inside a tube with wings rocketing through the air on its own climate-controlled ecosystem recycling everyone’s flatulence into a fine, depressive melange.
Also, no smoking. No yelling. No dancing. The Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria. I don’t know how a man is supposed to enjoy a drink without a cigarette to go with it, but those are the rules.
This insult is followed by further injury in the form of in-flight movies offered to agitated, nicotine-deprived customer-combatants. Just browsing the movie menu makes one wish they were out on the open-aired sea galley enjoying a smashing case of dysentery or an Agatha Christie murder mystery.
It just sounds so tolerable in comparison to airlines. But we landed after fifteen hours or so.
The airport in Venice does not have death-boxes provided for smokers as Istanbul does, but you can smoke right outside. Seattle banishes the tobacco enthusiast to either end of the airport like a shamed Lannister Queen. But first; bags.
We parked our carcasses at the baggage claim, reasonably certain it was the correct one. The monitors weren't working but we recognized fellow travelers from the plane. Neither of us spoke any Italian and I read just enough Latin to encourage genuine confusion as a guide in any way related to Italian.
Language issues aside, we somewhat naively believed we would be able to claim our baggage. But after about an hour of sitting around twitching, we’d only managed to unearth half of our bags.
We then invested another hour leaning on a countertop, attempting to let the hard-working bag people of the Venice Airport know not all of our luggage had arrived. This communication took place mostly via hand gestures punctuating words no one understood, most of which were polite, under the mistaken impression they cared.
We left satisfied the customer support in Venice didn’t seem terribly interested in our silly peasant problems any more than Seattle customer support would be. There is a certain consistency in this approach. Humans are largely the same the world round and airports remain a stodgy, stubborn reminder of this banal evil we all share.
They did mention, we think, they would continue to hunt for our bags, and should they ever finish mining them for gold and jewelry they would forward them on a bit lighter to our hotel in Venice. Silly thieves. We own nothing worth stealing at all.
I suspect Megan would have appreciated clean underwear to face the Mediterranean sun with, however.
Exhausted, settling for carry-on and a single piece of luggage in hand, we exited the Venice airport and crept into the blinding Mediterranean sun. Like Oedipus meeting random people on the road or St. Paul pretending to go blind so Peter would like him.
Didn’t work. Peter hated Paul’s guts as intensely as I hate air travel.
We dodged the cab driver’s union outside the airport attempting to seize the few bags allowed us. They performed magic tricks, back flips, offered us candy, free healthcare, or anything they could do to entice us into their vehicles.
These guys were obnoxious. They resembled those maniacal people one sees on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange screaming about bulls and bears and other animals and who knows what else they're into. But always gesticular and emotive.
Nicotine withdrawal encouraged me to sock any number of them on their noses. One such fellow figured out my weakness, though.
Noting our hiding spot, a gentleman in his fifties pegged us as a few foreign suckers in need of a ride into the old city. He had a smoke with us as he started talking about how beautiful Venice is, where were we staying, and other international chatter.
We allowed him to convince us in halting English we would feel better after getting settled into our hotel. He seemed thrilled at not having to do a backflip to get us into the car. I don’t blame him at his age.
I field-stripped my cigarette and rubbed out the still burning tobacco on the pavement before looking around for a trash can to dump the filter into. Our earnest cabby noted my quest, seized the butt out my hand, spiked it on the ground and declared, “You are in Italy now!”
This is something I came to notice about Italy at large and Venice in particular; the locals do not seem to have the same hang ups Americans do about littering. They never ran those anti-litter propaganda campaigns with the Native American guy who wasn’t Native American shedding a single, noble tear.
They don’t even have a sobbing, blubbering Elizabeth Warren pretending to be Native American. They have to settle for Mara Carfagna over there. They seem fine with it.
I rarely, if ever, toss a spent cigarette butt on the ground or anywhere but a trash can, assuming I can find one. I even go so far as to keep the disgusting thing in my pocket until I can find a can to dump it in. This has the effect of making me smell quite bad.
I became a bit of a fascination to the locals. An American man who refused to litter up their town or otherwise make a nuisance of himself on principle alone.
Our cabby seemed sketchy but official in the sense he seemed to own the vehicle he was offering to scoot us around in. He had licenses - or a facsimile of such - on his dashboard, but I wouldn’t know a real Italian license from a Snopes fact check. Only later in Rome did I learn of pirate cabbies in Italy.
Some sort of union versus rideshare fight was playing out in Italy while we were there. I couldn’t care less, beyond the vaguely racist signs all over stating to only ever, ever, ever use white taxis. Not making this one up. Not making any of this up, actually.
Didn’t have to.
We raced across the bridge connecting the mainland with the ancient floating city of Venice. Our driver made the usual small talk one expects when visiting other countries. Where are you from, what do you do, how much money are you planning to spend in my car, etcetera.
Our drive took five minutes or so, ending in a tiny parking lot on the outskirts of town marking the furthest distance an automobile is allowed on the island. Venice is so fragile, so odd and old world in terms of architecture, even a single Prius could destroy the thing. One wonders what an automated Tesla could accomplish.
One honestly wonders how horses and carts handled the place. I assume they didn’t. It has most likely always been an engineering and logistical nightmare. “Practical” is not a word printed anywhere within Venice’s city limits.
Disembarking from the car, we asked our driver for directions to our hotel while passing him his fifty Euro Bucks. That’s ten Euro a minute for those not doing the math, which even by Italian standards seemed pretty steep. That kind of money tends to come with an espresso afterward.
He was a nice crook, and far from laughing behind our backs at the absurdity of that question in Venice, he laughed in our faces instead. One does not give directions in Venice, it doesn’t work. I was skeptical, there are always landmarks or something.
But he was correct.
“Turn right at the canal,” is a statement without meaning. Like telling someone in Seattle to turn left at the used syringe. Or simply turning - directionally agnostic - at a six-way intersection. It isn’t helpful when everything is a canal or a syringe.
“Across from the cafe,” is equally lost in quantity. Venice is fifty percent cafes, eighty percent canals, and thirty percent expensive as balls. We thanked the crook anyway, and he sped off toward the airport again to hunt more suckers.
It was about noon when we descended into the labyrinth of Venice.
The midday sun did its best to grind our sleep deprived, brutally white bodies into powdered milk as we meandered our way through the warrens of alleys and squares and interminable bloody canals.
Venice does not appear to have been planned by a central authority, nor anyone at all. There isn’t a straight line anywhere in the place. Stairways lead in all directions, built prior to modern engineering triumphs like the wheel, the plane, or the right angle.
These stairways often lead to someplace one wouldn’t expect, which is great for a properly rested and not yet tested explorer. But it is not so great for one laboring to dump the bones of their luggage in a hotel they are beginning to suspect simply doesn’t exist.
As the sun began to set on our eighth hour spent attempting to locate our hotel, it came into view while rounding our hundredth claustrophobic alleyway. A tiny sign hung some twelve feet above the ground spanning perhaps two feet, declaring its genius and geolocation.
We only found the place due to the smell. We had been told our hotel was near what is known as a historic fish market and the area smelled about what one would assume a historic fish smells.
Campo della Pescaria was to be our home for the next couple days and if our feet and eyes failed to properly map Venice during our adventures, our noses never failed us.
We checked in, briefly met the tour guide who had considered enlisting the local cops to find us until we’d walked in the door, and slept like fat, ignorant Americans abroad.
Venice is tiny, which makes getting lost that much stranger. Without much effort one can walk across its length and back in an hour or so, provided they understand its perimeter layout. Less if one has access to a proper jetpack which I do not.
It is split into two halves, bisected by a canal one would properly refer to as a river in any other place. This canal is constantly peppered with romantic gondolas and pragmatic trash barges tooting up and down its length.
These trash barges are the only practical aspect of Venice. Everything else is all about style, romance, and all that other stuff Disney movies tell us are paramount, rather than just good to have.
One can also hail a water-taxi in order to save the half-hour spent lost wandering about completely lost in the city. These taxis will take you to the islands about the perimeter of the city as well, like Murano and Burano. Little villages themselves, they’re worth a peek.
Get sick of the Venice cafes somehow? Try the Burano cafes. They’re just like the others, but they’re on a smaller island.
If one is a fan of artisan glass blowing - and I don’t know a pot smoker who isn’t - the tiny island-village of Murano informed me they provide the world’s greatest glass pieces. I wouldn’t know, of course. As already mentioned, I know nothing about art, and I didn’t see a single bong while visiting Venice. I had to take their word for it.
They seem to stick to what I call baubles, jewelry, and similar junk you can’t easily smoke something out of. Still, the island was beautiful, the Mediterranean sun was out, and vistas in all directions defy description.
But Venice proper is where your heart will land, floating atop the Laguna di Venezia.
You will spend most of your time absolutely lost and loving every minute. You cannot truly become so lost in Venice the same way you can get lost in London, as any direction will land you at the perimeter of the city within twenty minutes.
At the same time, you will rarely find a specific place you seek within the first hour. Don’t make appointments to be anywhere, just wander about and let the city happen to you. Don’t have a destination in mind, unless that destination involves one of three things: coffee, food, or cigarettes.
The Venetians also sport a tobacconist on every block, in addition to cafes and such. I deeply approve of this.
Civilization is built upon cafes, tobacco, and religion. And murder, of course. Less thrilled about the murder angle of civilization, but there is coffee and cigarettes, so maybe I should grow up and get adapted.
I haven’t done that, though. Get adapted. I refuse. Just like every day we woke up in Venice and every evening we turned in, our prodigal luggage refused to arrive. Each day we were forced to settle for an update on our missing luggage instead.
We already knew it was missing, though. The local service industry couldn’t be bothered to find our bags, not in this economy, and they were quite religious about updating us on that fact every evening. It projected a phantom work ethic.
We were in Italy as part of a Rick Steves group tour, which I grudgingly admit was well done despite my innate hostility towards curated experiences.
I loved our tour guides, even if they didn’t appreciate my jokes about corpses clogging up the Tiber or the ever-present forever-castrated statues littered about town. It is a rarity, an exception, to find a statue without a mangled dong.
One supposes at some point during the Renaissance, members of a local movement deriding toxic masculinity arose and went about dismembering statuary. The United States experienced political movements targeting defenseless statues while we were in Italy, so the whole thing made perfect sense to me.
Seemingly, no wang escaped vengeful scrutiny from Venetian dullards interested in dominating and diminishing art through politics and censorship. These people never change, despite being separated by the Atlantic, ideology, and a handful of centuries.
A Rick Steves tour monopolizes your mornings and behaves a bit upset if you sleep in. Mornings are regimented, usually involving a trip to a museum or church to pore over relics of the ancient world. The mornings are locked in, on a schedule, and there’s no time for hangovers or soaking your feet in the bidet, which I highly recommend.
In the afternoons, you are on your own. Plenty of time to putter about town, eat at a cafe, drink at a cafe, smoke at a cafe, and hunt about for a trash can afterward. There are more cafes than trash cans in Venice.
My wife and myself were constantly looked upon with a certain dissatisfaction every morning, resulting from our rampant tardiness and omnipresent Mediterranean hangovers. I found myself wishing the mornings would pass swiftly yet wanting to benefit from the tour guide’s local knowledge of the labyrinth we found ourselves in.
Our tour guides were perfectly lovely humans - not to mention perfectly lovely and knowledgeable ladies - but the pursuit and application of their careers did prevent me from crawling about Venetian architecture for half the time we were there.
I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed quite a bit.
Venice - and Italy in general - hardly lacks for interesting things to crawl all over, though most of the legal options involve services of some sort or another. Eating, drinking, other modes of consumption one can find just about anywhere in the world.
But more.
One cannot make a left turn without tripping over a restaurant, nor do four left turns manage to make a circle. This embarrassment of riches regarding cafes was the case everywhere in Italy, but in Venice everything is compacted upon each other and condensed alongside everything else.
This ancient city is beautiful far beyond what one can imagine. It is better with your luggage by your side, but one rolls with the unions in Italy. More than a few folks told us they were impressed we even received daily updates on the state of our luggage.
We must be Important People. But we weren’t. We were just people without stuff.
The canals crossing the streets are incredible, something I haven’t seen anywhere else. They’re beautiful and calm. They’re not always bridged, however. Canals, at times, become damningly sinister, presenting themselves as impassible obstructions with the firm, negligent demeanor of Nature.
One never fails to find themselves thwarted by a moderately stubborn body of water which simply wasn’t there the day before.
Attempting to find your way back to that cafe - you know the one, with the little tables out front - becomes an impossibility. You seem to recall it was nestled against that church and a little bridge, but another building appears to have grown up out of the sea overnight.
This is why intentionally getting lost in Venice is the way to go about things. It cannot be helped. Lean into it like that Facebook executive lady who lies to Congress all the time. I can never remember her damned name. The inspiring crook lady.
In Venice, the instant you think you have a handle on where things are or which stairway leads where, the topography shifts on you. It is like sandcastles built on sand, only there are pilings and gondolas and cigarette butts and shit instead of sand.
The disorienting effect is vigorously encouraged by the locals, forever offering countless vintages of local wine. Locals, wherever they are local to, usually offer this kind of thing because they also enjoy it. I suspect one must be drunk to live in Venice.
One must certainly get drunk at least once if visiting.
If you do happen against all reason to place yourself on a timeline in Venice by agreeing to meet someone in a particular place and time, give yourself an hour to get lost first. Bringing a bottle of something never hurt, either. You can apologize with booze, or tap out, have a sit, and console yourself with it.
Just remember, Rick Steves won’t be allowing a late morning. That morning or any other.
Venice is a cultural center of the world. Other than an unacceptable form of rhetorical public masturbation on the part of the Venetian claiming it, this status means a few things, apparently.
First, half the population of Venice exists just to aggressively sell tourists useless junk at insane, clown shoe prices.
These people move like sharks through the crowds, looking for couples like gutter punk panhandlers, leaning on the idea a man cannot forbid his wife anything in the world. This practice is ancient and still exists by virtue of the fact it absolutely works.
These people are utterly insufferable, but there’s nothing a man can do when squaring up against the imploring look and lashes of his wife. While the husband is considering the best way to drop a pugnacious florist into the nearest canal, his wife is already sizing up those gods damned flowers as hers. A fait accompli.
Far from dropping the son of a bitch weed peddler into a canal, one finds themselves digging out twenty Euros for some sad, desiccated and condemned tulips or roses. Not that I know the difference between tulips and roses. I guess roses are red.
There’s simply nothing else to be done.
Second, by virtue of being a cultural center, it smells like piss. I do not know why this is, but it remains true. It is likely the canals, of course. They are beautiful, but they stink. You won’t see dolphins in them, but used condoms are kind of like dolphins.
A picture in how to be both safe and disgusting at the same time.
Venice doesn’t have sewers but what it rests upon in the bay. Between this and the historic fish smell around the market we called home while there, our noses furiously worked to deaden themselves against the constant onslaught of life.
Thirdly, and the only actual reason something should be considered a cultural center, one can find incredible yet decrepit old buildings in the city of some note. The Doge’s Palace, Palazzo Ducale, is one such thing.
The Doge of Venice, much like the modern Doge of the Internet, was a first-among-peers type office in the old Venetian Republic. Crusty old aristocrats - between knocking dongs off statues - would vote among themselves as to who would helm the state in Venice back when it was a capital of note.
The Doge’s Palace was one of the perks of this aristocratic popularity contest and it is situated on St. Mark’s Square, the patron saint of Venice and sick kickflips. Fun, since there’s no place to get a decent skate in anywhere in the city. Cobblestones, you know.
Mark is associated with the lion due to the book of Revelations, so one encounters lions depicted all about as they stumble across uneven flag stones. Yet another phantom of civilization. There is no way a lion is stumbling into Venice without either themselves - or more likely a human - making a horrible mistake.
Fourth, culture aside, one can see a cruise ship at the docks on occasion.
The locals I spoke to about this, to a person, despise these leviathans. You would think the ship was some sort of Gallic galley full of barbarous, bearded monsters, intent on destroying and raping their fine city the way they spoke about them.
These curses were always accompanied with what I assumed to be positive things in Italian about the Mayor of Venice. Yeah, that sounds right. Everyone loves mayors.
The cruise ships create unsteady seas which then slam against questionable pilings - ancient before you were born - keeping the damned thing above water. The city floods daily as it is, with drains all throughout the streets to encourage waves to recede.
But when a cruise ship wake comes crashing in, one notices. Unlike midterms in the United States lately. Blue waves, red waves, it just smells like a Grant County Sheriff’s Deputy’s breath. Low tide on the Mediterranean.
Venice, due to its cultural center designation, is dying and rotting from the inside out.
It has mostly been dead or many years already, an unliving museum with all the accoutrement of a city, but nowhere to build and no permission to tear anything down. It presents a facade of liveliness, but most human behaviors are simply not allowed.
One cannot create anything more substantial than glass anal beads, yet another James Bond movie, or a bowl of pasta. It cannot expand out beyond its current borders and so it can only retract.
The will and funds required to maintain it have been ebbing away over the decades and the very policies of tourism as primary revenue - such as inviting and allowing cruise ships to dock at port - are accelerating its death.
It seems a sad state of affairs considering how casually the city defies description. It is a unique place. One should visit it and lose their wallet while they still have the honor and the chance to get swindled there.
The old world still lives there, somewhat crippled and enforced in the manner conservationists dictate. Personally, I’m not sure why anyone would listen to them. They throw their garbage in the canals, still. But at least they use rubbers.
We spent four days there utterly lost and never once getting a handle on where anything was or when. This included our luggage.
But our time there vanished as if it was nothing. Our tour was moving onto Tuscany shortly. Florence, man. Coolest little town on the boot.
The Adventure continues in Tuscany.