The Truth About Venice

They don’t want you there. This rather bold assertion may not be as glaringly accurate post-Covid, as before, but I can tell you from first hand experience that you’re about as welcome in Venice as a bacon sandwich at a bar mitzvah.

Never being one to crash a party, and always welcomed everywhere I have visited, ( having traveled extensively) the whole Venice trip in May of 2019 became an exercise in awkwardness, as our well behaved all-adult family/friend group of 6 were booked for a 4 day stay.

Ever resourceful, and with a passion for photography, I made the best of the trip through the lens of my camera, I felt more like a voyeur than a guest, so I tried to be as gracious and unobtrusive as possible.

We had landed in Rome the week prior, and had visited Pompeii, and perused Rome itself, before renting a van and driving North to Assisi, then onward to Venice. Up to that point, the citizens of Italy were some of the warmest and most welcoming I had encountered anywhere. Had we left the country at that point, I would still be talking about the fun, receptive, attentive, and kind Italian folks we had encountered everywhere we went. But....then came Venice.

We dropped the rental car off at the Venice airport and boarded a bus (which was running an hour late) that would take us to a local water taxi service. The bus driver left us and our luggage in a parking lot and pointed in the general direction of the water taxi’s before driving away. Fortunately, I had printed our reservations online for the “Splendido Palazzo” facing a canal, so it was just a matter of getting there.

After we found the water taxi place, which was quite a jaunt, I joined a queue and waited with my reservation in hand. This is where the fun begins. The short, stout, and heavily mustached man at the counter had been friendly and jovial the entire time I waited in line. When it was my turn, I asked for 6 tickets to the stop closest to the “Splendido Palazzo.” He angrily snatched the reservation from my hand, squinting at it, while peering over the top of it to the rest of my group, then he waved it at me like a fan and said, in the booming voice of an executioner “Turista Americano...this place does not exist!” Then he threw the paper back at me, and when I tried to explain that I had just talked to the proprietor on the phone, he began to wave his arms and shout at me “ Get out! Go away! You hold up the line! I cannot help you!”

Were we having fun yet? Well, the Venice party hadn’t even begun. I got back in line to repeat the scenario another few times, over the better part of an hour, and finally managed to get the attention of someone else in the large glass booth and waved him over. He contemplated my reservation for a while, then scratched his head as though he had just remembered the place, and sold us 6 tickets to boarding dock # A21, pointing us off toward the right of the building. “Follow the docks until you come to it.” “Grazie, Grazie” we all replied in unison. It was beginning to get dark.

45 minutes down the shoreline with full luggage in tow, we barely made the water taxi on time, only to pull away with the realization that dock #A21 was directly behind the ticket booth... had we been directed to the left, rather than to the right. It could only get better from here. And darker...

The boat guys seemed nice enough. They didn’t speak English apparently but they seemed to recognize the address on the reservation. They were a jovial group and we started to relax as the dazzling lights of Venice danced before us. The boat stopped at this dock and that dock and eventually emptied out and we recognized some landmarks twice. Still, the boatmen were standing close by and when we looked at them quizzically they nodded and pointed, and went on laughing. We took it as a good sign that we must be close. So we got dropped off on some dock, somewhere in Venice, in the dark, with luggage and set about to find our “Splendido Palazzo”, which by now, we were more than ready to settle into. But Venice had other plans.

I don’t know, dear reader, if you’ve ever been to Venice. But if you have, you know that the city is set up like a giant stone maze with cobblestone streets. In it’s relatively small space (roughly the size of New York's Central Park,) there are 403 foot bridges. These are the kind of bridges that have stone steps on both sides so the bridges arch over the canals. 6 people, 9 pieces of luggage, and 403 foot bridges. Did I mention no Wi-Fi? No Wi-Fi.

We passed a few people and attempted to ask directions but they either ignored us outright, waved us off, or grumbled in disgust. Meanwhile, we kept looking for those obscure little signs in Italian that are plastered high up on those maze-like walls in the dark. The only great thing I have to say at this juncture is that we were all so exhausted after an hour or so of dragging luggage up and down those bridges that we stopped for a breather and there it was! Front and center. Something that was on my bucket list. The Bridge of Sighs. Everyone was irritable at this point and my snapping that single photo probably didn’t help, but it felt like my bucket might be running out entirely so I figured to go for broke on that shot.

I would like to say that we left the Bridge of Sighs and our Hotel was just around the corner, but that would be a fictional spin on what actually happened. What actually happened was a continuation of incensed and annoyed locals who wouldn’t even look at our reservation....PLEASE, DEAR GOD....just POINT to where this is! So, it was a couple more hours of bridge- dragging our luggage until a wheel finally broke off of one and we continued skidding it down the cobblestone in the dark until at last someone in our party got a Wi-Fi signal! The place was only another half a mile or so! We dragged into the lobby of the “Splendido Palazzo”, blistered and dehydrated, where lo and behold, the proprietor was friendly and spoke good English.

“Oh my gosh” I said, as I was gulping down the bottle of water he had offered us, “We’ve been through hell. How wonderful to meet you here. Finally, a friendly person!” He grinned broadly in the muted light of the wee hours, showing his rows of white teeth and he said “I’m friendly because you are giving me money.” Then the smile quickly faded, and after a brief and bizarre phone call, he handed us a key and sent us on another half mile hike to our rooms, which were a few narrow and twisting marble staircases up.

We fell asleep in our clothes and slept until noon. After drinking several bottles of water each and a series of long showers, we ventured out. In the dazzling sunlight, the entire place was stunning, and it appeared wholly inviting.

We had reservations for a gondola ride at 3pm and we had cast off the night before like some unimportant nightmare. Sure we had a few blisters and were sore and one of us was limping, but no vacation is without a few bumps. We were laughing like school-children about the events of the night before, and how it was simply a chain of bad events; surely we were just tired and overly sensitive.

3 pm came and we giddily went to the location of our gondola company and handed over our reservation. Our gondolier eyed us with shark eyes and brusquely waved us into the gondola. When I had one foot in he yelled “SIT!” So I did. Another in our party boarded just after me and he unceremoniously shoved her in, nearly toppling her. But the ride...well...aside from being a bit edgy that he might dump us in The Grand Canal, was quite relaxing.

In the end, we couldn’t wait to put Venice behind us, but on our last day, a delightful and stooped elderly woman emerged as if by magic, from a doorway in a shadowy alley. She walked right up to my friend Laurie, and clasped both of her hands in her own as she smiled and said “Bella, Bella...” and then carried on in Italian as if we understood her. The funny thing is that we did. We understood that she understood what it was like to be a Turisto Americano in this place. She was the grandmother who comforts you after the beating. “Grazie, Grazie” we said as we walked away. With one eye on the people in the menacing masks.

We found out later that there is a dock two city blocks from the “Splendido Palazzo.” Should you care to visit or anything. In the final analysis I have decided that a place is as good as its people. I should say that I fully understand their perspective. If people crowded and littered my street every day, and hoards of people lined up to photograph my shutters, my pets and my children; some of them drunk and belligerent, I’d turn nasty too. And I’m a nice person. Is Venice beautiful? Unequivocally. Would I go back? No Grazie.