More about Venice from us in France

Upon hearing about sagging beds and irascible Venetian chefs, some have written wanting to know if we are in fact having a good time. Mais oui, certainly we are! Everything is new and fascinating (if not always entirely comfortable or comprehensible) and we are enjoying ourselves thoroughly. Travel, you know, broadens the mind and the feet.

So here’s a little more about Venice.

Well Venice is simply amazing and strange, simultaneously ornate and crumbling. From novels and guidebooks I’d read I’d gotten the impression of a kind of fairy tale city, so I’d pictured it in clear watercolors with gilt edges. It turns out, at least in March, to have a more shadowy, almost seedy, beauty than I’d expected. The buildings were taller and more crumbly than I’d imagined, the colors more earth-toned; the alleys more shadowy; the canals abruptly edged, with water a dark mossy green. That indifferent water spends the centuries lapping the mortar off the bricks at the houses’ ankles, warping the wood on the great old noble doors, 10 feet tall with their front steps of pitted marble streaked with muddy algae and sludge, stepping down into dark water. Often the canals are so narrow that if you slipped going down your front steps (to your boat) you could crack your noggin on the house opposite. And the houses are several stories tall, so that most of the narrow streets feel like dim little twisty canyons, riddled with ancient wooden doors of surprising sizes (4 feet tall, 8 feet tall…), with brass doorknobs right in the middle; such as might be used by secretive, cave-dwelling hobbits. There are books and posters featuring the doors of Venice. Most of them have awe-inspiring doorknockers, too, elaborate metal heads and hands and grimacing lion-like beasts as big as your head. Fabulous.

Mostly in Venice we spent our days roaming through the twisty streets, getting lost and peering in windows and gawking at the apparent contradiction of front doors opening on water. I understand this is what you are supposed to do in Venice. Also you are supposed to visit Saint Mark’s, which we did most thoroughly. In case you haven’t seen it, the inside of this enormous duomo (church) is one big fantastical mosaic. All the domes and walls and the ceiling and around the windows and in all the funny medieval joints and crannies, every spot is completely covered in eighty bajillion eensy pieces of glass, stone, and gold-leaf covered squares, each about the size of a fingernail. It’s like walking around inside a really flashy sequined medieval prom dress. One that’s been turned inside-out. Only in this case the spangles are arranged in Biblical and other religious scenes. The façade of St. Mark’s is just as ornate, not only mosaic’ed but bristling with statues, cherubs, horses, and so on. You can climb up some narrow stairs that let out on part of the roof, where you can walk among the statues and peer down on the pigeons and tour groups down in the square, and also see out over rooftops and past the Doges’ palace to the Grand Canal.

Neither of us speaks Italian but Val has some Spanish and mine is pretty good, and combined with the remnants of my college French, English cognates, signs involving pictures and what we hoped were international gestures, we managed to keep ourselves housed and fed. We had a little Italian phrase book with us. I had balked at adding this minute bit of weight to our backpacks but Val was for it, and as it turned out I was really glad, especially the evening I planned adventurously to order something I’d never heard of for dinner, but then in a moment of prudence I looked it up and discovered I had been about to order (ugh) liver.

Did I mention the shoes already? The streets of Venice, the ones that aren’t water, are cobbled, but that doesn’t stop an enormous number of women from wearing really deadly stiletto heels everywhere. Some are shoes and some are boots, but they all have heels you could use for shish kebab and whimsically long pointy toes that extend several inches beyond your average homo sapiens toe length. It is possible that Venetian women have long prehensile toes and require these shoes to accommodate them. It’s true that I never saw a Venetian trip.

The church of San Geremia, on the same square as our hotel, was dedicated to Saint Jeremy but also housed the relic (ie., dead body) of Santa Lucia, Saint Lucy, who as you may know was martyred by having her eyes put out. In paintings she is shown smiling sweetly and holding up a tray with what appear to be fried eggs but are meant to be her eyes. Her saintly body is displayed, as is customary, in a sort of small sarcophagus (a reliquary) in turn enclosed in a glass case. Most of her is hidden but a pair of shriveled feet protrude from the bottom of the sarcophagus, much like those of the Wicked Witch of the East, but without stripey socks. (Stripey socks are, however, quite popular in Venice.)

That’s everything I can think of about Venice at the moment.

After Venice we headed to Siena, so more on that to come. And meanwhile, in real time, we are still in Saignon, outside Apt, in Provence, France, and having a marvelous time with Dad and Linda going hiking and eating olives and cheese every day. More on that later too.