Traipsing Around: Travel and Psychogeography: Venice

If Amsterdam is the Venice of the North, Venice, is, well……Venice! It has to be one of the most beautiful cities in the World. It is both ridiculously busy around the main tourist areas and signed tourist thoroughfares and yet eerily quiet just a few feet away. The trick, I think, is to get off the beaten track and to explore the small alleyways at random, just following your instincts and what looks interesting or promising. Often this means arriving at a dead-end, where the small street just terminates at an archway and a blue, ribbon like canal. At other times it means falling from a dark, dim alley into a brightly lit, deserted piazza with an empty outdoor restaurant and a 15^th Century Church with leaning campanile, or into smaller squares of a few houses, each with slatted green shutters at the windows and a bronze doorbell and plaque with the name of the owners outside each house. At other times, you step unexpectedly into a very busy alley, thronging with people, which comes as a complete surprise. The fantastic thing is that you really don’t know what is around the next corner. It is easy to spend hours just wandering around in this haphazard way, often ending up in a completely opposite direction than one might think. Indeed, despite following a map sometimes, the effect is the same – miles from the intended direction, so at least this traipsing approach saves any map reading embarrassment! The most interesting areas (for me, anyway), are those where the locals live, with lines of clothing hanging across the narrow streets, where working boats, used to carry goods around the city, are moored in the smaller canals and where children go to school in 13^th and 14^th Century buildings.

On each night there are violent storms, which leave the streets running with water like rivers, the cobbled streets and bridges dangerously slippery and all the inhabitants soaking wet through, dripping pools of water on the floor of the bus or tram. On one evening the thunder and lightning was directly overhead, the sound of the thunder ripping the sky so loudly that people would instinctively duck, their hands covering their heads for protection at each explosion.

On Sunday morning, quite randomly, I stumble across the Vogalonga, a colourful annual boating event where teams from across the world (I saw boats from France, Canada and Hungary) take part in a non-competitive race in all sorts of rowing boats (kayaks, canoes, gondolas, dragon boats and many other types I don’t recognise). There are people in traditional Italian boating costumes with straw hats and blue stripped shirts, many others are in fancy dress, with brightly coloured wigs and T-shirts. It looks good fun and has a sort of Italian organised chaos feel to it, with people in one boat throwing bottles of water and bananas to the competitors, often missing completely, so there are bananas bobbing in the water, boats bumping in to each other and an announcer who seems to be commentating on events which have already happened, or referring to the names of friends in boats that have already passed, which is unintentionally funny!

It would be wonderful to live here for a period of time and to get to know the history of that part of the city really well: the building, the churches, the art museums, to be intimate with such a fantastic place would be an amazing privilege.