Welcome to Venice
Our little wooden speedboat left the dock at the airport behind and churned down a channel marked by wooden pylons. Great tripods of wooden posts - the kind you’d see holding up a dock, were lashed together at the top to form a triangular structure. These were spaced at regular intervals to mark the path for water taxis. Every other pylon had a watchful seagull perched on top.
Our boat arrived at the island and entered canal with no name on the map and a fuel station on a pier. We crawled down the water way and onto the Grand Canal. We chugged through the surreal landscape of ancient, crumbling palazzos. The tide is in and the water laps at doorjambs. Little docks and piers jut out into the water. There are no walkways or promenades on the Grand Canal, except at a few major piazzas. It is as if the palazzos grew up out of the water on their own, like a coral reef. It is preposterous and beautiful.
We reached our hotel, an old palazzo, not far from a vaporetto stop. We get checked into our room and throw open the windows to see the canal. After a shower, a rest, and a change of clothes, we are refreshed and decide to explore.
The “front door” of the hotel is on the canal. So, to leave on foot you walk through a small piazza out the back and into a narrow alleyway. We hang a left and bumble into a site-specific work by Richard Long. Craggy boulders are arranged into a long rectangle. Most boulders are white, but a snaking canal-like path of pink stones winds its way down the center of the rectangle.
We are hoping Siri knows the way to the Rialto bridge, because we do not. The streets are windy and narrow. When the streets have signs, they are large tiles placed on the second story of a building. Sometimes there is an informational sign, in yellow with black type, pointing you to a historical site. Mostly we trust our pocket computers. We cross a couple of small canals and find ourselves in a small piazza with a café and a gelato shop. We get a coffee and then get a gelato. Two scoops. She gets coffee hazelnut, I get mint coconut. Directions fail us a few times and we have to restart. But eventually we find ourselves on a “main” street leading to the Rialto bridge. We are hungry, it’s close to dinner time and we stop into a small restaurant for pasta. This is pasta as street food. This isn’t something I had ever considered. I ordered a pasta puttanesca, she got cacio e pepe. We each got a tiny bottle of wine. The pasta came in a paper container, the diameter of a large American soda, but much shorter. A lid could be folded over the top and latched. This is pasta on the go. Several folks came in and left with their pasta on the way somewhere. We sat with our wine and ate our pasta and tried to eavesdrop on two fashionable young women who ordered calzones and chatted in Italian.
The Rialto bridge is covered in small artisanal shops. Theatrical masks, leather goods, art, all manner of things. The bridge spans the Grand Canal and offers beautiful views of the city. We keep marching to St. Marc’s square through more twisty, winding streets.
Eventually we find ourselves on a grand piazza with the enormous bell tower and cathedral. We’re tired from travel and walking and take a seat at an outdoor café facing the canal.
We order drinks which come with salty crunchy treats and watch the crowds thin out. The locals are hurrying in. The sky is threatening to rain so we finish our drinks and make our way back through completely different winding streets and find ourselves on the other side of our hotel. We finish the night with a drink at the hotel bar. Wine for her, a negroni for me. Back in our rooms we throw open the windows and listen the water, boats, and late night party-goers as we fall asleep.
