Kicking a puppy: Venice isn’t for everyone

Ahh, La Serenissima, Venice, the home of gondolas, Carnevale and the world’s most expensive taxis. At the very moment I say, ‘Yes, I just spent ten weeks there’, eyes light up, the person’s previously marginal interest in what I had to say for myself instantly exploded into full blown fascination. “Wasn’t it wonderful? Wasn’t it beautiful? Isn’t the food great?” Then with my next words I am made to feel like I have kicked a puppy.

A long time ago I chose to go to the less than picaresque Warwick University on the grounds that one day, in return for putting in my time in academic prison, I would get to go to the most romantic city in the world for a term. Having lived in Florence before, I knew what to expect from living in Italy and in many ways I wasn’t disappointed. I got to practise my Italian, haggle in markets for fresh food and argue passionately that the altar piece we just saw in that church MUST be by Fra Angelico not Giotto, over as many cheap and yet increasingly excellent glasses of red wine as one could get out of a 20 euro note. I’m an Italiophile out of the closet, I lap it up unashamedly, and I love Italy.

Venice, however, is something quite distinctive. While every city in Italy varies hugely (Italy has only been united for around a hundred and fifty years), Venice is just utterly different again. Building a city on a few muddy, almost uninhabitable islands was always going to make it an odd place. Anyone who has been or seen a postcard can attest to that: that many canals in a city is weird. And damp.

The modern day result, after over a millennia of tumultuous cosmopolitan history, is definitely something to be seen. Once one gets rid of the tourists, Venice is atmospheric. Getting lost in a maze of alleyways late at night, with fog which descends for three days and is so thick you can’t see over the grand canal, it’s enough to make anyone feel the innate moodiness of Venice. Because that’s what it is. It isn’t atmospheric in a bustling sense, but in the way of a graveyard. Venice is a vast mausoleum unto itself and its past glories.

Beautiful, haunting, melancholic; these are words to describe not just the city but the people. They know where they have come from and they have nowhere to go. Their city is ageing and sinking into the sea. Already, an astonishing proportion of the city is derelict, and many of those which are still habitable cower under scaffolding.

None of this, of course, affects the tourists. They can come and marvel at the sights of this once-glorious city, eat in the eye-wateringly expensive restaurants and not for a moment worry about any of this. For Venice is the ultimate tourist town. For four hundred years, Venice has been one of the principal tourist destinations in Europe, and those attempting to live in Venice for any length of time suffer from it. To be a rich tourist in Venice, even now, is a thing of wonder. I had the good fortune to be visited by relatives for a weekend and in a sense only then truly got to see what all the fuss was about. Not having to worry for that weekend about the fact that my clothes were never quite dry, or that one felt one’s pockets emptying as soon as you walked out of the door enabled me to purely and simply enjoy what Venice had to offer: a tourist experience like no other.

My conclusion, having both lived there for ten weeks and within that got to experience Venice as a true tourist, is that Venice, while far from the greatest place to live, is a great place for a holiday. Go, marvel at it before it becomes only possible to do so with the use of an oxygen tank and flippers, and just don’t think about what it’s doing to your bank balance.