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| Local transport stop, San Toma. |
My cases were found at Cargo at Marco Polo aiport. Ah, but there's a transport strike on! Never mind, back on the Alilaguna speedboat, pay E17 for a 3 km taxi ride from the airport to cargo, fill out five lots of forms and go to three different departments, and no I don't have any contraband or Chinese carnevale masks or skinned lizards or shoe samples. Another taxi, another speedboat, and this time, a gondola ride in brilliant sunshine, the light dazzling off the facades of the palazzos, goggle eyed tourists hanging off vaporettos, the white marble Rialto bridge crowded to capacity, and me, grinning stupidly, landing with luggage at the San Tomo berth. Fifty cents for the cross canal gondola, while the gondolier grumbled and complained and fussed that how come he's only busy on a strike day, every other day he struggles to make a living. This muttered in Italian. Then a trundle through the narrow cool lanes and ECO! Marco Polo! my beads are safe. I frisked them and fondled them and introduced them to their new workspace. I unpacked my summer clothes, and immediately thought - what garbage clothes, I should have saved the shipping money and bought everything here.
I was lost every few minutes during the first few days. The supermarket is just a block away, but my first shopping experience, my arms breaking with produce, took me an hour to get home because I think I went via Padua. Initially the calli all looked the same, but now I can tell the difference, by the colours on the walls, the broken bricks, the little frescoes and tiny shops and window boxes. The beggars all have their own posts too, setting up around eight in the morning: I pass them on my way to school.
I can find my way to the Rialto blindfolded - not that I would because the walk along the ponte past the restaurants has to be the most soul uplifting walk in any city. I've become liberal in giving English directions. I've learned the hard way that when buying flowers, the seller is not being generous when wrapping them in beautiful cellophane and white paper with ribbons - you're charged for this service - and that most flowers are bought by stalk, not bunch. I've learned that if I call a glove of garlic an olive, a little old lady will quickly correct me. That a tea light candle for the oil burner I bought is not called il forno (a mini oven), but a candela.
I've also become very territorial about my adopted city. The trillions of tourists throng through the calli like herds of buffalo, crashing into us locals, dropping gelati on our shoes, burning us with cigarettes, tripping us up when we're in a hurry. I've learned the back ways to focal points avoiding the throngs and enjoying the cool alleys and surprising canals. The walk to school is a visual feast of bridges, water, washing festooning the walls, small boats, barges delivering food and removing garbage, postmen struggling to move their trolleys through tiny lanes, traders selling fruit and vegetables, fish and newspapers in stony squares. I'm still pinching myself at my good fortune in being here. I have a developed a permanently stupid grin on my face .. but I see it's contagious - so many other non locals are wearing it.
School is four hours a day; a grammatical slog, but necessary. One teacher is a riot, the other hard work as few of us know what she's talking about - every aspect of schooling is in Italian. I think they call it immersive, but it's subversive. I dream I'm drowning, but I wake every day with more tortured words on my tongue. Scarafaggio. Cockroach. Cafuno - donkey - but used to abuse bad drivers. L-orrecchini - earrings. I'm surprised at how quickly I'm learning, and understanding. Verbs are doing my head in. I'm reading and comprehending with ease but my tongue still mangles mightily. Some days we do excursions - into the old Jewish ghetto, a miserable place with high walls, little charm and big echoes, where the Jews were forced to live from the 13thC. It's an architectural anomaly, with its high walls and tall buildings because there was no where else to go in that confined space except up.
A few days after arriving, Venice celebrated its annual Regatta Storica - the historical race between gondolieri of various classes. The weather had been divine all week, hot and bright, with white skies after 11am, but on this day, and this day only, when, armed with camera and a hat and water, I spent hours trying to find the best vantage point to photograph, the heavens opened upon all our hot tourist heads.
I had wedged myself between a sharp wrought iron balustrade, on the edge of the fondamenta at the Rialto, and throngs of tourists with umbrellas. Gondolas laden with fruit and vegetables, with modern day incarnations of the doge, with models of Atlantis and Venus, with clans of Chinese in medieval dress churned up the canal in the race to reach the Rialto first. Nobody cared about their sodden clothes as they watched and cheered the decorated gondole streaking past.
The boats are enormous; watching the congestion on the canals it's impossible to believe that there aren't any collisions; but learning to pilot one of these beautiful boats is a lifetime art - the oarsmen barely make a splash.
So! What did I do this first fortnight? Walked probably about 100 k - easily walking 10k a day. Learned how to hang my washing out of the third floor window and yank the washing line until it squeaks and arrives at my window, so my lace undies drip on the passersby below. Peg them well or rush downstairs to claim them before someone else does. Learned that if I don't take my pots of basil off the windowsill when I close the shutters at night to deafen the noises of amorous locals in the laneways, there is a chance someone could be decapitated. Discovered that a bidet is the greatest invention for aching feet anywhere in the world. Learned that if I open my windows on Sunday at 8am stark naked, to the cacophony of pealing bells, there is a good chance that the man right across the calle - we can pick each other's basil, will be opening his windows, stark naked, at the same time. Now he waits for me, but he's wearing a white vest, and I'm wearing a red silk cami.
Learned that the most efficient way of skyping friends is to sit on a window ledge, precariously above the heads of tourists, to get the best signal. Learned that if I put a bottle of cold water in the same bag as my mobile, my mobile will drown, gasp, gurgle and die, and that I will need a new one, pronto. Learned that if I buy a new mobile phone in Italy, it costs as little as lunch for two on a canal in the sun. And that if I get the phone, and a prepay, I can also get a dongle which means that I don't have to hang out the window waiting for a connection but that I can go and sit in a cafe and do my verbs there.
When I'd found my luggage, I took Giorgio and Sylvia out to dinner to celebrate my total arrival. They in turn treated me to a wander around the back streets of the Rialto, where they introduced me to the wonderful bookshop L'Acqua Alta - High Water. When the canals flood in November, the city is besieged by its own water and most of the ground floors are inundated. As L'acqua Alta opens to a canal, Luigi, who owns the bookshop which is crammed to the ceilings with a trillion second hand books, has all of them stacked in old gondolieri and boats and barques and on platforms. I asked him for a book on Casanova. Why, he replied, "do you want a book on Casanova? I am Casanova! I can tell you all there is about amore in Venice! If all the women in Venice are flowers, you Senora", he winked over his enormous, besplattered frame, breathing heavily towards my black floral dress, "you are a Bouquet! Let me take you for dinner and the books are free." "Ma Grazie, Senor," I countered, "how about you give me a discount and I try to come back and visit you". "Senora," he panted, "you are making my heart beat faster. I see there is a fire in you!". "Just the sconti, Senor! Arrivederci!".
I returned with Marina, whom I'd befriended at school, after I'd told her about this amorous exchange. We found the bookshop by sheer chance, at the back of the Teatro Malibran on our way to a wrong-night ticketed Le Barbiere di Sevielle. "Senor," I said, as I waltzed in, in another gorgeous dress. "Remember me? I am your bouquet!" "HUH?" he said, face a total blank. "Senor! Miscusi! You don't remember? I came in with Giorgio and Sylvia, we had wine, I bought the book on Casanova!" His face fogged over, he scratched his portly belly. Marina was holding onto the side of a boat of books, top of which was a book on giant boobs, trying not to fall over laughing. Luigi waddled over, dusted the top of another book, and said "This one you will like, it has big penises inside!" Indeed. They were conversation stoppers. Right next to the big book of gigantissimo penises was a large bowl of Casanova condoms. "Take!" said Luigi! "Take three each!" One had an image of Casanova wearing a condom on his head. Another of Cananova buried between the thighs of two buxom fishnet stockinged legs, and the third had the lion of Venice giving his lioness a mighty thrashing. On the way out, Luigi grabbed my arm. "You are a bouquet!" he said. "Will you let me take you for dinner tomorrow night?" "Certo!" I laughed .... "but you won't remember me once I have turned the corner!"
I've learned a bit of Italian; I needed to after getting bitten mightily by the vagrant mosquitoes. I needed some bite cream, not spray. "Mi scusi, senora, dove la crema per il pelle per anti zanzare?" Fair enough, I'd practised it all the way into the supermarket. Where is the skin cream against mosquitoes? Her response: " Non vedi che sono impegnato, sicuramente si dovrebbe sapere dove si trova ormai, è passato il basilico, in basso a sinistra oltre il cereali per la colazione, non a destra al shampoo, un momento, signore, devo frequentare a questo cliente perduto, dove ero io oh le creme non sono dove il formaggio è meraviglioso, ma passato che non posso credere che non si riesce a trovarlo mi dispiace, non posso alzarmi da qui dovrete zero." "WHERE?" Instead, I went to a chemist. A little bit of knowledge is dangerous!
The school gives fantastic discounts on theatre tickets: Marina and I chose the Barbiere but there was a mixup with the tickets and she had to leave for Holland the following day. At a loose end, we drank a glass of vino in the lane, sitting on a wine barrel, eating a wedge of pizza. Across the way was a Baroque Opera Concert - I musici Veneziani, in full Baroque costume in the grandly ornate Scuola Grande di San Teodoro, into which we rushed after skulking into the Max Mara shop, and ogling the La Perla undies. Dawn was here for a few days before moving onto Rome. We watched Venice turn to night on the rooftop of the Hilton Stucky, with views across the whole island, and a soft drink that cost E12, then took the long vaporetto back to Piazza San Marco, where we lingered around the Danieli hoping to spot a celebrity, sheltering from the sweltering sticky camera happy grubby tourists who only recognise good shoes when they fall over them ... mine!
I have a communicable disease. I don't think it's curable. It's called non pausa borsa. A literal translation would be obsessive handbag purchases. Every time someone sees me with a new leather handbag, they also have to have one. I have my favourite handbag shops, and I now have eight handbags and counting. I take the victim in there, and presto! They've caught my disease. Ditto shoes. That's called Havetohava scarpe. I've never been so well co-ordinated in my life. And why not, when a leather bag costs as much as a bowl of pasta vongole? Who wants to worry about starving children in Somalia when I can help the Chinese economy in a more positive way!
Dawn had wanted to come to the Opera Le Barbiere, but tickets were for students only, so when Marina wasn't able to use it, Dawn was delighted to come. She caught buses and vaporettos and we joined the coiffed and perfumed throngs for the delightful, splendid, opera, then spent her last evening having seafood at the edge of the canal on the Rialto. Another evening we'd wandered into a tiny restaurant overlooking a canal, where the waiter had placed a table for us almost on the window ledge; a hot, still night ... magic in Venice.
Dawn was staying in an apartment in the Cannareggio area - beautifully renovated, with an enormous window right onto the canal where we offered the gondolieri cichetti (little topless sandwiches characteristic of Venice) as they glide past. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, near a garden, quiet, loads of restaurants frequented by locals celebrating birth of babies, arriving by boat, drinking camparis. The owner has agreed to let me have it for my November-February stint. I'm thrilled, it's gorgeous.
My current home is in San Polo, near the San Toma vaporetto stop, and the traghetto to San Samuel, very central, two minutes from the vaporetto, Billa the supermarket, not even a spit from Giorgio and Sylvia, the gondale, walking to Ferrovia, Piazza La Roma etc. It's a private, very very old home so I have the security of having the owners upstairs like when my toilet "blocco" .... a terrible consequence, considering this is a city of canals and drains! I can hear 24 hour conversations in the lane, and if I need a new bag, I just look out of my window, choose the one I want from the display downstairs, lower my credit card on a piece of string to the blonde from Moldovia who told me she loves me, and in an instant I have another matching outfit. (Just kidding! About the string bit, the rest is true) However, I can't have friends here, so it'll be great to spend time exploring new areas. When MrM is here we'll walk and shop and cook; I'm hoping M&N&Luda, & S&S will come too.
S&G have wanted me to have a shop near the Guggenheim complex - truly a fantastic location and I've been making jewellery every afternoon. But we've hit a legislation snag - immigration/tax etc - so it doesn't look as if it's going to happen. I'm not really all that disappointed as I wanted to spend time enjoying the
I can find my way to the Rialto blindfolded - not that I would because the walk along the ponte past the restaurants has to be the most soul uplifting walk in any city. I've become liberal in giving English directions. I've learned the hard way that when buying flowers, the seller is not being generous when wrapping them in beautiful cellophane and white paper with ribbons - you're charged for this service - and that most flowers are bought by stalk, not bunch. I've learned that if I call a glove of garlic an olive, a little old lady will quickly correct me. That a tea light candle for the oil burner I bought is not called il forno (a mini oven), but a candela.
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| Institute di Venezia - my school |
A few days after arriving, Venice celebrated its annual Regatta Storica - the historical race between gondolieri of various classes. The weather had been divine all week, hot and bright, with white skies after 11am, but on this day, and this day only, when, armed with camera and a hat and water, I spent hours trying to find the best vantage point to photograph, the heavens opened upon all our hot tourist heads.
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| Regata Storica a Rialto |
So! What did I do this first fortnight? Walked probably about 100 k - easily walking 10k a day. Learned how to hang my washing out of the third floor window and yank the washing line until it squeaks and arrives at my window, so my lace undies drip on the passersby below. Peg them well or rush downstairs to claim them before someone else does. Learned that if I don't take my pots of basil off the windowsill when I close the shutters at night to deafen the noises of amorous locals in the laneways, there is a chance someone could be decapitated. Discovered that a bidet is the greatest invention for aching feet anywhere in the world. Learned that if I open my windows on Sunday at 8am stark naked, to the cacophony of pealing bells, there is a good chance that the man right across the calle - we can pick each other's basil, will be opening his windows, stark naked, at the same time. Now he waits for me, but he's wearing a white vest, and I'm wearing a red silk cami.
Learned that the most efficient way of skyping friends is to sit on a window ledge, precariously above the heads of tourists, to get the best signal. Learned that if I put a bottle of cold water in the same bag as my mobile, my mobile will drown, gasp, gurgle and die, and that I will need a new one, pronto. Learned that if I buy a new mobile phone in Italy, it costs as little as lunch for two on a canal in the sun. And that if I get the phone, and a prepay, I can also get a dongle which means that I don't have to hang out the window waiting for a connection but that I can go and sit in a cafe and do my verbs there.
I've learned a bit of Italian; I needed to after getting bitten mightily by the vagrant mosquitoes. I needed some bite cream, not spray. "Mi scusi, senora, dove la crema per il pelle per anti zanzare?" Fair enough, I'd practised it all the way into the supermarket. Where is the skin cream against mosquitoes? Her response: " Non vedi che sono impegnato, sicuramente si dovrebbe sapere dove si trova ormai, è passato il basilico, in basso a sinistra oltre il cereali per la colazione, non a destra al shampoo, un momento, signore, devo frequentare a questo cliente perduto, dove ero io oh le creme non sono dove il formaggio è meraviglioso, ma passato che non posso credere che non si riesce a trovarlo mi dispiace, non posso alzarmi da qui dovrete zero." "WHERE?" Instead, I went to a chemist. A little bit of knowledge is dangerous!
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| I Musici Veneziani |
I have a communicable disease. I don't think it's curable. It's called non pausa borsa. A literal translation would be obsessive handbag purchases. Every time someone sees me with a new leather handbag, they also have to have one. I have my favourite handbag shops, and I now have eight handbags and counting. I take the victim in there, and presto! They've caught my disease. Ditto shoes. That's called Havetohava scarpe. I've never been so well co-ordinated in my life. And why not, when a leather bag costs as much as a bowl of pasta vongole? Who wants to worry about starving children in Somalia when I can help the Chinese economy in a more positive way!
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| At Hilton Stucky on Guidecca |
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| Dawn and I ate here |
My current home is in San Polo, near the San Toma vaporetto stop, and the traghetto to San Samuel, very central, two minutes from the vaporetto, Billa the supermarket, not even a spit from Giorgio and Sylvia, the gondale, walking to Ferrovia, Piazza La Roma etc. It's a private, very very old home so I have the security of having the owners upstairs like when my toilet "blocco" .... a terrible consequence, considering this is a city of canals and drains! I can hear 24 hour conversations in the lane, and if I need a new bag, I just look out of my window, choose the one I want from the display downstairs, lower my credit card on a piece of string to the blonde from Moldovia who told me she loves me, and in an instant I have another matching outfit. (Just kidding! About the string bit, the rest is true) However, I can't have friends here, so it'll be great to spend time exploring new areas. When MrM is here we'll walk and shop and cook; I'm hoping M&N&Luda, & S&S will come too.
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| Peggy Guggenheim shop |
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| Accademia shop, opposite Guggenheim |
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| "Guggenheim Canal" - my name for dove non lo so. |
city and my friends when they come. As it is, I have school every day till 2ish; I make jewellery in the afternoon, I do my homework, I do the blog, I take photographs, I walk everywhere. I have no idea how I would find any more time. So when the notary said, Basta! Not possible I breathed a big sigh of relief which I kept to myself because I knew that S&G have been hoping this would be possible. But I don't want to spend time handcuffed in Casanova's cell!
Venetians eat very simply; lots of small, tasty dishes. S&G took Dawn and I to a private luncheon in an old villa with garden and ancient olive trees. The owners prepare typical Venetian fare for very small parties; everything, from the linguine to the olives and oil and breads and cheeses - are prepared by themselves. In winter, the guests sit in la sala da pranza, in front of the fire.
My favourite book since I've been here? Venice is a fish. It's an ode to this magnificent, magical city. I do think about the starving children in Somalia, occasionally. There still lurks a conscience beneath my amorously beating heart.
My favourite book since I've been here? Venice is a fish. It's an ode to this magnificent, magical city. I do think about the starving children in Somalia, occasionally. There still lurks a conscience beneath my amorously beating heart.
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