Arrivederci, Venezia.

Our month in Venice is done.  It went slowly, arthritically in the cold of late winter, when the only reason we found to get out of bed was to walk 50 metres to our favourite cafe for boiling hot chocolate, espressi,  and sticky buns, even though Tintoretto, Titian, Klimt, Ernst and all the others were waiting impatiently for our adulation.  There were days when hail rattled the windows and frost bit the metal and fog, then we wrapped ourselves to the eyeballs,  and plunged into the soggy lanes to dance with delight at the foamy rage of the waves knocking the gondolas senseless because so few people were mad enough to be out.  Even the gondolieri were huddled in coffee shops, smoking, going out only for the loads of Japanese on day tours, determined for their rides.

We'd fought the rivers of masked revellers splashing through 10 days of pantomime, where our vaporetto companions were everything from Aphrodite to Zeus with a flaming halo.  We'd befriended a doctor, an artist, a cellist, an antique dealer, a madly gay restauranteur, and two laundry women, but never, never, the grim cranky woman at the entrance who glared at us every morning with the same expression of the dragon in 9.5 weeks when Mickey Rourke was trying out the beds.

When the nights began to grow shorter, the days began with soft light filtering through the shutters.  We went out early, before the hoards, and before the squares were filled with souvenir vendors and those upside down map holders.  We lay in soft green grass sprinkled with wild daisies, waiting for the first burst of spring buds on the naked, still-shivering trees, drinking champagne given by our friends, near statues of generals, doges and kings.  Babies were out in their beautifully cut clothes, blinking in their first watery blue days. The grand dames, walking arm in arm with their life long friends, were still coated in flocks of chinchilla, herds of mink, and packs of foxes, their lips painted vermillion, their older-wiser eyes hidden behind Raybans, giving their coats the final airing before being packed away for the winter.

We've thrown away regular time tables and are living within our personal rhythm. We've eaten gelati in the rain.  Breakfast at dusk.  Biscuits and cheese and pickled herring sitting on the fondamente of Rialto with tourists and pigeons watching so many types of boats. We've fought and we've shouted, and we've laughed, and we've loved. We've been lost, and found, and lost again, maintaining identities while becoming more flexible.  So we'd have fought again,  but each time one of us wants to throw the other into the Canal of the Assassins, or down the river of Lepers, or into the short cut to the street of the fabric makers, that's the one who is carrying the passports or money. So we've gone home and listened to Vivaldi and woken to bells clanging and people laughing and Venice at our fingertips. And realised that nothing really matters.  Even though we think it does.   Or we've been silent, just walking the shadowy lanes at midnight, when all the shutters were down and the graffitti looked more menacing, and only the thin line from heart to head led us home. We're learning to be married, adapting to each other like moss around rocks. 

On the pale blue morning that we left, the moon was still in the sky, and there were still puffs of confetti on Piazza San Marco, left over from Carnevale.   We'd made peace with the idiosyncracies of the apartment and its stairs designed more as a bookshelf than a means of ascension. (Descending was easier - one step, one slip, one step, watchout.)  Reno's strong, tall frame had adapted to being permanently bent while upstairs, to avoid ugly bloody encounters with the low beams.  We'd resolved to using only the downstairs shower if we actually wanted to get wet. We'd given up on the receipt for the cash handed over in lieu of rent.

We'd cooked in a space so small we could now audition for MiniChef or My Kitchen Pebbles. From a kitchen so well equipped in Sydney, we'd learned to improvise: using a folding frying pan as a lid, a jug as a salad bowl, tea lights as champagne glasses.  Our tomatoes tasted as they should, filled with warm Italian flavour. Vegetables were crisp and juicy.  Oranges had mouthfuls of Sicily deep in their hearts.  We'd found our favourite vegetable seller at Rialto and she'd begun putting extra surprises in our shopping bags.

We'd spent a month watching as the sun slipped earlier and earlier through the cracks in our shutters. We knew that the 10.30 pm rabble from the cobbles below meant the La Fenice concert was over and whether or not the night had been a success.  We bought tickets for the Barber of Seville, dressed to thrill,  and almost garotted ourselves in the cheap seats trying to see the performers,  and then found how quickly (30 seconds tops) we could get rid of our cheap tunnel vision tickets for La Traviata the next day, to giddy-with-delight tourists who never dreamed they'd see the inside of this fabulous theatre at such short notice.

We made friends, saw friends, said bye to friends for a while.  We facebook befriended the fabulous cellist Davide Amadio, who has now asked that we meet him for a pre-Rossini concert coffee when we return in May.   We rescheduled some of our trip so that we could see Gaspare, the artist we met on our first day, in Paris.  We cooked and shopped and found how to prepare fresh carciofe hearts, discovered the sardines we'd bought to deep fry were actually sold as cat food, invented more ways to cook gluten free pasta, and walked so many back streets, till our legs wobbled and all we wanted when we returned home was a tube of Dencorub and some chamomile tea.

We dragged a spare case across bridges and through tunnels and over squares, to the shipping dispatch centre I'd remembered from 2011. Closed for lunch, shrugged the man selling souvenirs. I can keep it for you?

So, trusting Venetians, we left the case there, and went home for lunch, hoping we'd trust ourselves enough to find that same place again.  We did ... and our case will meet us again in May, in Varenna, when Carmen and Stefano will bring it to us.

We went to Burano, for lunch, although it was a day's trip, there and back.  We boarded a boat and rocked in the waves, sat in the front watching and wondering about those desperate people of 2000 years ago who sank their poles into the marshy ground to escape from persecution. How could they have known that their rickety wooden shacks would become palaces and their grubbywaifs, princesses. A great and glorious and grand civilisation from a mosquito infested marshland.

We ate at a restaurant I'd remembered from 20 years ago; where, while we were waiting, we were given a glass of Prosecco.  We wandered around the coloured, peeling houses with our glasses, over bridges and through sottoporto's, drinking our prosecco.  We feasted on grilled sea bass, and sardines, and hot crusty bread, salad, coffee, biscuits ... and more Prosecco ... and thanked the generous wedding guest who'd paid for this spectacular lunch.  Because we would always remember it.


And Reno fell in love with Venice, as I had.  For the last few days we walked while he schemed how we could live here. I reminded him that I needed greenery and dappling shade. He said I could buy pots of basil for a windowsill.   I reminded him of high waters and mould and how difficult it was to get baggage and groceries from place to place. He said we could hire a porter when necessary and after all wasn't living minimalist more sensible.  I said I needed space and light. He said Geneva and Paris and Verona were a train ride away.  I said I wanted to live near my children. He said bring your children to Vivaldi and Tintoretti.   I could see that the love bug had bitten deep ... a bug that respect silence and secrets, and bows to the sequence of life in the rhythm of stones, and light and water.

When I left this time, catching the Alilaguna Blu line from San Marco, we took the long-way-round vaporetto to the airport, zigzagging all across this network of boggy islands holding such spectacularity.   This time I didn't cry with a broken heart that I may never be back.  I held my latest handbag (red leather) to the sky, I shouted I love you to the moon, I held my new husband's hand as he gazed wistfully at a disappearing Venice, and I sang, Arrivederci, Venezia.  I shall be back.  In May. With my new, delicious, adaptable, amenable and well-travelling husband.

It's spring. Off to Prague.