I remember being at school (I'm not sure when, but I was definitely quite young) and learning that the city is gradually sinking and will one day be lost. I felt a real shock that this might happen before I got the chance to visit, and promised my young self that I'd get there before it did! Now I suppose it's a race between the rotting foundations and the risk of rising sea levels for what gets to finish the place off first.
I disembarked the night train (good word that), and strolled sleepily through Santa Lucia train station. I don't think there's a station in the world that can rival Santa Lucia for a first breathtaking look at a city.
Without warning, the concrete blah blah funcionality of the station drops away to reveal the Grand Canal sloshing merrily in front of you; gondolas, vaporetti, barges and speedboats weaving in amongst each other, and the graceful arch of the Ponte degli Scalzi spanning the water like an elegant alabaster bracelet.
Immediately you know that you can be nowhere in the world but Venice. It was yet another one of those moment where my natural, unbidden reaction was to smile and let out a gentle laugh of delight. I must be starting to look like a nutter.
The next morning, after I had spent my first day exploring the city in a fine light drizzle, I sat down in a sunny piazza and wrote the following:
Here are the first impressions of Venice that I scribbled down on a scrap of paper in a cafe where I stopped to grab a revitalising breakfast of croissants and cappucinos along the way:
- Too many tourists! Even on a rainy day in April.
- The city is very, very beautiful. Intoxicatingly, perspective-shiftingly beautiful. It's so familiar, and yet every side street and stumbled-upon piazza brings something new and intriguing.
- Venice is probably just as knackered (if not more) as Budapest, but it somehow turns its dishevellment to its advantage, like a frustratingly beautiful person who can roll out of bed with a hangover and still look like a movie star. The exposed brickwork, crumbling plaster, tumbledown ivy and lopsided church towers all just add to the charm of the place, in the same way that it is often the slight imperfections in a person that you end up becoming the most attracted to or affectionate about.
- I could stand and watch the traffic on the Canal Grande for hours. I stood on the Rialto and watched the hustle and flow of gondolas, barges, police boats, ambulances, vaporetti and so on and on for ages, a sea of tourists shifting around me like the coloured grains of a kaleidoscope for so long that I lost track of time as I simply stood spellbound and absorbed by the lifeblood that flowed before me down the city's main artery.
- Piazza San Marco is smaller than I imagined, and has less pigeons.
- There are barrow boys (well, men) everywhere. I hadn't really considered the logistics of supplying businesses in a city without tarmac roads until I watched the supply barges full of beer and food and a hundred other products, and seen guys sweating to get barrows up Rennaissance era stairways. This is not a good city to be in a wheelchair.
- I really can't decide who's louder; American tourists or the animated locals. They all bellow away like a herd of elephants after a wasabi enema. Italian is definitely a better language for swearing in though - I watched a wide-bottomed American lady clobber a guy in the face with her umbrella and nearly gave him a round of applause for the operatic volley of abuse he unleashed on her. I didn't understand a word of it but it sounded bloody good.
- I'm a coffee freak, and I've been saving my first authentic Italian cappucino for a city worthy of that honour (i.e. not Milan), and so there was a certain amount of expectation as the waiter brought it over to my table. I sipped it gingerly, only to discover... it was absolutely outstanding! Ordered another one immediately afterwards.
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