This was
my 2nd time visiting Venice. The broken alleyways and cloudy emerald canals had
ensnared each of my senses on my first visit. I’d seen everything of course.
From Piazza San Marco and Scala Contarini del Bovolo to San Michele - the Cemetery Island. This time I decided to
do something else. I would refine the art of getting lost. I would not succumb
to maps and I would leave any fears and senses of foreboding at home and I
would simply walk the streets and bridges of Venice.
The
first night started as nights in Venice often do: full of romance, awe and
inspiration. The streets were to become, as they always are in Venice, the
stage for my own personal theatre. A production inane and yet beautiful - real
and yet fictional. As though each step and each stumble into an alleyway was a
turn of a page in the book of my very own adventure. After dinner, I walked
towards my hotel but took a different route. Away from the noise of the crowd was
my only direction.
Of
course, walking in silence is only possible if one waits until nightfall, after
the cruise ships have refilled and departed - onwards to their next
pre-constructed holiday destination where guidebooks are replaced by guides and
adventure exchanged for recycled itineraries. The bars in Venice throw out by
midnight and clubs are almost non-existent. Eventually the streets become
cavernous empty vessels. Acting as nothing more than conduits for tourists and
locals on their way to bed. As I walked I became aware of the silence. It was
different from other cities. Not as brash. The echoes of my boots hitting
against uneven bricks bounced from the walls around me creating a rhythmic
backing track to what I saw, while the distant sounds of boats pushing through
the canals mixed with loud laughs in neighboring alleyways created a lucid
ambience, which was in time with the rhythm of my feet. I walked slowly around
a corner and looked up to admire the artistry of a local who had hung their colorful
clothes from a wire between two windows. So very Italian. I carried on
walking past a man pushing an old brass key into a door.
“Buona serata.” He muttered with a drunken slur.
The
soundtrack to my first night spent lost in Venice was complete.
The sun
shined strong and hot for the next few days without even a hint of letting up,
so I decided to take a stroll to The Piazza, and
ordered a glass of chilled barley coffee from Florian (whose Florentine
sister is much better by the way) before standing in front of the stunning
byzantine façade of the Basilica to admire the replicas
of the Horses of Saint Mark galloping from the loggia at full speed.
Afterwards, I decided to walk in the direction of their gallop. Castello, east
of Saint Marco and far from the usual tourist trail.
There
are bridges everywhere in Venice, there are small streets and gondolas,
gondoliers and orange tinted Spritz, but each neighborhood offers something
different. I like the backstreets in Castello but there are fewer canals. There
are fewer tourists too. I walked to Campo de la Celestia and admired the small
collection of trees that lined the square and then crossed a small bridge which
led me to the bank of one of Venice’s small, quiet canals. Two doors sat across
from each other just a few feet away from the water but they didn’t open. I sat
and waited quietly, hoping for a boat to pass. I waited for 10 minutes until it
finally happened. It was a lone gondolier. His dark shiny gondola passed me somberly,
bobbing only slightly as he checked his mobile phone in mid row. I turned back,
not phased by a misadventure into a dead end, but revitalized by the randomness
of the scene. I headed north through the backstreets until I reached
Cannaregio.
Cannaregio,
despite being the largest of Venice’s sestieri, is often overlooked. I love
Cannaregio for its village like ambience, al fresco cafes and for the Jewish
Ghetto (one of few places where you’ll meet an influx of tourists). I wondered
around its maze like streets, exploring cafes and the windows of bookstores,
passing by curious cats and loud locals, drinking liberal amounts of Aperol
Spritz and crossing bridge after bridge after bridge. I stopped in one alley as
I came face to face with a small posse of Carabinieri who were attempting to
erect a safety net around a crumbling wall. The wall literally crumbled as we
all watched. The police were nonchalant - arms crossed, tanned faces more
intrigued by my astonishment than by the fact a wall was crumbling before our
very eyes. I moved onwards, passing an empty mask and costume shop, considering
the humbling and sad fact that even Venice is temporary. One day those
crumbling walls will become crumbled walls on the floor of a forgotten canal.
Maybe the canals will swallow up the entire city. Perhaps Italy will rename it
Veniceland and build automated Gondoliers and rollercoasters where Italians
used to live.
There’s
lots of room for contemplation when one gets lost in a city such as Venice.
Forget panic. There’s nothing to panic about. The city is safe and every
stretch of glittering canal eventually leads to the Grandest of them all - the
Grand Canal. I walked all the way to the northern tip of the sestieri, still
thinking about the palazzo crumbling to the ground, and found the quaint little
Sant’Alvise church. There’s a boat stop here too, but not much else. It’s
perfect for sitting and watching the boats float away in the direction of
Murano and San Michele. At this point I pondered revisiting the cemetery island
but decided against it. However, if you enjoy the silence as much as I do, then
I suggest you take a boat there in the late afternoon. The island is often
deserted but is now the final, silent home of Sergei Diaghilev, Princess
Catherine Bagration (sometimes known as the wandering princess) and the
jewellery designer Jean Michel Schlumberger, to name but a few. I decided to
jump on the boat anyway, and took it all the way around to Salute to visit the
gorgeous Santa Maria della Salute church. Afterwards I took a seat on the steps
that lead down from the church to the waterfront, to do a little people
watching before exploring the backstreets of Dorsoduro, which is full of quiet
streets, cafes and boutique hotels.
It was my last evening in Venice and
I decided to spend it watching the sunset over the Lagoon, listening to the
water brush the concrete below my feet and admiring dimly lit islands in the
distance. I ate in a small Sicilian restaurant on the Campo Santo Stefano. I
drank Sicilian, not Veneto wine and walked for hours through broken alleyways,
across arched bridges and past some of Italy’s most beautiful palazzo, before
reaching my hotel, which was 15 minutes away from where I’d eaten. I found a
beautiful door that night. Blue. Made of wood. Old and cracked. Faded and
graffitied. It was the end of an alleyway for me but the way home for someone
else. It was just a door, but I’ve stumbled across it several times since then
and it never gets boring. It is the visual accompaniment to the secret sounds
of Venice at night, the sign that says to go back but come again, and a
representation of the beauty that can be found in the everyday, once we leave
the map and the guidebooks at home.
All photographs © and used with kind permission of Nick Nomi at http://www.europeisourplayground.com/
About the author:
Nick
Nomi
Nick
is a writer and photographer, who, after working for years in the fashion and
creative industries, gave up London and the office life to travel long term and
write about it.
He
writes about travel and culture with a literary twist at www.europeisourplayground.com
This was my 2nd time visiting Venice. The broken alleyways and cloudy emerald canals had ensnared each of my senses on my first visit. I’d...
