Back home in the height of summer. The town has transformed into a tourist mecca. People crowd the streets, the cafes have moved their tables onto the sidewalks, the mountain walks are full with people and their dogs. There are concerts in the piazza, music on the weekends at the cafes. I can’t believe it.
I meet up with a woman I met at the station in Mestre near Venice, she’s 82 and her husband and her little dog had both died not long before I met her three years ago and she has a house in Auronzo. She and her sister are here for a holiday and we meet up at the bar by the lake. Her sister smokes a pipe, having given up cigarettes years ago but still likes to smoke occasionally. Every now and then she starts talking to me and her sister in Italian and I get totally lost and then she remembers. I saw goodbye until we meet again.
I've got a few days on my own and so I decide to paint some pictures for the walls that I stripped of the weird paintings that were displayed there. The weather is beautiful, the windows wide open to a soft breeze. This is becoming home.
So I’ve arrived in Venice for a solo trip, to study my late husband’s ancestor, Titian. But I have chosen a place so far out of the centre that I feel I’m in another world. I booked an Air BNB and have never had much luck with them. This place was so weird that I thought it could work for me. Finally getting there I’m taken up two flights of tiny stairs with strange paintings and sculptures everywhere and then I’m in my room. From the photos it looked authentically Venetian but now I’m here I realise that the columns, the ornate fireplace, the frescoes and cherubs on the roof - all fake. Mostly plastic and if not, modern, made to look old. Run by a man, and a long way from anything. I’d walk in the morning into the centre and be dripping wet with sweat and then upon return, I’d stay in my room until dinner.
This was the biennale side, big wide empty streets and decaying empty buildings and then suddenly the odd apartment with washing strung along zig zagged lines across to the other buildings. This, I was told, is where the remaining Venetians live. The rest having been forced out by tourism, by people buying up properties for holiday rentals. I saw so few Venetians in the centre this time and only early in the morning with their dogs, beautifully dressed, getting out before the tourist hordes took over. There was such a change since last time I was here, just before the pandemic when all the shops were open and there were beautiful galleries and glass shops and now, so many shuttered and closed.
I found a restaurant and walked to it and discovered Venice with trees! A whole avenue of them leading into a big open parkland on the water, filled with kids, dogs and Italians. I ate the famous fried fish with polenta and a big bowl of the buttered spinach that the Italians and I are so fond of. I saw a couple of guys, one Asian, one maybe German having dinner there and the next night they were at the same restaurant as I was, closer to where I lived. We obviously looked on the Google Map review and made our way through it.
The next day I went early into the centre to look for places where Titian and his gossip friend Aretino hung out around but the heat did me in. I walked till I could walk no more and found a Cichetti bar. It was 11.30 and I ordered a Spritz as I saw another Italian drinking one and they had the best little snacks. I felt very grown up, drinking an early Spritz and eating my cichetti and then I had a pistachio and amaretto gelato in a cone cup - no waste!
Then I headed back to my out of the way accommodation and that night found a great restaurant close by where I had honeyed duck and vegetables. It was so good that I went back the next night and had the guinea fowl and duck lasagna, again, excellent. There I met two Australian girls but I wasn’t sure because when you hear accents in a noisy place, the sounds distort and you’re never quite sure. They were trying to make a decision and I told them how good my duck had been the night before and then we worked out we were all from Sydney, although they thought I was British. It was strangely good to talk to Aussies, about the rain, about why they were here (the Biennale as they both worked in art institutions and they were here for work.
Then home for me but the nights were long and so hot and humid. I had a fan and after ten I would open the windows for a breeze that never came. Even the fan just flicked around the hot air. I would lie looking at the ceilings that I knew now were newly painted, especially what I thought was Leda and the Swan until I looked closely and Leda was a man -Zeus, in the guise of a swan, coming in from behind. The next day, the only other tenant moved out and the other three rooms were open and they were all different, with queer art and photography everywhere. I reread the reviews and realised I’d stumbled on a queer hotel. One of the people I was researching was supposedly bisexual so maybe I was in the right place.
But the heat and the distance into the centre got me and I looked for a place in the centre and maybe because it was last minute but I got a cheap hotel on a canal in the centre! Halleluja! It was lovely and I settled in there for the last two days.
It was where the gondoliers hung out and close to the Libreria Acqua Alta, a beautiful bookshop by the canal. A beautiful last 2 days in the heart of Venice.
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