Travel Feature: Venice

Photos by Adam Pillsbury, Barbara Watson,
and Christophe Alary and KL Mircea of Flickr

Benvenuti
A remedy for an 18-hour journey with kids: Time your arrival for late afternoon at Marco Polo Airport where your father and stepmother are waiting, then follow the salty breeze to the pier and onto a handsome water taxi, which surges gracefully towards the shimmering apparition ahead. It enters the city from the north – suddenly, you’re on the Grand Canal, fighting sensory overload as the rays of a dying sun illuminate the magnificent facade of the Ca’ d’Oro and other palazzi.

Your destination is the Rio Terrà degli Assassini, named for infamous cutthroats. Out of the boat, down the street, left over a bridge, right, left, up four flights to your rented apartment where you find a bottle of Prosecco in the fridge and black olives in a bowl. The bags go down, the cork pops off. Gorgeous pizzas from a neighboring restaurant later make their appearance as a light red from Alto Adige follows the bubbly. The girls and grandparents are bonding. And just when you think life couldn’t be sweeter, the sound of a rehearsal from La Fenice, the venerable opera house, filters across the square and through an open window. Welcome to Venice.

Jet Lag
Palm Sunday begins at 5am with a symphony of scents: the heady aroma of a freshly opened can of illy coffee, the ambrosial bouquet of ripe plums and pears, the fragrance of toasted Colomba (a breakfast cake with dried fruit and almonds served at Easter). And then we’re off through deserted streets. By 7am, we’re in San Marco Square. The religious processions, clamoring church bells, and babel of tour groups will come later – for now, the square is ours. We gasp, drunk with the beauty of its constituent parts: the columned galleries, the round domes of the Basilica, the campanile pointing towards a blushing sky. This is where Casanova courted, where Vivaldi composed, where Galileo demonstrated his telescope. Our daughters have brought stale bread in a bag, which we stomp into crumbs. Then, under the fawning gaze of her baby sister, our eldest feeds a flock of pigeons, giggling at her Doolittle-esque good fortune. The city slumbers on.

Water
Mario, a gondoliere, is waiting for us. In two previous visits I’ve avoided gondolas, from a surfeit of cynicism and lack of cash, but my father knows Mario, and he’s treating on my birthday. Fears of a contrived tourist experience recede as Mario deftly oars his 600kg beauty into a narrow canal. What becomes obvious is that this is the way Venice was meant to be seen. A city on stilts, its grandest buildings open onto the canals on which they float, since Venetians traveled principally by boat – there were 10,000 gondolas in the 16th century. Mario’s languid pace allows us to spy private gardens, rooftop terraces, and myriad testoni – grotesque stone heads that ward off evil. Emerging into the Grand Canal, we admire palaces of Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque styles, adorned with mosaics and rare marble. We spy boats of every description – public transport, construction, trash collection, fruit delivery. By ride’s end, we’re all trying our “Oye,” the cry of the gondoliere approaching a blind corner. Not a bad word to shout when turning 40.

Chichetti
A holiday indulgence, lunchtime drinking is particularly pleasurable at Cantina Schiavi, a wine bar on San Trovaso canal. The draw is remarkable chichetti – Venetian tapas on bread with toppings such as tuna with onion slivers, shrimp and crab, gorgonzola and walnut, and spicy sausage – consumed with Soave and Valpolicella at the venerable wooden bar or, in fine weather, on the banks of the canal. As our well-being reaches its zenith with the second glass, the girls imitate local boys by kicking their plastic soccer balls in an adjacent street. Their play attracts clever footwork by passing adults. It seems a perfect image of the fine life here – a walking man, instead of being immured in his car, pauses to kick a ball back to a girl. With pride at his touch. Ditto the kid.

School
A centuries-old civic tradition of art patronage has bequeathed Venice an embarrassment of riches. Every church, palace and confraternity (scuola) is adorned with masterpieces by the likes of Bellini, Titian, and Veronese. One of the finest collections is at the Galleria dell’Accademia, and this is where I take my eldest daughter on an art adventure. At 8.15am, we have the ancient rooms practically to ourselves and my companion is focused and inquisitive. How can St. Sebastian smile with two arrows in his body? Why did Cain murder his brother? Why is Mary reading when there’s an angel in the room speaking to her? Our favorite painting is “The Miracle of St. Mark Freeing the Slave” by Tintoretto, which has the haloed evangelist hanging upside down in midair and, with pointed finger, smashing the implements of torture being applied to a Christian slave who’d been caught worshipping illicitly, while turbaned bystanders exclaim. The action and composition are wild, and it seems right that Venice’s patron saint accomplishes miracles with such style and verve.

Church
Professor Bruna Caruso Cherubini leads private tours of her beloved hometown. Short and vivacious, she charms the girls at once. On the way to San Marco, she speaks of the empire and great plague as well as villains like Napoleon, who looted Venice, and the Italian minister who wants to build more hotels in this tourist-choked city. Informed by Bruna’s descriptions, we see the Basilica as inordinately eclectic, the result of centuries of accretion. It encompasses fourth-century Roman statues, gothic bas-reliefs, stolen Byzantine icons and Baroque mosaics. Its foundation myth is roguish too, involving the theft by Venetians of St. Mark’s bones from Egypt. In a museum upstairs are bronze horses, from antiquity but twitching with life, thought to have adorned Constantinople’s hippodrome. That such profane statues would be deemed suitable for a church speaks to the Venetians’ relative appreciation of aesthetics and religious orthodoxy. But of course San Marco was built as much for political reasons as religious ones, to overwhelm visiting envoys with its beauty. And this is why we are upstairs at 11am – for today at this hour the light shines through the cupola windows at such an angle as to light up the gold mosaics that cover every inch of the ceiling.

Wedding
Established on mudflats by refugees fleeing barbarians, its wealth generated by maritime trade, Venice owes its fortune to the sea. The Museo Storico Navale details this relationship with navigational implements, weapons, maps and intricate ship models. The pièce de résistance is a model of a Bucintoro, the ornate galley on which the Doge, the leader of the Most Serene Republic, traveled once a year to enact a sacred ritual: Venice’s marriage to the sea. Also on display is a replica of the wedding ring (the size of a life preserver) that the Doge would toss into the Adriatic. It’s an evocative reminder of the city’s glorious history, the burden of which, it is sometimes predicted, dooms Venice to becoming simply a museum of its past. But is a city without cars simply an anomalous relic, or could it be a model of the future? On this day, a visitor from Beijing can hope for the latter.