Venice Diary

She isn’t beautiful

Millions have thronged the sestieres of Venice. Early this winter, I went hoping to find a Venice unravaged by tourists, and I did, even though it took a lot of cajoling for La Serenessima to take off her mask. On my first day in Venice, I was too mesmerised by the view from my hotel to even put on my Bata sandals. I didn’t know then of the cobbler’s Italian connection. My window overlooked the Santa Maria Formosa square, and I could see well-fed locals haggling for fruits and vegetables. Stranded from the mainland, sinking gradually into the sea, this decaying beauty looked far too fragile to take the weight of the millions. If Venice was a woman, she’d be Greta Garbo. Her youth long gone, rec­lusive, hunted down by the millions and captured in badly taken photographs.

The comfort of strangeness

Yes, I went to Venice a stalker. I searched for the Venice that was mine, in the tawdry ‘made in Korea’ masks, in the cafes selling ‘tiramisu’ and ‘Lindor truffles’, the usual touristy spots. I hung out at San Marco piazza, its splendour overshado­wed by a ridiculously large Guess hoarding, almost mocking the Venetians. Telling them that you may hate us, the tourists, but look, we’ve redesigned your cultural jewels. Elton John’s palazzo in the Giudecca, he’d have a second home here, wouldn’t he? The Rialto’s overpowering fish market. A Vivaldi concert at a church near the Academia. A walk along the Fundomenta Nova. But it was a Venice untouched by tourists (as yet) that took my breath away. It was here that The Comfort of Strangers, Ian McEwan’s very unfilmable book, had been filmed. In a Venice so beautiful, you had no right to live after you had witnessed its lethal charm. Canals that sucked you in and threw whatever was left of you to the perpetually hungry tourists.

A decaying city

“Go to Caranneggio and take a look at the Ghetto,” Andrea, the hotel manager, told me. Andrea himself stays at the Lido, an island in the Veneto, because of his love of sports cars. Venice is a city for pedestrians. The Ghetto, the old Jewish quarter, was where I saw the most beautiful small church in the world—Santa Maria dei Miracol. It was six on a cold wintry evening and there was an old lady caretaker hovering about. Even as I fished out a few euros to drop into the offerings chest, the lady stretched out her palm. Embarrassed by her naked need, I looked for a slightly bigger note. This was the first sign of the lagoon coming apart at its seams. It was in the Ghetto Nuovo that I saw a huge slab of stone come loose to reveal a rectangular cave beneath. Alise, my guide for the day, said that the frequent aqua alta had loosened the stones, and the bones found were taken to the nearby cemetery island of San Michele where they were given a reburial. In a city that’s closing in on itself, even the dead seem to be protesting: “Take us back, La Serenessima.”

A tantalising taste

If you’ve come to Venice seeking a miracle, search for the brick heart in Sotoportego dei Preiti, near the church of San Giovanni in Bragora, something even the locals don’t know about. Legend has it that a fisherman accidentally killed a serpent who was none other than his wife. The heart was carved to commemorate a love lost. Touch the heart, and you’ll always be loved. And then as if it had been ordained, all the bells rang at once. Such beauty can’t be of this earth. And if you do want to see it, see it through a pair of oddly asymmetrical, handcrafted horn frames (forget Murano, shop for eyewear when in Venice) from Ottica Urbani in Mercerie. I touched the brick heart and fell in love almost instantly. With the limone gelato at Ca D’Oro. The first taste was like a heady rush of something that couldn’t be made with human hands. My taste buds stood on edge, first assaulted, then seduced and tantalised.

Get lost

I don’t think maps in Venice are supposed to guide you to your destination. This is a city of mazes. You may set off from the same place to the same place every day and never go by the same route. Your confident instructions to passers-by will send them to squares they’ve never heard of, over canals that take you to dangerous watery pathways, deeper and deeper in the maze. It tells you to get lost, most beguilingly. Walking along the Riva one sunless afternoon I found myself sipping a Bellini at Harry’s bar. A bar so elegant they don’t have a sign, just the word Harry’s etched reluctantly on a windowpane. Watch the bartender here attend upon overweight American tourists with the same courtesy his predecessor would’ve extended Ernest Hemingway in the summer of 1962. Venice may be losing some of its morbid silence but it hasn’t yet sold its soul.

Raise the Venetian blinds

Venice at night is when the city takes off its carnival mask. When the ghosts of centuries past seize the ruins of what were once their floating palaces and scare the cobwebs away. When the young search for prosecco and love or something less poetic in a city that has been taken over by the old and souvenir shops.

Kanchan Wadhwa is a writer with an advertising agency in Bangalore; E-mail your diarist: kanchan.wadhwa AT gmail.com