A Dangerous Venetian Beauty
All Good Things Must Come to an End in La Serenissima, but When?
The City of Venice has a problem, and it is us—or at least our cruising cousins.
UNESCO keeps threatening to add the city to its official list of World Heritage in Danger—a list that includes Vienna, Jerusalem, parts of Sumatra, and the Everglades—a list that is apparently bad for business—unless Venice does something to curb its appeal to the tourists who generate that business.
In Venice, tourists come in two flavors—visitors who stay overnight and spend all kinds of money, and visitors who arrive by cruise, gawk at a handful of monuments, then return to their ship without buying anything. So the city fathers have reluctantly decided to appease everyone except the latter, who don’t spend enough to matter anyway.
Therefore, it is written:
From April 25 this year and for 29 days, the city will charge all cruising tourists 5 euros each to disembark from their ships. Gates and checkpoints will be set up at all entry points (cue your favorite WW II occupation movie), and violators will pay hefty fines. If the scheme works—if the cruise business doesn’t evaporate and take with it all those docking, fueling, and other fees—the city
willmight make the charge permanent.UNESCO approves. Hotel owners approve. And frankly, so will we when we can turn around on Piazza San Marco without crossing swords or selfie sticks with the competition. But it does feel a bit cheesy for us travel snobs to single out our cruising cousins here.
Having said all that… For the traveler, there is one absolutely infallible thing you can do ALL BY YOURSELF to erase the over-tourism problem, and that is: Arrive in the off-season. Venice in winter is an entirely different, but still perfect, city. Just dress appropriately.
We must confess to a certain ambivalence about La Serenissima, because even though Venice has consistently requited our affections, our bond with the Lagoon has never felt unique or special. We fell for Milano, Napoli, Firenze, and even Bologna and Taranto long before the tourist lines began to stretch out the door, but Venice has been the Beauty Queen of the touring world since the Middle Ages.
Literally everyone in the world has loved Venice, and Venice has loved everyone in return—equally—like a 500-year-old courtesan with rouge on her cheeks and her delicate hand in your pocket. And now she’s charging 5 euros just for a glance.
We can all thank Attila the Hun, Alaric the Visigoth, and Alboin the Lombard for the eccentric, iconoclastic Venetian character, because when those savages rampaged into northern Italy, they sent the natives fleeing into the mud flats, salt marshes, and tidal islands around the natural refuge of the Venetian Lagoon.
As the Medieval world descended into its authoritarian feudal nightmare, those contrarian refugees created one of the freest, most open societies on the planet—give or take a clan-based oligarchy, a Jewish Ghetto, and thousands of mercenaries, servants, and slaves. Anything went—just as today, anything goes. The result was an explosion of creativity in commerce, trade, printing, the arts, sex, politics, and social organization that evolved into the Italian Renaissance.
In spite of the ever-present Ottoman threat, that Venetian creativity generated unimaginable wealth from their control of that era’s world trade. The golden flow paid for draining the swamps, raising the islands, cutting the canals, and building the palaces and squares you see today.
There are 167 of those islands in the Lagoon, 32 inhabited, and a mere handful locked into the tourist circuit. 90% of our fellow visitors never venture beyond the Centro Storico, centered on San Marco, except to Murano for glass and occasionally Burano for lace. A few wander along the Lido, only not during the Film Festival, when the glitterati and their bodyguards swamp the barrier island.
You can tour the Doge’s digs and prisons, but most of those gorgeous palaces you gawk at along the canals of the six Sestieri are still in private hands and closed to the public. Still, it never hurts to rub elbows with history and imagine your previous life as a debauched, pleasure-seeking libertine. Just climb into our gondola and let us serenade you.
The overwhelming element and motif in Venice is the same as it was five centuries ago—namely water. With no wheeled transport available, you can exercise your legs along the 150 canals and 438 bridges—or jump into a water taxi or Vaporetti (water bus) to get around. This is absolutely unique in the modern world. No one anywhere else can point to so little progress in the movement of human beings, and the Venetians are justifiably proud of it.
But seawater has its own challenges, and yes, it’s true that Venice is sinking into the polluted green waters of the North Adriatic. Other places are sinking much faster—in our lifetime, you might need a gondola to cross Atlantic City, and don’t even mention the Ninth Ward of New Orleans—but Venice started subsiding a millimeter per year from the day it was built.
The original plan of stone slabs atop water-resistant trunks of alder trees has functioned remarkably well through the centuries, but somehow in the modern era, we humans have come to expect eternity from our treasures. It’s not a reasonable expectation. Like it or not, your great-great-grandchildren will probably have to catch the movie.
But you won’t, because when the spring rains fall and the Adriatic tides roll in, and you find yourself sloshing around Saint Mark’s Square, it will all be part of the adventure. Man and woman against nature, and even if nature always wins in the end, the struggle is what separates us from the other species. With your 5-euro pass in hand, you’ll be part of that.
And by the way… Before you feel too sorry for those great-great-grandchildren, they’ll probably be catching that Venetian movie in between naps on their way to a weekend getaway on Mars. You, on the other hand, will probably never set foot on the Red Planet. Nevertheless… Much as we love orange sunsets, empty deserts, and oxygen tanks, we’ll let the 16th-century Venetian poet Veronica Franco explain why we think you’re getting the better end of the generational stick:
We danced our youth in a dreamed-of city Venice. Paradise. Proud and pretty We lived for love and lust and beauty Pleasure then our only duty Floating then 'twixt heaven and earth And drunk on plenty's blessed mirth We thought ourselves eternal then Our glory sealed by God's own pen.
As the antiquated saying goes, put that in your Martian pipe and smoke it.
Four Favorites:
Off the tops of our heads:
Il Palazzo Gritti. In the choice between the Gritti and the Hotel Danieli for a luxurious, hyper-extravagant stay, we’ll generally opt for the Gritti. It’s a bit farther away from the craziness of Saint Mark’s Square, and as the former residence of the Doge and his family, it breathes history from every savory, canal-front pore. We got the original tip from Elizabeth Taylor (admittedly in a magazine interview), and she never steered us wrong.
Harry’s Bar. No one knew their watering holes quite like Ernest Hemingway, and this was one of his favorites. One afternoon, we sat in the empty bar, drinking the Bellinis invented there and chatting with the bartenders, as they turned away one customer after another. What gives? we asked. Touristi, the bartenders sneered. But we’re touristi! Certo, but we love you! Once in a blue moon, it’s nice to be arbitrarily loved.
Il Ghetto Ebraico. This was the original, the very first Jewish ghetto, from which the name was derived. Part jealous persecution and part protection from the mob via the narrow entrance passageways. Napoleon broke down the walls and the social barriers, the Nazis replaced them with barbed wire and cattle cars. Today, the neighborhood feels like a ghost town, but these are some seriously weighty and powerful ghosts.
Trattoria Alla Scala. We toss this one in here as a marker for one of the two types of restaurants we frequent in the city—outdoors, on a corner with plenty of foot traffic and people watching. The other type is the tiny neighborhood fish trattoria, and there are still a few of those to be found. Our favorite people-watching spot is actually an anonymous snack bar on a corner somewhere vaguely near Saint Mark’s Square. Two stools by the door, decent antipasti, and a superb wine list from the Veneto. It takes a while, but we always find our way back.
And Meanwhile, at the Movies:
We could have listed dozens of flicks that feature Venice in all its splendor and decadence, but these five are actually about Venice, each in its own way. Some of them travel elsewhere, but without the languorous beauty on the Adriatic, they couldn’t have been made.
Dangerous Beauty is Glinda’s all-time favorite—we’ve seen it too many times to count. What’s more, we’ve spent hours talking about Veronica Franco and the misogynistic world she dominated through sheer talent and authenticity. As for the movie itself, it reveals the life of a 16th-century courtesan in all its lush, eloquent glory—until the bubonic plague arrives, and someone has to shoulder the blame.
Tintoretto is a must-see before you come to town and dive into the visual arts milieu. It gives a whole new perspective on a painter’s place in the world, and demands that you take a side in the high-stakes Titian-Veronese-Tintoretto rivalry. We’re with the genius who painted the magnificent Venetian fresco, Il Paradiso.
Italian for Beginners is a wonderful little Danish movie that doesn’t actually arrive in Venice until the third act. But it demonstrates how the dream of that earthly paradise can help cure the loneliest, most melancholy life.
Bread & Tulips: This might be the worst trailer ever assembled for one of the best Italian movies we’ve ever seen. The husband and sons don’t “drop” the heroine—they just forget to check if she’s still on the tour bus. And that’s the moral of the story: Neglect your gorgeous wife and mother at your peril, because if she discovers the beauty and romance of Venice, you’re toast.
Casanova isn’t the worst movie ever made, and the philosopher’s reputation was all his own fault—he didn’t have to write about all those women or enjoy them so blatantly. But no matter, because it was the backdrop and on-location filming we came for, and Venice has never disappointed. Historical truth and philosophical depth be damned.