Dateline: 11.04 01 Sep 1996
Location: Italy, Venezia, Piazzale Roma
Happy birthday me! And indeed, Venezia turned out not be merely a
'bit' better, but a hell of a lot better. Oh, sure it's just as
ramshackle, but the water! Yet again I find myself forced to
compare something to Christiania: Venice, too, has thrown out one of
the principles of urban design - the car - and replaced it not with
bicycle lanes, but with water, gazillions of little canals running to
and fro, even public transport using them. I was amused to realize
that I left Dijas^ki Dom Bez^igrad in the morning on a Ljubljanski
Potnis^ki Promet bus and arrived at my hostel this evening with an
Actv vaporetto. Almost a magical moment, gliding on the
waters of Venezia at night, lights winking through the twilight
at midnight...
Piazza San Marco could really use a good scrub. Black ooze is
dripping off most walls, making them remarkably ugly. No sir, I did not
like it. Venice, too, is an over-touristed place, Japanese hordes
everywhere and, worse yet, noisy Americans too. But there's a sucker
born every minute, as the well-dressed black fellows hawking ladies'
handbags and jewelry in front of Ferrovia will attest. My L 70,000
having already practically disappeared without a trace, I was forced
to eschew the planned restaurant meal and content myself with self-catering.
For 5 kL I got a kilo of fruit (grapes for a change too, yum!) and now I
need just a loaf of bread. Mayhaps I can even afford another vaporetto
ride on line 1? We shall see.
In a little less than 4 footblistering hours, I have completed a tour
of Venice: Piazzale Roma -> Accademia -> Piazza San Marco -> Rialto ->
back to Piazzale Roma. Initially I had to use a map to locate
Campo Santa Margherita and its reportedly cheap student restaurants,
but after finding it (...to be without any cheap restaurants, at that)
I gladly ditched the map and made my way around following only the
intermittent but surprisingly omnipresent little yellow signs.
A funny way of navigating: you tend to have no idea where you are,
but you can't get lost either since the signs are everywhere.
It was fun, walking through the myriad tiny alleys that would otherwise
have been utterly confusing; it was not fun, getting stuck in one of
these when some herd of tourists following an over-eager flag waver
rampaged through in the opposite direction. Do I sound like I have
something against herd mentality? It's the least you can expect
from someone who's been lone-wolfing it for the past 2 weeks.
If my estimates are correct, Venezia is both the southernmost point
of my trip and the point most remote from Helsinki; only tonight
shall that distance start to decrease again as I head for Bruxelles.
There are two festivals going on in Venezia at the moment, both of
which I hope to catch in part. One is the Regatta Storica, held on
the first Sunday in September each year - in my case, entirely by
accident, that happens to be today, which is both my birthday and
the only (almost) complete day I'll be spending here. And the
second celebration is the Italian Communist Party's "Festival of
Liberation from the Resistance to Progress" (if my free-form translation
from Italian is close enough - I had to parse that a few times before it
made sense), the preparation of which I happened to pass in Campo S.
Margherita earlier. Pavilions with red sickle-and-hammer flags
fluttering and even a Che Guevara proclaiming "Hasta la ultima
victoria!" (For people who know their Schwartzenegger better than
their Spanish, 'hasta' is 'until', not 'bye-bye'). And they were
grilling up food that might even be cheap, so I shall return and
peek. I've got 4+ hours to go, and the Regatta won't start for another
2 hours yet.
The Regatta is the only time of year when gondolas not colored
black are allowed to come out of their hiding places. So they do,
pushed around by gondoliers wearing costumes of matching color, which
would probably be quite cumbersome most of the time. This is the
real reason non-black gondolas are banned: how on earth can gondoliers
look sexy and macho wearing green tights and a green joker's cap with
bells at the tips, like Errol Flynns in the wrong movie? Anyway...
this spectacle is accompanies by incessant flute music (maybe that
last word should be in quotes), played on the station's P.A. from
the sound of it. Or maybe it's not flutes at all, it's one of those
old Disney theme songs from Peter Pan or thereabouts, with
choirs intoning, "we're going hoooo-ome, hoh-oh-ohme, hooooooooooooome...".
Or something of a similar intellectual caliber.
I appear to be falling prey to sarcasm, a surefire sign that my fascination
with a place is wearing off. Which, in case you hadn't noticed, it is.
I would very much like to go off and explore the rest of the lagoon,
but I don't have enough money for a one-way ticket, so I'm stuck to
exploring Venezia proper. And it's boring. Yes, the little medieval
alleys have a certain amount of charm; yes, the canals are cute; yes,
that's it. The rest is expensive, ugly, not cared for and - a mortal
sin - there are so few parks that I find myself returning to the same
one for the third time already. What struck me when I got here was the
water, and quite frankly, nothing has struck me since... except in the
wallet. I may have promoted Venezia to stand on par with Wien and
Ljubljana too soon; but, then again, a blitzkrieg visit is always a
blitzkrieg visit and this place does deserve a second peek.
The day's budget
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