The Colder Face of Venice

Most people don't think about visiting Venice in the winter but Rachel Donadio did and her look at a typical tourist place during an off-season time provides a different perspective of Venice, uncommon to the pages of travel magazines and books. She intermixes personal memories with other literature references while describing things in rich sensory detail. She has me interested in her first paragraph: "The light, as always, was beyond compare and there was a watery chill in the air. I loved it immediately. Or rather, I remembered how much I loved it. Italy can do strange things to your perspective. Memories of a place become more real than the place itself. I had lived for years with the Venice of my recollections...and then last November I was back. I was older, so was Venice". She does a lot in this section of text, but it all works. She describes the scene using sensory language so that I know exactly what she's talking about when she describes the damp chill that clings to the air, she provides a personal touch informing the reader about her past trip and the fondness of her memories of the place. She makes an insightful observation that with a place like Italy often times your memories hold a greater sense of reality for you than the actual place, I think this is something that almost anyone who has travelled to a foreign place has experienced. And at the end she begins to almost personalize Venice, aging herself along with the watery city I am expecting to read about some changes that have taken place.

She goes on to reference the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, informing the reader that she used a "well-worn copy" of his collection of poems Watermark, "It is an emotional guidebook more than a practical one, but I would argue, just as reliable. In Venice, maps fails. As everyone knows to be in that floating city is to be forever lost and disoriented, as if in a labyrinth". Here, again, she is letting us know that the experience for her is indeed an emotional one, and goes further by saying that it is more reliable almost to depend on one's emotional guides rather than the standard practical ones like maps, which as she tells us fail. As some who has now visited Venice twice, and gotten thoroughly lost both times this is something I can attest to, even the Venetians don't know where things are half the time. The way to navigate Venice is not to navigate you at all but in some ways let it guide you, as you stumble along alley ways barely wider than you are don't waste your time staring at a map trying to pinpoint your location, it's useless and honestly just frustrating, instead try and breathe try to look at the surroundings about you.

Donadio gives some reasoning for her admiration of Venice in winter, unlike the tourist season of summer Venice, which she compares to "one big floating Disneyland", a comparison that is both equally disturbing and accurate. Instead of writing about the crowded summer streets she opts to talk about a quieter time, in extraordinary descriptive detail; "Distorted by light and water, time thickens in Venice. So does sounds. What I love best about the city is its glorious quiet, and its strange pace, as if you were living in slow motion. In Venice, hurrying will get you nowhere fast - or perhaps lost faster". I love her description of time and sound, in summer the pace of Venice seems anything but slow most of the time but noticing the locals, who are obvious because while everyone else is bustling around saddled with armfuls of shopping bags they merely sit, sipping a cafe or slowly enjoying a gelato, unlike the tourists who dash about hurrying to eat the sweet treat before it begins to drip down your hands creating a sticky mess.

The bustling robustness of the crowded summer Venice is gone in her wintery description instead her scene is a calmer one; "On winter nights, the lights of every trattoria beckon, little pockets of warmth against the damp. Once inside, my glasses were forever fogged". Again, I can just picture the soft glow of the trattoria lights, and the misty fog that would instantly cloud her lenses as she crosses the threshold into warmth. This idea of a calmer Venice is enforced even by the things that are often most obnoxiously forever present in the days of summer, pigeons, or flying rats as my mother refers to them, "In winter, by day, even the pigeons in the square seem subdued". She ends her mysteriously, calm portrait of winter in Venice by mentioning being lost once again, only this time the sense is different. She seems to be referencing getting lost, and the pleasure she takes in it as a way to spend just a few more precious moments in the winding streets of Venice, giving her just a few more minutes before letting go of the place during the time she loves it so much; "I thought that this might just be true happiness: being semi-lost in Venice on a cold and snowy day".