The best time to see Venice? Early spring or late summer, according to Trip Adviser; November, my Italian driver assured me, turning into the spa hotel an hour away from Lagoon City (and, he insisted, I had to ‘approach from the water’ to see the domes and towers loom out of the mist: ‘Is beautiful’); at sunrise on a weekday (when I did arrive, by train) before the traffic of the day erupts, when buildings and canals emerge with all the (illusory) fresh potential of Wordsworth’s London (viewed like a transitory tourist from Westminster Bridge)? No, the best time to see Venice is in the 18th century just before it all went pear shaped, when it was still a honed and vigorous young Turk, squandering the proceeds of newly minted capitalism, like a rampant hedonistic 80s Yuppie, building a palace of pleasure (with the bright-eyed ingenuity of a rampant Casanova) desperate to recover lost glories by turning itself into the up market flophouse of the Grand Tour. When it knew how to party and what to do with a courtesan and a gondola. When gondolas were still employed for their designed purpose. When it still had some talent and rep. When it was still real.
While it might have still been fun to visit with Byron in 1816, riding horses and women along the sandy stretches of the Lido, the city, although retaining the charm of a certain sexual freedom, had already become a backwater well in decline, Too much sex and too much freedom. ‘Though the night was made for loving’, even Byron had to call a regretful early halt to his ‘roving’, leaving the city to dye it’s hair and moustache and suffer a decadent decline into the melancholy of Mahler’s Adagietto. Now the Lido, a four mile stretch of sand and sewage pollution, is one of the most restricted and policed seafronts on the planet and no one swims in the sea.
It is a painful experience to see Venice now (literally, if you arrive by error at the wrong time of day, month, year). See Venice and die? If only. Unfortunately, it’s long since dead. So few fail to even see the remains they trample across, slavishly wandering in cheerful confusion back and forth in shorts and sandals, obediently following wilting, drooping maps through baking, convoluted and ‘romantic’ passageways.
If you are fortunate enough to see the city in the early morning, then leave before it’s too late. Don’t wait to die, get out of there, now; if you can. As for the rest of the day, forget it. If you can. Unfortunately, you can’t. As much as you might try, it will leave an indelible memory and a depressing view of the human spirit.
‘Oh, but it’s so romantic.’ I can already hear the protests. Where, you have to wonder, do these people usually find romance? Paris, probably, still a staple for perfume ads, usually evoking a long lost 50s heyday. Here in Venice Canaletto has been the ad man for over 200 years, so everyone thinks they know what they’re looking for. The ‘One Cornetto’ crowd has its equivalent in every country (middle aged, middle class and middle brow) and in summer they’re all here, arriving like locusts, like aggressive migrating birds to scatter the pigeons from the piazza ; noisily photographing each other in front of one disintegrating canal bridge after another, attempting to assert their own rhythm (stop, smile, snap) but hurried and harried by the inevitable Tsunami, a crowd moving with the weary but relentless tramp of refugees, flooding the canals and the city itself with a cheerless, careless, sulking exhaustion before trudging on to another destination, another event on their bucket list (bungy jumping? Skydiving?) before they die.
What are they doing? And why are they doing it here? Searching for ‘romance’ (and Venice) in the loose trail, the watery maze to San Marco. Where is this romance? In the gift shops (there’s one on every street, each identical to the last) masquerading as real shops selling masks for masked balls which will never happen (and actually destined for the glass shelves of suburban cabinets next to Eiffel Tower snowstorms and miniature bulls from 70s Torremolinos); in gondolas where, as they swerve and rock in the wash of the traffic bullying vaporettos or queue at bottlenecks in canal turns like patient carriages on a stalled Alton Towers ride, the lover holding the single red rose as tightly as her fixed smile, tries to meet her embarrassed boyfriend’s eyes and say something, anything (‘Isn’t it beautiful’) while above them the gaggle of gondoliers riding the wobbling canoes like talented fairground roustabouts on bumper cars, argue with each other with the cheerful banter of lorry drivers (‘No, I don’t know what they’re saying,,,something romantic’); at the tables in San Marco, where at least the tradition of extortion in this 15th century flagship of usury and capitalist enterprise still lives on, you will pay operatic, high C, eye watering prices to be served mediocre food, whilst serenaded by a collection of the most lifeless musicians in the world, having no trouble avoiding eye-contact as, locked into thoughts of their own lunch, they work with the efficiency of cash nexus through their over-familiar ‘romantic’ repertoire, some hardly bothering to conceal their yawns.
Stop for a moment, if you can, on the narrow, crumbling bridge or the dank passage, tolerate a little pedestrian (tourist) rage and look closely at where you actually are in this empty husk of a ‘city’. This is slumland. Recognise it? The blackened, cracked and crumbling walls, the locked shutters almost stripped bare of paintwork, the balconies propped up by planks and makeshift, rusting ironwork, the washing hung between buildings. You are standing in the midst of a preserved slum, like the back of a stage set, hardly any different to the grime and dilapidation of the slums and wharves of Bermondsey wharfland before the 80s clearance and rebuild. Do people actually live here?
Yes, they do. Around 60,000 at the last census, although dwindling by the decade (by nearly 50% since rehabilitation began on those London docks). Those who remain contend with damp, flooding (several times a year! Life doesn’t even happen on the ground floor), relentless, sluggish football crowds of day trippers on their three hour bucket excursions with their memorised and mangled ‘Scusi, dov’e Piazza San Marco?’. And where are the shops, the real shops? Think of the old, taking a water taxi ride to and from the nearest store and market, carting their weekly groceries to the upper floor of their overpriced slum. How different is this to the old woman in the south London high rise who at least has the luxury of a piss-smelling lift which might work at least a few weeks in the year?
Whatever Venice was or represented to people in the past has long since passed. It has become a depressing experience, another dead museum barely seen by those passing through its canals, who have already been told what to think, what to see, and yet would deride any suggestion of watching an informative TV documentary which might distill the knowledge and treasures available in HD close-up and a comfortable setting. No, you have to ‘see it for yourself’, you have to have ‘been there.’ Seriously, what else can you tell your friends, colleagues, dinner party guests? You couldn’t tell them you’d just been watching TV.
‘A nice place with a fin de siecle decoration’ says one Trip Adviser reviewer of the Hotel Metropole, ‘where you could meet Oscar Wilde sipping his absinthe...if he was still alive.’ The enthusiasm of this Wildean scholar is touchingly ironic, unconsciously informing us of how each man kills the thing he loves. Already the steadily dwindling population of aging Venetians is on its way, forced out by the benevolent bailiffs of humanity and operatic property hikes, as if the adulation of the world is determined to suck the last remnants of reality from the place already destined for Disneyland where eventually, inevitably, it will be recreated stone by stone in its natural nursing home of Florida.
DG 2013
