When I stepped off the sea-beaten water taxi and sunk my foot into the fleshy, waterlogged plank below, when curls of laden mist kissed my skin and heavy sighs of dirty orange sunlight seeped through the air, when I realized that, though dozens of people ambled around me, the ocean-side cobblestoned street, with its rows of fish shops and bakeries and coffee houses and flashy tourist restaurants, was permeated by a powerful and damp sense of quiet — almost like the weight that hangs in the air of a museum — when our guide, Andrea, advised us to put away our phones because electronic maps didn’t work in this maze of a city, I stepped into Venice and out of time. It took me the better part of my first afternoon to realize no automobiles marred the crooked streets of Venice. It would feel absurd, almost sacrilegious, to find a car ploughing through this crumbling city, which looks like it was built by Romans and then never touched again — just quietly lived in for millenia. For a city that has a long and infamous history of revelry, the energy that winds its way through the city could just as easily pass through the silent majesty of a cathedral.
***
It rained that first night. Hard. As dusk started pooling in the shadows, a bitter wind picked up and carried with it sharp bullets of rain — the kind that always seem to make you feel colder than the temperature really warrants. We were unprepared. After splashing through cramped, quickly darkening alleys, an explosion of neon fluorescents signalling our arrival at a small square, a campo, was infinitely welcome. We ducked into a loudly lit shop stuffed full of bright, woven scarves, knit hats, plastic umbrellas and a strange collection of mass produced formal dresses. If we hadn’t been in dire need of three out of four items the shop seemed to specialize in, the establishment would have seemed almost offensively out of place between the white marble buildings glowing in the moonlight outside. We settled on a scarf, a hat, and an umbrella each. They were thin, but beautiful in their own right — and startlingly cheap. We were warm.
***
I have found, with an unpredictability that has only been steadfast, that I have come by adulthood in a series of startling gasps. Wandering through a grocery store once, I found I was shopping for a week’s worth of groceries for the first time. On hold with my health insurance company last summer, I was surprised by an absence of phone-call related fear. I never quite expect these little gasps, these shifts, to crop up, nor do I have a sense of how many more are in store for me. I do usually know when they arrive. I did not realize until much later the shifts at work in Venice.
***
After a thrilling succession of wrong turns, this time lit by an eggy morning sun, we found ourselves in Campo Santa Maria Formosa, waiting for a walking tour to attract its full cohort. The tour, led by an ageless Italian man named Ricardo, ambled across foot bridges and campos, through ancient churches and forgotten alleyways, with a mind towards waking up the city’s history on our path. Towards the end of the tour, Ricardo made a sudden turn into a small, comparatively ugly square devoid of everything but a small shed frame of naked two-by-fours. I almost laughed. We’d used this absurd little marker the previous night in the rain — our neon scarf shop was bound to be right around the corner.
Ricardo stopped in front of the structure, turned swiftly around, waited for his audience to settle, and started to complain. He complained of the tourists who flooded Venitian streets every day, outnumbering locals two-to-one, he complained of the flourishing Airbnb apartments, that, like an invasive species, have choked out real estate for residents, he complained of the grocery stores, emptied at the hands of tourists and the shops filled with cheaply made products from the mainland that fail to spare even a drop of their sales for the local economy, he complained of a city that gets leeched of its resources and space and food and culture by the very people he led tours for. By me. I was staying in an airbnb. I had shopped at the grocery store only the night before instead of paying for expensive restaurant food. I’d bought a scarf and a hat and an umbrella from a store whose profits would never grace the streets that I so proudly paraded my new wares in. My very presence in the city, albeit unintentionally, weighted the scale one jot further towards the tourist burden the city could barely even bear.
***
Until I stepped foot in Venice, I had only done any real travelling with my parents. My parents researched restaurants and museums and art galleries — they planned the itinerary and booked the flights and chose where to stay and where to walk and where to eat and how to comport ourselves. I offered opinions and preferences, but it wasn’t until my friends and I were trying to decide where to grab lunch after Ricardo’s tour that I realized I’d never felt any responsibility for the ethics of how I travelled. Another gasp.
***
Venice is crumbling. Plaster façades cling like peeling remnants of ancient paint to the exposed red brick of the city’s skeleton. Bright green vines tumble out of balconies and burrow through the cracks in the stone. Aside from the shocks of nature and flashes of modernity battling for real estate, the stone labyrinth looks almost filtered — all the colors have long since drained from the landscape, leaving a uniformly muted, weathered haze that clings to the buildings. When I first arrived in the city, I thought the decay of a thousand years was beautiful. Every alley looked like an impressionist painting. This is what it means to be old, I thought. But Venice is not a museum. I wonder now what it means for the residents that the city’s infrastructure is cracking and crumbling away. Many people think Venice is sinking. And so it is. About 2 millimeters a year. But sea levels are rising faster. Since the 1960’s, the Italian government has been attempting to engineer a solution for the ever-worsening floods that plague Venice a hundred times a year. Corruption, scandal and a lack of funds has delayed the project for decades. The week after I left Venice, the worst flood since 1966 ravaged the city. Those mossy gray canal waters rose 6 feet above sea level. I wonder how many cracks swelled and buckled with salt water. Where does the water go in a city-in-collapse?
***
The Venetian airport is one of the nicest airports I’ve ever visited. It’s sleek, glassy, modern — a façade that isn’t peeling.
***
Most of the Venetian masks that spill out of mask shops are only cheap reproductions. Local artisans have never touched them and will never touch the euros they generate.
***
Venice is full of fake food. Large mainland corporations pay to build paper house restaurants with paper food that looks like what an American might want to eat in Venice. The giveaway is their outrageous prices advertised on shiny, laminated pictures of greasy lasagna, spaghetti and pizza posted garishly out front. Laminated to withstand a flood.
***
After our tour with Ricardo, I only ate at the local restaurants tucked away in the nooks of the city. I didn’t buy another tourist product. I shared what we had learned with the rest of our group. I still shopped at the grocery store because coming home to our charming apartment, uncorking a bottle of red wine and combining, with an almost childlike gusto, achingly fresh produce, tender mozzarella di bufala, cured meats and crusty bread and whatever else caught my fancy in the warm light of a little home was too enticing to pass up. I ignored, for a while, that our home was a home stolen from a Venetian. But with every step I take away from Venice, I find I cannot step away from the mark I left on the city. My very presence in Venice, the space I took up on the street, the plane ticket I purchased to travel, was feeding a multi-billion dollar industry whose greedy, meaty paws are sinking deeper in the city’s bones. Venice was breathtaking in a way that taught me the true meaning of the word, and I am not certain that I should have gone.
Riley Nelson is a fourth-year creative writing and theatre major from Austin, TX. She is disappointed to announce that she, unlike William Shakespeare, failed to produce any great works of literature during the pandemic. Perhaps next time.
