Venice

December 1992
Junior year of college I went to Venice with some other Centro students for a weekend.  I remember walking over a bridge from the train station, standing in Piazza San Marco, eating big chunks of chocolate, taking a gondola ride.  Mostly I remember all those canals, my new semester-in-Rome friends, walking around.

December 2018
The kids stood on a little no-name bridge and watched the gondolas going by.  Daniel almost took a picture of the woman in the gondola who seemed to be texting on her phone.  The kids watched each gondola approach the bridge and begin to go under; then they ran to the other side, racing the gondolier, I imagine.  They did this again and again and again.  This reminded me of Beaver Brook Park and Reservation in Belmont (MA) and Pooh sticks.  As you'd expect, there's a brook there.  Sebastian and Mary, when younger than Con and Han now, used to stand on the little bridge, throw sticks into the brook, then run to the other side to watch the sticks come out the other side.  Sebastian told me once, "We're playing Pooh sticks," referring to a Winnie the Pooh story he'd read.

Venice, Italy, and Belmont, Massachusetts -- kids standing on bridges and playing games.

We used our phones to get to the famed Rialto Bridge.  The small bridges were fun, but it's the Rialto Bridge we'd heard about.  So we headed there.  We stood on it, again watching the gondolas and the folks looking out of their hotel rooms.  The kids just stood, leaning on the rail, watching the water, the boats, the people.  Just watching.  No rush.

When we stopped for gelato, Sebastian ordered a crepe.  Daniel and Hannah have been making crepes in the past few months.  But here, here we watched this woman heat up her flat metal surface, pour her batter, scrape it neatly from the sides, spread it thin.  The kids licked their gelato while we stood mesmerized by the woman making the perfect crepe (I'm reminded of the performers in Rome -- breakdancers, mimes, painters...so many ways to make art and/or to entertain).  Thin, golden brown, expertly flipped.  So fine.  She folded it, spread Nutella, put it adroitly into a cardboard holder like the ones they use for french fries back at Saffi in Viterbo.  We all begged him for a bite.

In the church of San Marco, Mary pointed to the ground to show us the squares of marble that she and Daniel had noticed on their walk through the church.  We walked with our heads down, admiring the geometric patterns.  After a while Mary said, "Don't you think it's strange that we're in this famous church and we all keep looking down at the floor?"

We got to the island of Murano too late to see any glass blowers, but we admired the glass in the one shop still open until the store owner -- fearful that we'd break something or just eager to close up once it was clear we weren't going to buy anything? -- told us she was closing.  Mary found a restaurant for dinner, where we tried yet another tiramisu -- having learned that tiramisu is a Venetian dessert and means "pick-me-up"...tirare: pull; mi: me; sull: up...how cool is that!?!? -- and Hannah insisted, on the way back to find an ATC boat (public transportation system in Venice) that we cross every bridge, back and forth, back and forth, til we got to the dock.  Connor, chuckling, let me know that he'd managed a day of pizza for every meal.  (Would I have insisted on different meals if I'd realized?  Unlikely.)

Small regret: not buying a small painting in a small store that the kids wandered into when we first arrived on Venice.  Two small rooms, the artist there talking with people, the kids admiring the bright colors and noting the sign that said, "Please respect the artist's work," and had an x through a picture of a camera.  Tourist error is usually to buy such a thing, especially early on in a trip. But this kid-led moment had a sweetness to it.  The kids didn't care about museums or churches in Venice.  This man's paintings were museum for them, and they loved just admiring them they way they liked watching the canals, wandering into the glass store, standing on bridges.

I liked being a kid tourist, not my sometimes-what-is-there-to-see tourist self.  I liked looking at the intricate decoration around windows as we floated along the canal, the columns, the light on the buildings and on the water.  I liked just looking around.

We had said no to a gondola ride early on -- too expensive when we could take the public transportation boats for which we'd bought two-day passes.  But having lost Sebastian for fifteen minutes -- not really, he didn't know he was lost when we crossed the Bridge of Sighs...he was just waiting where he thought we were taking the next ATC boat -- feeling not up for a 90 minute boat ride to Burano, realizing that none of us would be back to this magical spot for many years, I suggested the gondola ride.  Again I felt like one of the kids, just taking it all in, needing no dates and historical or literary information (though, I confess, reading/teaching Othello this past fall certainly came to mind), just wanting to let it seep in, especially visually.  I felt like we were walking around in a children's book of castles and magical houses and bridges and boats.  One page after another.

Daniele's Gondola.  Really, that was the name.  A sign, I thought.  The sun set behind Sebastian down the other end of the gondola.  The girls snuggled to stay warm.  Connor smiled with delight to be away from the Grand Canal, liking the quiet of the smaller canals ("Too many people and too much smoke," he says of Venice).  We asked our gondolier questions and he told us how he used to live in Mestre, but now lived in Venice with his wife and two daughters.  He used to drive an ATC boat, and then learn how to drive (right verb?) a gondolier afterwards.  For two years, he did both a job and the training for being a gondolier.  His dad had been a gondolier, too.  He showed us a photo of his children.  He pushed off the walls of houses with his foot, touching the gondola to a wall not even once.  He told us by the last turn, "That's a hard one," detailing the length of the gondola and the distance across for the turn (numbers I don't recall; I recall only that we were in awe by the closeness of the numbers, the lack of margin...for Italians a norm though, as we've learned: there are almost no margins for driving).  He squatted down to get into a photo Mary took of Daniel and me.  We laughed with him.  He laughed with us.  We stumbled over Italian while he stumbled over English.  He told us that he usually doesn't talk with the tourists on his gondola: usually they are on their phones.

We asked him what he would do for New Year's Eve that night.  "My wife is making food now," he said.  "We have friends who will come over.  The kids will play."