Insights into Venetian — and Italian — Life

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Last night we met one of my Dad's friends, Alessandro, at the top of the Rialto Bridge to go on his “Classic Venice Bars Tour.” While we were waiting for him, we asked an American couple to take our picture. Lo and behold, they were also meeting up with Alessandro and would be the only two other people in our tour group.

Alessandro showed the way to our first stop, an enoteca, where he got us wine and bruschetta. He didn't have much of an agenda for the evening except to let us talk about whatever we liked, drink several glasses of wine and snack on cicchetti (bruschetta, mini-sandwiches and other little hors d'oeuvres). After the wine was finished and the conversation had come to a natural pause, he would take us to the next cicchetti bar. This is standard practice for Venetians. I guess they like to try many different wines, and to hop from one bar to the next for a kind of progressive dinner.

Alessandro explained some ways in which Venice is unique from other Italian cities. It is traditionally a fishing town, so many people wake up as early as three a.m. for the fish market. Nine a.m. feels like the middle of the day, so that is when they go to the bar to drink a few glasses of wine. It is the same reason why people eat dinner and retire in the evening here much earlier than other Italians.

He also explained how dramatically Venice has changed just in the past 10 years with the vast increase in tourists. It is a very hard city for Venetians to live in, so many, like Alessandro himself, have moved outside of the city.

What was especially interesting to me was his explanation of Italy as a nation. Venice used to be just Venice, not Italy, but a country of its own, like the rest of Italy until the 19th century. Not until Mussolini did Italians replace their regional identity and pride with nationalism.

We also talked about the Mafia at one point. He explained that the Mafia in the early 1900s was a good thing — supplying protection and looking out for people's needs and equality. Now, he says, the Mafia that is talked about isn't the traditional Mafia — they are thugs and a bad thing.

This morning we visited the beautiful Frari Church. I liked it even better than St. Mark's Basilica. We visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of modern art, which we both liked a lot for its pretty gardens, thought-provoking modern paintings and sculptures, and the Coming of Age exhibit on American art.

I took a photo of a bench which had a poem engraved in it that I really liked:

I walk in
I see you
I watch you
I scan you
I wait for you
I tickle you
I tease you
I search you
I breathe you
I talk

I smile
I touch your hair
You are the one
You are the one
Who did this to me
You are my own
I show you
I feel you
I ask you
I don't ask

I don't wait
I won't ask you
I can't tell you
I lie
I am crying hard
There was blood
No one told me
No one knew
My mother knows
I forget your name

I don't think
I bury my head
I bury your head
I bury you
My fever
My skin
I cannot breathe
I cannot eat
I cannot walk
I am losing time

I am losing ground
I cannot stand it
I cry
I cry out
I bite
I bite your lip
I breathe you breath
I pulse
I pray aloud

I smell you on my skin
I say the word
I say your name
I cover you
I shelter you
I run from you
I sleep beside you
I smell you
On my clothes
I keep your clothes

Then we visited the Academia, which was a bit vast and overwhelming. I had a hard time appreciating huge religious painting after huge religious painting. After about huge room number 10, all the paintings started to look the same to me.

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