Europe on Two Martinis a Day - Part 2 (Venice)

Venice has been called "the City of Lovers", but there again, so have Rome, Paris and probably quite a few other cities (not including Belgrade or Wolverhampton). They should make things clearer with epithets like "the City of Unrequited Lovers", "the City of One-Night Stands" or "the City of Sleazy Extramarital Affairs". In this more precise terminology, Venice would be a city of clandestine affairs with sinister undertones, such as a former KGB agent sleeping with the wife of an art-collecting mafioso so as to get a glimpse of a renaissance painting which proves that Lucretia Borgia poisoned the last descendant of Mary Magdalene. The dark alleys and narrow bridges of Venice are just made for clandestine trysts, except for the problem that it is so easy to get lost in Venice that the lovers would probably never meet up. Since there are no roads as such, addresses consist of just a number and the name of what in other cities would be a block. This system is incomprehensible to all but native Venetians; we navigated by brand names: "Ah, we've just passed Prada, so Dolce & Gabbana should be just around the corner." Venice seems to have more labels per square mile than any place outside Manhattan, and all the spaces between are filled with restaurants or tiny shops selling jewellery, Murrano glassware and carnival masks at twice the price they'd fetch elsewhere in Italy. God help anyone who needs to buy anything practical in Venice - there's probably a retailers' leper colony outside the city proper where people can shop for things like TVs and aspirin.

Of course shopping is not what you go to Venice for, despite the profusion of labels. You go to Venice to gawk. You gawk at canals, gondolas, churches, facades, more gondolas, those funny little shops I mentioned, bridges, the Piazza San Marco, more bloody gondolas ... Venice is as gawkworthy as it gets.



Nobody says "Hmm, Venice, not a bad place if you like that kind of thing." That's what you say about Brighton or Harrogate. With Venice, you either fall in love with it or despise it. We fell in love with it the first time we visited, but realised that we were starting to fall out of love by the third day of this visit, while broiling in Murrano looking for affordable glassware. At this point, I should extend the trope by comparing Venice to a particular kind of beautiful woman (people who write about cities are always doing this) but I can't summon the literary finesse at the moment, so I'll just say that the problem with Venice is detail. Everywhere you look, you will see something beautiful, but after a while the profusion of detail starts to eat away at your optic nerve, leaving you wishing for wide open spaces and minimalist architecture. The answer is simple: take the water bus to Lido, lie on the beach and stare at the Adriatic for a few hours. And don't spend more than two days at a time in Venice: even if your eyes can handle it, your bank account probably can't.