Venice off the main canals
We arrived at Venice a little after noon and made the short ten-minute walk from the train station to our lodgings, which were thankfully located well away from the main tourist area. “Well away from” doesn’t really take far to accomplish in Venice, however. 90% of tourists seem to stick to just a couple of the streets and, of course, cram onto the public transport in Venice. Our patron saint of Italian trip planning, Rick Steves, recommends exploring the back streets as much as possible, and staying there made our trip to Venice an unexpected highlight.
“Unexpected highlight? Venice?” I can hear your incredulous tone from here, all the way across the Atlantic and in the past (relative to you reading this). Ten-year-old me would have been surprised, too. I fell in love with the Travel Channel at a young age, especially Samantha Brown’s Passport to Europe, and Venice featured heavily on my travel bucket list for a long time. The streets are water. How cool.
What made me fall out of love with the idea of Venice? Learning about how dirty the canals are (they don’t look it, thank goodness, but occasionally stink; we were lucky that they only smelled of fish and brine during our visit). Septic tanks are, unfortunately, the exception not the rule in these historic structures. Hot, humid, crowded, dirty: all the things I don’t enjoy when traveling. So I scratched Venice off the top spot on my bucket list, and we allotted it two half-days in our planning.
Rick Steves didn’t steer us wrong. (He rarely does, we’ve discovered.) The quiet streets we stayed on near the old Jewish quarter were the Venice I imagined of my youth, with fewer gondolas but no less charm. Boats still pass under the arched stone bridges, and gorgeous buildings draped with flowers and lined with shutters are still the norm. You are more likely to see actual Venetian residents hanging out their laundry, which just adds to the scene in my opinion. I watched a woman shaking out her quilts and draping them across her window flower boxes to air out in the sun from our apartment window.
We bought vaporetto day passes online and set out to explore the city. A vaporetto Venice’s answer to public transportation via the canals. The boats are less packed early in the morning, we found, but the afternoon we arrived they were so crammed with passengers that there was often nothing to do to steady yourself other than brace against the roof. We managed to arrive during their election day, which had a shortened holiday schedule for vaporetto routes and funneled the normal amount of tourists into even fewer boats.
After some experimenting with the system, we managed to get to the Piazza San Marco, the main hub of attractions in Venice, which contains the Basilica San Marco and the ornate Doge’s Palace. Vaporetti operate along a map similar to metros in major cities, but we found that it was even more confusing; the day pass with unlimited rides is highly recommended, even if you are used to navigating public transportation. Google Maps attempts to be helpful, but more often than not thinks you are capable of simply walking across a canal, so I wouldn’t advise relying on its directions in this case.
We weren’t in the mood to tour either the church (which contains the bones of Saint Mark, who is believed to be the author of the Gospel of Mark in the Bible) or the Doge’s Palace, so we settled for looking up shots from The Italian Job and finding the exact spot
where Donald Sutherland and Mark Whalberg stood in the iconic opening scene.
With that accomplished, we began to walk back in the direction of our apartment. The claustrophobic conditions of the vaporetti made them less appealing than the 20-minute walk, so we went by land. We took our time, and I stopped and bought a couple of postcards and a sentimental gift for a family member. Venice is known for its glasswork and its lace; you can tour the islands of Murano (where the glass artisans are located) and Burano (for the lace workers) from the same vaporetti that navigate the city. Half of the shop windows along the tourist routes sparkled with brilliantly colored glass spun into delicate shapes, including a wide variety of animals whose tails surely won’t survive the journey home.
We stopped halfway through at a restaurant called La Cantina and had drinks (even the hydrating kind) and a charcuterie platter, then continued on to our neighborhood. We ate at a highly-rated restaurant called Al Parlamento, which didn’t disappoint. We were able to walk right up and get a table for four next to the quiet canal, which reflected a shimmering version of the restaurant lights and the darkening sky. This was the Venice I had imagined as a kid. Well, there might have been a gondola involved somewhere in that dream, but as an adult, 80 euros to paddle up and down one small street made it easy to pass up.
Gondola or not, it was the kind of magic I had given up expecting from Venice. It felt absolutely unreal, except for the very real danger of my stiffening calves tipping me right over into the dirty canal water when I stood up.
So many of my favorite travel memories are made up of moments like that. Moments when I’ve managed to get away from the crowds and soak in a touch of authenticity, a glimpse of a different way of life. Venetians fussing at their dogs for barking at other dogs, friends meeting up for drinks, boat traffic that was more local than not. I wouldn’t have traded it for any gondola.
