TRAVEL|Venice 2
Venezia, ancora una volta
Venice, one more time, eh? I may be wrong but it seems like only the other day that you went there for the first time. Explain.
In fact, it was some eighteen months ago, at the very end of October 2009. Even so, while we certainly knew we wanted to return, we didn’t expect it to happen as soon as this. But one day in February this year I was lunching with Tony Ellis, Mike Sexton and Kit Wright in The Grapes, Narrow Street, Limehouse Reach. Ellis announced that he intended to celebrate his sixty-ninth birthday, in his view an anniversary of much greater importance than his seventieth, by hosting dinners for friends in Venice. What did we think? Did we want to go? Everyone thought it a splendid idea, though no firm commitments were made on the spot.
Why does Ellis think his sixty-ninth birthday is so significant?
Well, it all goes back to his undisguised obsession, probably developed during schooldays and carefully nurtured ever since, with the slightly exotic position for human sexual intercourse known as ‘soixante-neuf’. Clinging to this notion throughout his adult life, he felt it deserved major recognition, leaving the otherwise dull and uninteresting seventieth to find its own level like most of the others, previous and still to come. (It could also be insurance in case he doesn’t reach the three score and ten, though I’m sure that wasn’t in his mind). Such has been the influence of ‘69’ on his thinking that, during one Fiction Festival at old King’s Lynn many years ago, the mission of the Sunday afternoon plenary session was to identify The Best Soixante-Neuf Novels of all time. The late Malcolm Bradbury, chairing the session, told us that he’d already been asked about the significance of this particular wording. He had to admit that, with his wife sitting right under his nose on the front row of the audience, he felt unable to shed light on the matter without causing both her and himself considerable embarrassment.
On my return from this jaunt, I immediately emailed Tony to suggest the seventieth, if he should feel like celebrating it, might take place in Bruges, involving an easy couple of train journeys from St Pancras. Like Venice, Bruges is another place I don’t need to be asked twice to revisit. Indeed, I’d also be most likely to accept if he wanted it in Prague or Dublin. However, the Pike Pub on First Avenue, Seattle may be going just a bit far, as would Vesuvio in San Francisco.
Did you manage to get one of those seriously cheap flights where you’re treated like cattle and even breathing the air on the plane costs you an extra few quid?
No, partly because we want to fly from Birmingham International which is only a 50 minute train ride away for £8.50 single for those of a certain age. The really cheapo lines don’t appear to fly from there to Venice, so we decided on KLM. Nearly every European destination, apart from Malaga with whom we fly by Monarch, and will do next month, requires a change at Amsterdam, Zurich, Frankfurt or wherever is convenient to your provider. The Ellis party went from Gatwick for £63 by Easyjet but returned with BA, which doubtless cost them more.
On principle, I’m not touching BA, unless there’s absolutely no alternative, until they sort out their appalling long-running industrial relations mess which has been buggering up people’s arrangements for three years now. A business run as badly as BA simply doesn’t deserve anyone’s money, and they’re not having any of mine. At least now the CEO is no longer the combative little squirt Willie Walsh, though the new union leader is yet another unreformed relic from the 1970s, and now we understand that they’ve brought in a psychologist to give both sides training in understanding interpersonal conflict or something of the sort. It’s been very clear for far too long that neither side understands the basic principles of effective negotiation and compromise.
So KLM come up with a return fare of £179 return per passenger. Their on line confirmation actually breaks down that figure as follows (I wonder how many people realise what they’re actually paying for): KLM ticket £37; Fuel surcharge £80; UK air passenger duty £12; security charge £12; Airport passenger service charge £22; embarkation tax ££5.50; Council city tax £3.80; Netherlands noise isolation charge £3.40; another security charge £1.50; Security bag charge £1.50; another airport passenger service charge £0.70. Given all that, the financial basis of the cheap airline operation defeats me completely when they can offer flights to heaven knows where for fares as low as a fiver each way. Not everyone knows that it costs us all half a million quid every time our Tornados fire a single missile at Gaddafi.
So, you arrived.
Indeed, but the first stage created its own distinctive brand of anxiety. It’s silly of us to imagine that just because we want it all to work properly, it will all work properly. Although this whole trip involves less than three hours flying, by the time we’ve got into position for various airport security checks, etc. in different places, it actually takes most of an entire day. Rising at 7.30 am (horrifyingly early for me) to find daylight and birds twittering all around to catch a train from Shrewsbury to Birmingham International, we discover that the appointed train has been cancelled. It’s Monday morning and doubtless some driver or other train-related functionary has phoned in sick. The next one arrives on time some 40 minutes later but leaves late. Events of this kind at this point in the long network of interlocking interchanges is far from encouraging. Even so, we arrive in good time at the airport, meeting Mike in the Costa Coffee place.
In fact, as we are able to confirm by the end of the jaunt, all transport connections thereafter work perfectly and on time, right down to the waterbus to take us in to the Grand Canal. Flying KLM we change at Amsterdam-Schipol, which is a massive and pleasing improvement on its condition the last time J and I used it en route to America a good few years ago when it was in hellish process of complete rebuilding and took half a day to walk across. Between Amsterdam and Venice we have magnificent views on the right-hand side of the plane through breaking and eventually clearing cloud way below us of the huge snow-covered Alps, being amazed to realise how extensive they are, stretching lumpily away as far as you can see in all directions. Towards the end there’s also an excellent view of the whole of Venice itself as we approach Marco Polo airport. Neither experience was available on our previous visit due to seasonal cloud cover and approaching darkness.
More transport issues after you’ve landed?
No. This is where you appreciate having done it all before and remembering how it works. Mike is particularly pleased to follow us to do the right things. The only issue is to try and remember the route we need to follow to and from our apartment, something that gradually imprints itself on you as you progressively recognise minor landmarks. Despite Venice being one of the most expensive tourism spots on the surface of the globe, some things are still the same price as they were eighteen months ago, such as the waterbus fares. After arrival around 4.30 pm, the Alilaguna waterbus speeds us to the Rialto for the expected €13 in about three-quarters of an hour, with only about 15 minutes to wait. From Rialto we wend a slightly uncertain route via steps, canal bridges, alleyways, unexpected squares and lanes, many of them formerly extremely small canals, to Residencia Ca’ Riccio, Rio Tera del Biri, in the Cannaregio sestiere, located beside a medium-sized canal not far from Fondamente Nove.
Here we meet Christiano who leads us down further lanes and alleys to the Elena apartment in a separate building, which will be ours for the duration, explaining (or not explaining) as we go the obscure house numbering system in Venice (there may well be a system but hardly anyone knows how it works). “Is crazy, Signior Brown, means nothing. Look, 6437 then next 6591. What it means?” I agree. We have a double bedroom, a single bedroom, each with fully fitted bathroom, and a combined sitting room/kitchen with television, cooker, fridge and all utensils, all for €470 for the three of us for three nights (in central Venice!), no more than 20 minutes’ walk down to the Rialto and Grand Canal, whence everywhere you want to go to is spread out before you.
And your other interest, food on plates and the contents of uncorked bottles?
We have dinners this evening at Ristorante Tre Spiedi (Three Skewers, as in, presumably, kebabs) where we find a very popular and buzzing place with seriously decent food and service in the mid-range. We manage two courses and a bottle of Valpolicella for about €36 each, the capresi quite excellent, J’s pasta dish, Mike’s veal cutlet and my escalope Milanese all thoroughly OK. The younger waiter, taking us for gullible tourists who’ve never looked at a wine list and shuddered, initially tries to steer us towards a fine Valpolicella at €40, which we consider more than slightly Over The Top and resist. Mind you, nothing is particularly cheap in Venice, one of the hottest tourism spots on earth, and having a drink or snack on Piazza S. Marco would be exorbitant – and foolish - in the extreme. A coffee costing €2 at a little corner café elsewhere could be between €10 and 15, probably even more. I manage to break a well filled upper left molar on a piece of crusty bread but fortunately pain is not involved. The patrone delivers a small complimentary glass of grappa as we give our credit cards an airing, making it all well worth recommending to anyone and worth re-visiting on any later Venetian project, provided we could find the place again.
By my calculation, the following day is Tony’s 69th birthday, with the main event in the evening. How did you pass the time?
We awake to a warmish but generally hazy day, sun visible in the usual place but not beating down hard upon us. This is Mike’s first visit to La Serenissima so we walk him down to S. Marco first. We’re in the school holidays so the whole place is infested with large groups of school-children in addition to all the usual coach or cruise partiers being toured around behind their guide holding aloft an umbrella or flag. Movement along these narrow alleys and lanes, many no wider than three people, is made considerably slower by all these mindless gawpers, and brought to a dead stop when a bunch of thirty kids decides to look at some Euro-trash in a souvenir shop window. The sound they make en masse is also an irritant, generating unwelcome echoes of pupils and students in school corridors. At least, you can hear them coming and, if possible, scoot down an alley and let them go past.
Eventually we proceed along the ‘prom’, the wide Riva degli Schiavoni with the lagoon to the right. Everyone in Venice walks along here past the huge white frontage of Chiesa della Pietà (known as the Vivaldi Church where Vivaldi wrote many of his finest works), the Danieli, the Gabrieli and other high-expense accommodation joints until we reach the Arsenale. Petrarch and his daughter lived along here during the 14th century and Henry James apparently lodged at No. 4161 while trying to finish Portrait of a Lady. In its day, the grand Danieli has provided beds for such as Dickens, Proust, Wagner, Balzac and Ruskin. It’s no longer the most expensive in Venice, overtaken by the Cipriani in that respect, but you could still pay as much as €1,500 per night for one of their best rooms. We slip round the Pietà and up one or two very narrow lanes to recce the Da Remigio, tomorrow evening’s intended eatery. It looks promising, said to be very popular with locals, though in the event they are unable to take eleven people at short notice.
Reaching the Arsenale you immediately find that you’ve left the most concentrated tourist route and have space to yourselves with just an ordinary number of folk wandering along. It’s time for a lunchtime beer or two and a snack (Mike devours a large pizza, believing Italy to be the country where you should eat one) which we have comfortably outside in the cafe next door to the Pinguin ice cream shop, with Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore opposite us across the water. More walkabout beyond S. Marco this afternoon, eventually returning to the flat for eye-closing before this evening’s excitements.
Trattoria Anticho Carampane is in sestiere San Polo not very far from the lovely hotel Ca’ Favretto where we stayed last time. As so often when looking for a specific location in Venice, you follow the map and although you know you’re only a matter of yards away from your destination, you can’t see where it is. It’s always just round this corner, or perhaps that other one, or perhaps we crossed one small bridge too many or too soon. So you each take a different direction and within thirty seconds one of you has found it. Arriving there first we meet and greet the various other guests as they arrive – Ginny and Richard from Greenwich, John and Judy, Tony’s sister and brother-in-law, Tony and Lizzie themselves and a couple whom we’ve never met before (and, it has to be admitted, we don’t entirely take to). Like many in this small city, it’s a predominantly fish-based menu.
Tony, being Tony, always eats here when in Venice, sometimes more than once in three or four days - just as he always stays at Pensione Accademia, preferably in the same room each time. I have a superb thick asparagus soup with scallops, followed by a mixed fried fish concoction which I don’t hugely enjoy, washed down by a selection of different white wines. We learn that Andy and Bridget who were on the cards cancelled abruptly this morning, having had a monumental row. I’m seated where I can chat to Judy beside me and Richard opposite, then halfway through there’s a seating change providing a different person to talk to. It’s not a riotous event but nevertheless very agreeable with bottles gently circulating, a fine almond-based birthday cake covered in drizzled hot chocolate sauce and plenty of chat, a Do that I guess must set Tony back around €1,000.
Assuming a clear head the next morning, you have another entire day for unalloyed pleasure. What form does this take?
Today is much improved in weather terms. The haze has gone, and sun and blue sky prevail. Mike receives an unexpected text from a cousin in Scotland announcing the death of her sister, leading to Mike texting far and wide to inform his own family contacts. He has already decided to do some leg work on his own today to get the lay of the land in preparation for a more extensive future Venice visit. We want a more structured approach today so we buy our 12-hour season tickets for the vaporetti for €16, from which we most certainly have our money’s worth during the day, still using it for the final trip just before 11 pm after dinner. We make for Accademia first to see the exhibition of photographs “Ernest Hemingway in Venice” at the Arts and Letters Institute, only to find it opens at 2 pm. So waterbus down the Grand Canal to Santa Maria della Salute, arriving there about 1 pm to find it doesn’t open until 3 pm. The Salute contains some Titians and rests on a platform of over 100,000 wooden poles, having taken over 50 years to build, completed in 1681. It’s dedicated to S. Maria for helping to preserve two thirds of the Venetian population during a devastating attack of the plague in 1630-31.
So we nip round the corner to a decent little café for beer and snacks, then leaving the interior of the Salute for the next visit, return to the Hemingway, passing the Vorticists show at the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery. In the Hemingway show we meet Tony and Lizzie also viewing this display set up in room after room of gorgeous historical library, with book-filled shelves reaching from floor to ceiling – and what a ceiling, highly decorated, worthy of many of Venice’s grand churches.. It’s mainly focused on Hemingway’s time here in and around 1954, though a few earlier pictures depict him wounded and recovering after WW1, and one after he’d been wounded by a Masai spear, presumably in East Africa.
If a large building in Venice isn’t a hotel or a Renaissance palazzo, it must be a church. Which ones took your attention this time?
There are so many of them here and most are so overwhelming that three in a day is about enough for many of us, though you can get a season ticket to visit sixteen of them. They generally cost only two or three Euros to get in. The Basilica S. Maria Gloriosa Dei, known as the Frari, contains two massive works by Titian, a wooden statue of St John the Baptist by Donatello and plenty by others, and here we locate Monteverdi’s tomb. The building’s exterior is described as a ‘mountain of brick’, (rather like the cathedral at Albi), with those long, slim medium-red bricks you tend to see everywhere. The interior is simply enormous and despite notices forbidding photography there are people, though not many, who ignore it, even when told off by an official person – clearly members of the F-You society.
More in our quarter of town is the Basilica Dei Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, beside the massive Ospedale with tromp oeuil stuff beside the front doors. J went inside last time we were here and I did this time to find another gigantic interior, with some encouraging organ music being played. Finally, after the necessary walking that gets you between places here, to the much smaller, much less elaborate Miracoli, where there’s a rich magnificence of carved marble. It’s a late 15th century building, intended to house a Madonna statue, which is still there, which was thought to have been responsible for miracles involving the return to life of a man who’d been drowned in the canal for half an hour and a woman stabbed to death.
How did you solve the restaurant issue for the final evening?
Very neatly indeed: Ellis said he’d get it organised and communicate the result to us via mobile phone-based text messages. Sure enough, by lunchtime we and Mike, and the others, all in different parts of the city, had each been informed of the name and detailed location of the selected trattoria. Being a reluctant and only very occasional mobile phone user, this experience impresses me, providing a personal example of the usefulness of the little device. Even so, I have still not used the entire £5 of my first card. Ristorante Raffaela beside a minor canal is easily found and will deal with us all at 7.45 pm. On a really warm evening it would be very pleasant outside as they occupy a long frontage beside the little canal. The menu is less elaborate than last night’s place, but plenty there for all tastes including those, like me, who would now fancy something in the meat line, and I enjoy the whole thing rather more. The first bottle of white wine, ordered by the unknown bloke, is more or less despised by all and we proceed through a few more acceptable ones, until Tony orders a drop of something red, a Valpolicella, specifically instructing the waiter to serve some to Signior Brown, among others, at the other end of the table. It comes to me as a great relief and goes down beautifully. A shot of grappa puts the finishing touch to the whole thing, farewells all round, and the vaporetto delivers all involved back to their respective stops, after a decent evening of dinners and more satisfying conversation.
Any hitches on the return journey?
None. The Alilaguna waterbus to Marco Polo leaves the Rialto at 9.03 am, a relatively comfortable hour, and we arrive for take-off on yet another splendid sunny day. Right through the journey with nothing else to do but think about the past three days, I have painful pangs – I don’t want to leave Venice, I’ve got the hang of it now, this is not enough, I want more days loping around its alleyways, zipping along the Grand Canal from one wonderful place to the next, in and out of its magnificent buildings, seeing its art and its architecture, eating its dinners in friendly restaurants where everyone knows that what matters is the quality of the food and of the service. Stiff with great clumps of tourists it may be, but we now know where to go and what to do to avoid the buggers. The groups will queue to go inside S. Marco, and to climb its campanile, but mostly they don’t go inside many places, largely just looking at the outsides as they float past – and their tour guides keep them on the move. This leaves the interiors of so many splendid buildings free for small numbers of folk like us to go in and have a decent look round without being trampled by a coach party.
KLM do another great job via Schipol and via another marvellous viewing of the snowy Alps without any cloud at all. My conclusion on Venice is that an annual visit there would not be an inconvenience.