December in Venice

“Cambridge, Massachusetts?” - curiously enquired American fellow. I was not prepared for this at all. It took me years to figure out how to answer loaded “Where are you from?” for people to lose interest immediately and to avoid further interrogation. Answer “From Cambridge” worked until now perfectly.

“No”, - I stumbled, - “normal, I mean, original, Cambridge UK.”

We are in Venice, in the middle of Jewish Ghetto, waiting for the start of a walking tour. Besides us there is a shivering American couple, who are dressed for mild Italian autumn. It is December and there is nothing mild about it.

“Venice lies”, - my thoughts towards them. - “you expect one thing, but it does not quite align with what you find. Smoke and mirrors, quite a lot of smoke.”

There are layers in understanding Venice. Hordes of mindless tourists are forming one of them. They create distraction, take your focus away. Thankfully, December is when there are less of them. However, tacky Rialto bridge still bears resemblance to a postapocalyptic zombie invasion.

Cute museums, pretty facades, canals, and overall quirkiness form another layer. You do not have time to think, you only have time to admire.

Route finding is the next layer. It is a full time job to navigate in Venice. Constant calculation: what would be faster, river bus or walking, does this bridge lead to a dead end, shall we take a gondola? It is snowing, so no, thank you very much.

Before Ghetto we had a general walking tour. It was not meant to remove layers, but it started to show me some inconsistencies. Venice did not just appear. It was thought through, designed, architectured and engineered. It took creative guts to build something as bonkers as Venice. Bonkers, I mean absolutely unhinged, batshit crazy. The complexity of such a challenge cannot be underestimated. Water supply solution, metal bars holding houses together, transport. Everything worked for more than a thousand years, you only can quietly respect it.

Looking at a statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, a brutal leader, who put his three testicles on a flag, realisation that Venice is not as cute and pretty as it tries to present itself just deepens.

Venetian Bridge of Sighs has nothing in common with one in Cambridge. Well, it is a bridge, but context, architecture, esthetics, you name it, are all very different.

“Lord Byron was full of crap too, wasn’t he?” - obvious conclusion comes to mind, - “but we already knew it.”

“You know, they used to construct three ships a day in Arsenale.” - guide announces a piece of trivia.

“These obviously were not powered by enthusiastic members of local rowing clubs,” - I started to connect dots.

Venetian traders were dominating seas in the middle ages. Their main cargo was primarily slaves from the East. The decline of Venetian republic was predetermined when Spain and Portugal found alternative sources of slaves from the discovered Americas. Subsequent discovery of quinine opened up Africa: other countries were better positioned to take advantage of. The rise of the Russian empire cut out Eastern routes of slaves. Then came Napoleon and concluded the inevitable. After all that Venice had to rediscover itself as a tourist destination, but you cannot sell slavetrading past, you need to look nice for people to come.

“Venice is trying to be like Florence with all these museums of elegant art, glass, Vivaldi, but it's really just a make up to cover its brutal past. Those tour guides make Fall of the Republic sound like it was a loss, as if Napoleon did something evil, slavetrade never mentioned once.

Paul Jonhson in his book “ History of the Jews” argued that the Ghetto was another stone in the wall of European anti-Semitism. That does not really align with my newly found understanding of Venice. If leaders of Venice would not like Jews to be in Venice, one word and Venice would be without Jews. Instead Jews were given the whole neighbourhood when they asked for it, luxury other ethnic groups could only dream of. I do not argue that there was no anti-Semitism in Venice, Jews must have felt threatened to ask for a closed district, but my argument is that there was no malice from pragmatic authorities. I have got a feeling that Doge and co treated Jews as business partners. Maybe with the same respect and contempt Microsoft treats their business partners these days: “We will take over your business one day, when we figure out how, but until then we are partners”.

We were walking away from the centre heading East, away from St Marco square, away from schools of tourists and junk shops. We passed the sleepy Biennale and reached residential areas. People became scarce. Something in the architecture of houses, cosy and clean parks and yards reminded me of something from childhood, summers I spent in Ukraine. We walked a bit more until we reached the beginning of St Elena island and could see the whole southern side of Venetian fish. The descending sun finally made an effort and lightened it all for us.

“This is really romantic” - said Loreta.

We looked back, this was the spot to admire Venice from and that was a feeling I expected from Venice in the first place, but it did not come naturally. It feels different when you pierce the history of a place and know what you are dealing with.

“It’s beautiful here”, - I agree, but only conditionally, - “when the sun comes out.”