24 HOURS IaN VENICE
View of Venice from the Garage
I drove into Venice with the top down on the MINI Roadster and realized that the GPS instructions would have me driving over pedestrian bridges the whole way to my hotel. I finally found the massive parking garage near the train station on the northwest side of the watery city. I got a 24 hour parking space, so I had until the next afternoon at 6pm to explore, party, get lost, imbibe, satiate, get lost, dance, get lost, sleep briefly, wander around, get lost, explore San Marco, get lost, and then get outta dodge.
After packing a small backpack for an overnight I headed through the maze of buses and into a small park that led to my first tiny
Endless Lens Fodder
venetian bridge. After a quick spin, and a disorienting one at that, I headed to what I thought was the location of the AirBnB place I had tried to make a reservation at. After ten minutes of walking, and stopping endlessly to take photos, I came to a little back alley motel. Some friendly brits let me in the locked door with the warning, “Don’t let them know we let you in, we’re not supposed to let anyone in!” And apparently they really should not have let me in. There were keys left out for an arrival that wasn’t me. After calling the number on the door I found out that I was in the wrong place, that the AirBnB that was listed had the wrong address. But there was a key for me…
San Giacomo del Orio
I walked off and looked up some other places. I decided to head to a section of town that my friend Peter Ginsberg had mentioned as his favorite area, the San Giacomo del Orio, and search for a place nearby. It was getting late, almost 8pm (although it was still quite light out, it was getting dark about 9pm) and I still didn’t have a place. I needed a rest so I plopped down on a park bench and decided to watch the Venetians as they went about their day. I had a hotel bottle of brandy in my bag and decided to sip on it as the rays hit the church behind me and kids scampered and played with each other and a friendly neighborhood dog. Venezia is amazing. And it would only get better.
Well, it took a while to actually find a place that had room for the night, and only 1 night, but the desk clerk of the hotel said the name of the street so I heard ‘Domina Cadusta’ and couldn’t find it on any map. After two hours of searching, and repeatedly calling him back, I found myself at an Arts College after having just followed the sound of live music blindly after giving up on his directions. It was a lovely little courtyard with a bunch of Italian art hipsters listening to what sounded like an American guy squeezing a cat, or singing like Bob Dylan, and playing a piano. I had an Aperol and Soda and sat down to listen for a while. It looked like it was shaping up to be a good party, I vowed to come back after I found my hotel. I asked a student who asked his friend that was from Venice and all he did was shake his head, ‘Nope, I’ve never heard of Cadusto.’
The University of Arts where the student concert was held.
I had made a reservation at Cafe Zucca, another recommendation by Peter, that turned out to be a foodie favorite. It was 9pm, I still hadn’t found my hotel, and I was just hungry at exhausted at this point. I ordered the Tagliatelle with a light tomato sauce and fresh ricotta. I mean, really fresh. It melted into the pasta and into me and I was rejuvenated. Back on the hunt, I searched for local hotels and found it! Hotel Ca Zusto! Only a few blocks away. Yea! Now that’s how you do 24 HOURS IaN; without planning ahead properly!
The hotel was really kindof cool; the interior paint job was interesting and the room was enough, if a bit small. As much as I wanted to head back out to the student party I realized I needed to get up early to see as much of the city as possible, and I was exhausted from driving all day from Bologna. So I passed out.
I awoke early and, after checking some emails, headed out to get lost in Venice once again. After a couple of wrong, or right, depending on how you look at it, turns I made my way to the grand canal and jumped on the first transit barge going towards San Marco. I’d always heard the smelly horror stories of the funky miasma that emanates from the canals but I found the canals to be surprisingly fresh and free of malodors. The captain of the subway of the seas didn’t have a deft hand as he plowed into the stations and gunned the engines back out of them, all the while skirting the edges of the bridges that we passed below. As we neared the Piazza San Marco I decided to jump ship after eyeing the Peggy Guggenheim Museum from the canal. But first I walked to the edge of the southern side of the Grand Canal and feasted my eyes on chapels, steeples, churches, and towers that mark the famous trading city.
View of the front of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum from the Grand Canal
I wandered back through the alleys of the glassworks that surround Peggy’s place and listened, or eavesdropped more accurately, as a tour guide gave a bit of the history of the ‘unfinished palace’ of Peggy and her consorting with artists over the years, including her husband Max Ernst, as well as Marcel Duchamp, who taught her, ‘the difference between Abstract and Surrealist art.’
After sauntering through the nicely appointed home; The Poet by Pablo Picasso here, Pollock’s Alchemy there, I felt somehow compelled to retire to the garden and recite One Art by Elizabeth Bishop near Peggy’s modest grave. A friendly Italian student graciously agreed to film my little homage below.
Some Italians really seemed to respond to the poem and wanted to know who it was written by. I obliged and, suddenly quite hungry, headed for another nearby restaurant recommended by my Biennale frequenting friend Peter, Restaurante Alle Testiere. A white wine with some veal alla milanesa and a little letter writing before I headed back to my hotel to retrieve my belongings. A few wrong turns later I ended up in a leather shop and decided I really needed another notebook, along with a wax seal with the letter Q in order to make sure my correspondence would reach its intended recepient without being spied upon. Quite a few Euros later I made it to my hotel to find the culprit of the Cadusto/Ca Zusto debacle at the front desk. We had a bit of a laugh about it, even though I was still smarting from the ordeal. At least I had been able to see some other neighborhoods I would have missed without being so lost.
I grabbed my daybag, headed left then right out of the hotel, instantly lost once again, and followed the sun to the main train station where my MINI Chariot awaited. I went to the roof of the car garage, surveyed the wide expanse of the city of Venice that I had been mostly lost in, and vowed to come back for at least a month in order to learn my way around the city sans map. I gunned the motor and drove back over the causeway as the sun tried to set in the distance and dark thunderclouds rolled in to swamp the city in my wake.
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- View of the front of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum from the Grand Canal
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- View from the Garage
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- Endless Lens Fodder
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- The University of Arts where the student concert was held.
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- San Giacomo del Orio
Ian Q. Rowan 