Venice First Impressions of the “mud”

At last I’ve found somewhere to stay. It’ s very cheap but, as usual, there’s a reason – or rather many reasons, for its cheapness, which would be too boring to describe here. There’s an enormous treble bed in the main bedroom and the biggest claw foot wardrobe I have ever seen. It is over eight foot high and must have been built in the room, it is so large. The ceilings are over ten feet high so it still fits in the room quite comfortably.

The second bedroom has two beds in it with some traditional painted furniture, The living room has a large SKY television set-up and comfortable furniture. There is also a large dining room with quite solemn furniture and paintings but I don’t think I will be using that. The kitchen has a gas range and a large fridge but the bathroom is well provided with old stuff that seems to work well. The washing machine is a really amazing relic. It is like a modern front loader but you load it from the top!! I do eight empty runs with it but brown bits still emerge on the ninth run. Something is disintegrating or the last people who rented this place were very messy people.

It has nine large and tall windows which look out on to a wide (for Venice anyway!) lane so that the apartment is very light (again for Venice as most houses are in very narrow alleys). There are no curtains but there are exterior shutters which function very well.

My first view as I look out of my windows is a group of workmen lifting the large paving stones which form the walkways through Venice. To my amazement, I see that these paths have no foundations. They do not even have sand under them. What I see, when they have lifted them, is that dark estuary mud which apparently seem like Mars bars to many birds. It’s a reminder that Venice is merely a collection of estuary islands with a causeway leading to the main island. We’re actually out in the sea.

I’ve always had an affinity with the sea. Although I was born in London, I spent much of my time on the East Coast of England at Walton on the Naze, Essex where my mother’s side of the family worked in various professions connected with the sea. My favourite author as a kid was Arthur Ransome and I was delighted to find out that my grandfather looked after his boat which lay during the summer in the backwaters but, during the Winter, was often in his yard.

My grandfather was also coxswain of the Walton lifeboat. We would hear the wind force increase some days; then the ‘phone would ring, my grandfather would hurry up the hill, the maroon would go off and we would all go down to the seafront to see the crew catch a small train to the end of the pier then perilously row out to the lifeboat moored off the end. Once on board, I would see my Uncle Frank – how he stayed upright I did not know – as bowman handling the anchor, then off they would go, bobbing like a cork on the huge waves of the North Sea. They were a brave lot and saved many lives whilst putting their own lives at risk but, of course, using their amazing resources of seamanship.

I went to a fairly awful school on top of the cliffs of Dover and would sit through boring lessons looking across the straits to the clock tower of Calais. (Apparently they could also see our school clock tower, which was about the same height!) But, in the vacations, I would prefer to be down at Walton , where I would go fishing with Frank who eventually took over from his father as lifeboat coxswain, winning many awards for great rescues which he commanded. My favourite days were when we went way out to some banks in the North Sea where we used baited hoops to pull in huge lobsters. “We’re the only people in the world to use this type of fishing, Keith”, he used to say. I once pulled up the biggest lobster I have ever seen covered with barnacles. It looked so tough that I wanted to throw it back but Frank said, ” We’ll keep that one until my agent says there’s a big event coming up in the city. It’ll be the centrepiece of a banquet!” We’d sometimes transport groups over to Harwich or Felixstowe and I actually got us to a number of buoys mentioned in Ransome;s book, “We didn’t mean to go to sea”. I’ve always meant to hire a boat on the Norfolk Broads, Ransome territory, but never got round to it.

But I vaguely remember the struggles I had starting the Lister diesel before motoring out through the backwaters to the sea. If the tide was out, we’d see miles of that dark estuary mud.

After that I have always lived near or actually on the sea or an estuary. I shared a house actually on the Menai Straits in Wales. Then I lived in Cardiff and often spent weekends on the Gower Peninsula. Then we had a Herreshoff sloop on the Bay in Melbourne which I actually sailed through a Bass Strait force ten on the way to Queensland. After that we lived in a house in Topsham, where we actually had a mooring at the bottom of the garden. Rayleigh and Drake used to drink in the strange pub round the corner here and the Queen, in one of her ‘meet the people’ moments, actually met some of her subjects in this pub (but declined to execute any of them!!). Princess Di had her affair opposite our house on the other side of the river in the Hewitt’s house. Much of the fleet which defeated the Armada sailed from Topsham. The local school houses are named after names of parts of the fleet. It was a historic place.

Then finally we bought a house in Noosa Heads, Queensland on an island with a causeway leading to it. We even had our own little beach. The water was warm all the year round. Richard Branson has actually bought Makepeace Island up the river all for himself but the council will not allow him to build a bridge or much else for that matter!

So here I am watching workmen taking up the giant stones which form the walkways of Venice. These huge stones sit directly on that same sort of mud that I remember from Walton!!! There is no hard core or even a layer of sand underneath!! It makes me wonder if these buildings had any foundations. (In Topsham, the houses this age were built without foundations directly on the estuary mud on the East side of the river Exe.) This probably explains why my bedroom in the apartment is on two levels, the front part about two inches lower than the back part. Venice is sinking, we are told. From what I have observed, I’m surprised it didn’t sink into the mud and disappear centuries ago!!

In Venice, fish comes from the Adriatic, a relatively unpolluted part of the Med, whilst excellent vegetables come from the land further up the estuary.

But I love the idea of a city that has survived using only water craft for the transportation of everything. Those bridges over the canals may look beautiful but you cannot carry supplies to supermarkets or hotels using that route. Everything comes and goes by water. Venetians ask me, “How can you stand the noise in Firenze?” and I tell them how normal cars are banned and there are free charge points for electric cars. And they are building tram tracks.

But an even greater benefit is the energy use of water transport. A boat travelling at hull speed uses a tiny amount of power. Most transport in Venice does not travel much faster than hull speed judging by the small bow waves they produce and, of course, a gondolier who does not take his craft past hull speed will have an easy time.

All the bridges in Venice were built to allow headroom for gondoliers. This is great for the gondoliers but it means that pedestrians are forever going up and down steps. The four city bridges over the Grand Canal are particularly hard work as they go much higher. So a short walk around Venice could be similar in energy use as climbing a small hill.

One interesting point about modern Venice is that they have retained some of the old Italian for the names of streets and other features. For example, the lane outside my apartment is called “Strada Nova” instead of the modern Italian “Strada Nuova”. The tunnel to my apartment door is called “Sotoportego Vendramin” instead of the modern “Sotto …”.

But the internet shop people tell me that Venice still suffers from the same weakness as the rest of Italy including Florence. They have awful internet in the old houses because of the incredibly thick walls!!! I remember the crazy situation with internet in Florence where the WIND shop could not actually receive a WIND signal! So my very first hunt is for a WIND shop, the only place where I can buy wireless internet by the Gbyte download, a month at a time. I’ve already visited two WIND shops when I come across a real WIND shop in the backstreet looking rather like a Radioshack. These are the people I prefer to deal with. They give me the usual apology for how awful Italian internet services are then I buy their bargain of the month which gives you so much free stuff that it completely cancels out what you are paying in the first instance but only in the first instance!

I have a ‘bargain’ amount of free credit but to charge the SIM card up with more, I must go to a tobacco shop after six o’clock this evening. At six o’clock, I go to my local tabac and, just like last year in Florence, they can only charge certain amounts and that doesn’t included my amount. I return to my friendly WIND people and they tell me to go to the LOTTO shop which also sells tobacco products. Sure enough, I manage to get the LOTTO person to charge me up with the correct amount.

The LOTTO man also helps me to find a way to a SKY shop deep in the lanes. The large flat screen television in my apartment only has a SKY receiver and I am wandering what else it can do. After wandering for some time, I come across a very large shop in the middle of a labyrinth of narrow lanes. I am greeted by two lovely people who firstly help me find the free digital channels on the Italian SKY schedule then suggest that I come back the following day and they might do something about the rest. I am charmed by the way they help me out knowing that I will not be giving them any business.

But even more important than internet is food!! I am SO pleased than BILLA has arrived in Venice. They have brought the price of cheese down to not much more than the Florence price. And all the locals are responding to their prices. I manage to squeeze my way into their large store and collect almost all the items I need for a happy life in my apartment. BILLA seems almost as popular with the Venetians as TESCO is with the people of Prague – or, I must add .. as ALDI is with the people of Australia and England!!

The two centres of music are traditionally St Mark’s and La Feniche. On Sunday mornings, I make my way hopefully to St Marks and arrive just as the service is beginning. I hear some music at the beginning of the service which usually sounds like Giovanni Gabrieli. The Credo is plainsong but sung very well, thank goodness. In Vienna, they had a separate Duomo choir for the plainchant which I did not like at all. Some of the service is what I refer to as “call and response”. We sing the response a number of times then answer the psalm verses with this response.

But the rest of the service is sung by the choir. Besides some Gabrielis, I usually recognise a Monteverdi motet and other pieces by recognisable composers. I couldn’t find a service list of music anywhere so I’m not certain of the composers. The acoustics of St Mark’s are ideal for the Venetian music around 1600. There are antiphonal organs and choir lofts but I have yet to investigate them. Instead of an organ piece at the end of the service, the choir sings another long motet. It is very strange to emerge from a church which has been making music for hundreds of years into a square full of people taking photos of each other.

Obviously my next port of call is La Fenice, one of the most important opera houses in the early history of opera. Unfortunately, it recently burned down and the crazy Venetians rebuilt it exactly as it was before! This means the house is in the form of a horseshoe with the ends of the horseshoe curving right in to the proscenium. Half the people in the boxes, balconies and galleries are actually facing away from the stage!! I buy a ticket for this week’s opera which is Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ in the secure knowledge that I will be lucky to see any of the production.

As I leave, the manager of La Fenice comes out into the square and tells everybody that the opera is about to start. How nice is that!! Although they are doing a Bruno Maderna piece in tandem with ‘Dido’, La Fenice seems to be on an English bent this month. After ‘Don Giovanni’ next week, (Can I bear yet another one?) Jeffrey Tate, whom I missed in Florence last year, is conducting Britten’s ‘Turn of the Screw’ and even Britten’s ‘Little Sweep’ which I saw years ago in a children’s performance. But La Fenice also does orchestral concerts which seem more interesting. For example, “dishevelled” is doing Mahler’s Ninth in a few weeks time. I hope he has found his penguin suit by then.

In Florence there are wall to wall tourists from the Duomo all the way across the Ponte Vecchio to the Pitti Palace. Here they stretch along lanes especially between the Rialto and St Mark’s. There is also a ‘tourist route’ which they follow and I also follow when I get lost!!! Off these paths and you have only locals and lost tourists!!

The price of an al banco espresso is one euro in Venice. Last year in Florence, it was 90 cents. Ah well, that’s life!!