A big day walking round Venice

Today was a great day, a huge day, a record-breaking day (ok so that all sounds rather Trumpian), but let me say this clearly: Venice was absolutely stunning.

It’s an interesting one… I have fond memories of visiting the city as a child and loving it, but for years all I’ve really heard about Venice is that it’s been destroyed by tourism, that it stinks, that the local council have been trying to do what they can to dissuade people from visiting, that it’s all one big rip-off, yada yada…

And yet our experience of spending more than ten hours almost continuously walking around was not quite so doom-and-gloom. Yes, there were lots of tourists, and yes, a lot of shops selling generic tourist tat, and worse, shops selling imported Chinese glass figurines as if it were Murano glass… BUT, alongside all that there was still clearly a real Venice, local people going about their day-to-day business, real artisans selling their art and craft, and proper bars, restaurants and bacari purveying good food and drinks at completely reasonable prices. In short: it absolutely did not feel like tourism had ruined the city.

It was really noticeable how you could turn off one tourist-ridden road (well, ‘bit’, really, since there aren’t really roads, per sé), walk down an alley, and emerge into a square or place inhabited only by locals, where those tell-tale signs of tourist fodder were suddenly no longer present. We were lucky to have a list of recommendations of places to eat from my old friend Milena, that included several bacari, Venice’s own version of an enoteca, selling ‘cicchetti’ (equivalent to pinchos). We stopped at one and were served delicious freshly prepared vegetables, potatoes and fish perfectly paired with a couple of glasses of white wine.

While of course there was a smattering of stereotypical Venice things: buskers playing “My Way” on an accordion, gondoliers happily singing away to their passengers at an eye-watering hourly rate, and shops selling over-priced arancini, there was also plenty of un-pretentious, un-coated, daily life just going on, which it was possible to dip into. We sat at one fairly quiet café in the morning and enjoyed macchiatoni (basically flat whites) for four Euros a pop. Later in the day I spotted a very nice, very non-touristy looking bar and suggested getting some more coffees ‘al banco’ (at the bar), and paid only one Euro each for delicious macchiatos and service with a smile… in central Venice. I was pleasantly surprised, Josie was blown away! (It was her first time engaging in that typical Italian activity of the quick caffeine hit stood at the bar). We also had two delicious slices of pizza ‘al trancio’, one for three Euros, the next even less, and that too felt like the exact opposite of what we had come to expect: that absolutely everything would be a rip-off.

Anyhow, in conclusion, we both thoroughly enjoyed Venice, and I was very happy to find a city still very much alive, thriving in fact, fed as it always has been by the tourist trade but not (yet, at least) ruined by it.