Venice inspires devotion and madness. I should know: I went there for a last-minute holiday four years ago and have ended up buying two properties. What is it about this city? I think there are three faces to Venice, and you can’t always be sure which one you’re seeing.
We all know the first face of Venice, the tourist Venice. The images of the Grand Canal, the gondoliers, the Carnival, are clichés that stare at you from paintings and photographs in a million locations. Not just in travel articles and television shows: a restaurant, an art gallery, an engraving on a pub wall – there the Grand Canal, here the Rialto Bridge. Of course I took these image in my head when I first went to Venice. I was not disappointed; they’re not a confection, but real, gloriously, deliriously beautiful views that crowd the city. Add to them the countless art galleries that depend on the visits of tourists and academics, and you have the tourist paradise, a Disneyland digest of European art history – which, as everyone tells you, is a ghost town and an echo of its former glory.
Except that they’re wrong. Yes, the permanent population of Venice may have declined to just a few tens of thousands. But it’s no ghost town: you cannot fail to notice the vibrant daily life of Venetians as they go about their daily business in the city. This is the face of the real, everyday Venice. Venetians haul heavy kegs of beer over bridges. They walk their dogs along the hard pavements of the fondamenta. They chug along canals carrying loads of bricks, mortar, cement, furniture and flowers. And above all they chatter to each other, on the bridges. In this city without cars, there is every chance of bumping into someone you know when you cross a bridge. So why not stay for a chat? In this second Venice, there is a far more obvious sense of community than in any other world city I have known. And being an island, Venice seems to breed a sense of huddle and bemused detachment, among its true-born inhabitants, as they contemplate the follies of the rest of the world. Their geography and way of life is unique. What is the rest of the world up to?
Against the real, everyday Venice I would suggest there is also a third Venice. I can call it the unreal city. It is the historical echo of the kegs of beer, barges, flood plates and all the outward signs of Venice’s contemporary uniqueness. You could call it tradition, but that suggests something dead. There is nothing dead about the cafes and bars where Venice’s peculiar seafood snacks are the everyday accompaniment to an “ombra”, the tradition of an evening glass of wine that goes back hundreds of years. Or the Burano regatta, where a tiny island with a population of just hundreds manages to put forward tens of people willing to practise for months to take place in a traditional rowing race. My favourite is the fish market: hardly known by tourists, this extraordinary riot, slippery mountains of silver and squid, takes place in the heart of the city, just as it has done for hundreds of years, and the housewives flock to it like the seagulls. Unlike many other cities, Venice has ways of life that are not traditions on life support, but which reach back and show the influences of hundreds of years of history in a unique, watery environment.
And then there are the buildings, which hover between the three Venices. The first time I went to the city, I assumed that if you were to pan the camera just a few degrees to the left from the tourist cliché shot, you’d find the necklace of ugly concrete that has blighted every other beautiful city from Cambridge to Bruges. Not so. Venice is composed of almost nothing but tall, elegant palazzos, strange seaside workmen’s cottages, and nineteenth-century apartment blocks. I have joked that the tourist books should create a walking tour that takes you round the five or six ugly buildings in the city, since they are its special rarity, much more remarkable than any palazzo.
These buildings clearly do much to present the tourist face of Venice. They house the art, they form the backdrop, and many of them are hotels. They are also the everyday real Venice, as the Venetians live in them, busily hammering away, painting, improving … and propping the more rickety ones up. And, especially at night, as their solitary shining lights are reflected in the misty or moonlit canals, the tall, narrow renaissance buildings are definitely the soul of this unreal city, whose past lives cheek by jowl with the present.
If you’re going to Venice, here are my recommendations for places to see the three faces of the city:
Tourist Venice: shy clear of St Mark’s (except on a summer’s evening, when the string quartets are playing), and instead of climbing its Campanile, climb that of San Giorgio Maggiore, looking out across the most famous view in the world from the opposite side of the St Marks basin. If you think a gondola ride sounds a bit too tacky and costly, take a traghetto, working gondolas that take you across the Grand Canal at points distant from bridges, all for the princely sum of 40 cents.
Real, everyday Venice: if you really want to see the nitty-gritty of how everything moves around the city, stand on the Guglie bridge between 08.30 and 09.30 on any weekday morning. You’ll see the commuters striding in, the huddled groups gossiping on the fondamenta di Cannaregio, and the barges will chug busily beneath you carrying everything the city needs to eat, drink and be merry.
For the unreal Venice, with history poking through the veil: the fish market runs from Tuesday to Saturday mornings at the Rialto, just inside San Polo. It’s likely to be winding down at 12 noon, at its peak between 9 and 10.30. Take an ombra (glass of wine) at the Cantine del Vino Shiavi at 992 Fondamenta Priuli, Dorsoduro, where the glorious, slow-moving days of la Serenissima (the Most Serene City) are still visible in this atmospheric cavern of fine wines and wonderful appetizers. The Burano regatta takes place on the third Sunday of every September and is a much more low-key affair than the Regatta Storica of the main city. Watch the young Buranese teenagers fooling around in their motorboats to impress the girls … For moonlit walks, try the calmness of Fondamenta della Sensa in Cannaregio, as you make your way to the lesser-known church of Madonna dell’Orto.
Jonathan’s two homes in Venice are available for holiday rental: see www.visitvenice.co.uk