Venice Limits Cruise Ships
I love Venice and so did my late wife, C. We must have gone about five or six times and it was no surprise, that the first place abroad I visited after her death, was Venice, to see if I could holiday alone. This post contains a lot of how I feel about Venice.
So Venice to me is special and I’ll probably go again this winter. The winter to me is the best time to visit, as there are less tourists and day-trippers gumming up the city. I always stay in the same hotel close to St. Mark’s Square and even next week, prices are high. So I suspect that even in the winter now, it’s getting lots of visitors.
So to see that the city is to limit the number of cruise ships that visit, as reported on the BBC, is to me a very good thing.
Looking at prices and knowing the city as I do, I would recommend that if you want to visit Venice, you book the best hotel you can afford close to St. Mark’s Square, fly into the Marco Polo airport and then take the ferry to the centre. It looks like nights at the beginning of the week are best and as Venice is a city which is on the go all the time, Monday to Wednesday, aren’t the disasters some cities are. But go out of the city the back way, using the train to a contrasting city like Milan, Bologna or Verona and fly back from there. Remember, every sizeable city in Italy is worth visiting and there are very few, where you can’t enjoy yourself sightseeing, eating and drinking for a couple of days.
We must find better ways of visiting Venice, otherwise the city that I love, will be ruined by tourism.
Florence Is Being Destroyed By Tourists
Not my words, but those of Ottaviano de Medici, a direct descendant of the Medicis, who created Italy’s jewel. He is quoted in this article from the Sydney Morning Herald. Here’s the first paragraph.
A descendant of Florence’s famous Medici family said on Tuesday that mass tourism was a “threat” to his native city and called for it to be put on a UNESCO list of endangered areas.
I must admit, I get a bit fed up with tourists, especially in London. It’s one of the reasons, I’m a member of many of the arts institutions in London, as it means I can bypass queues and crowds, and get invited to special events like this one at the British Museum.
So if I go to Florence or Venice, I always go in the winter, as the threat of cold and wet weather keeps most tourists away. It was one of the great charms of my visit to Genoa recently, that the city was almost empty.
Tourists may be a curse, but they do bring in money and create employment. We need to find a balance as to how we charge them for their disruption.
Not In Venice
Pierre Cardin is really trying to upset everybody with this design for a building near Venice. The Mail cals it a fashion faux-pas.
And we worry about wind turbines!
Every Picture Tells a Story
I mentioned in the post on house-husbands that I have various skills and strangely one of them is dressmaking. Or it used to be, as I haven’t made anything in years.
But look at this picture of Celia, who in this blog I usually refer to as C, taken at a New Year’s Party in Venice probably in 2002 or 2003.
C at New Year in Venice
It looks like a strapless evening dress or a full skirt with a strapless top. It is neither.
The skirt was luxurious and there was an equally luxurious top to go with it. But when C bought the skirt from Beatrice von Tresckow, the top in her size was sold out, so they said they’d make one for her. Something went wrong and it didn’t fit.
So there we were in a five star hotel in Venice, an hour before the dinner and one of us had nothing to wear! And it wasn’t one of those parties, where she could have gone topless. I hasten to add that she never did outside of the confines of our bedroom.
Depending on where I tell this story, there are various versions. In some she’s in tears and in others she wants to go home, but the truth is probably that although she was upset, she trusted me to have an idea that would work. Her versions of the story used to have a lot of emotional actions, as aren’t most barristers frustrated actors?
She thought I was joking when I asked her for some safety pins. I found two in the dinner suit I was wearing and one in a good pair of trousers. All had been used to attach dry cleaning tickets and after that day, she never ever removed one. But she still referred to it as one of my lazy habits.
I then told her to remove the strapless bra she was wearing and replace it with a basque I knew she’d brought with her to wear under another dress, that was a bit tight and needed a bit of an extra squeeze to get into. She’d also brought it because it was New Year and she knew the extra layer added warmth. She also took the opportunity to change from tights to some stockings as a reward to me, which she said she’d remove, if I couldn’t make her respectable.
I then took the shawl that she had brought to wear with the top and skirt and wound it round her securing it with the safety pins. The hotel was warm, so the lack of a shawl wasn’t a problem.
The result is shown in the picture, which was actually taken after the dancing. So it held together without any problems.
I hasten to add, that wrapping the shawl round wasn’t my original idea, but was borrowed from a very old 1950s, TV Series, called Dick and the Duchess. In one episode, Hazel Court, who played the Duchess, got into a scrape as she often did, lost her clothes and ends up in a boiler suit. She then takes a taxi to her couturier, who was played by a very camp, Michael Medwin. To preserve her decency, he wraps her in expensive silk, tucks it all in and sends her home. He orders the boiler suit to be burnt. I never saw the errant top again.
If there is a moral to this story it is to never travel without safety pins! And steal ideas from out of context and old television shows.
Venice in the Snow
I’ve just looked at some of my Venice pictures from last year.
It was in early March, slightly earlier than now, and although it was cold, the sun was out and it was perhaps ten degrees or so.
But now on the news, Venice has been pictured in the snow. I can’t find any pictures on something like the BBC or the Times, but here’s a blog post from the 3rd March.
Venice looks really surreal in the snow. But then it looks surreal in good weather too! And the rain! I guess it just looks good at all times.
You can understand, why it was my late wife’s favourite city. And mine too!
Venice
After Milan I travelled on to Venice.
I’ve been to Venice many times, including once at New Year and another time to give a software demonstration at Verona. The latter ended in my giving someone a tour of Venice in the dark. As he had left before first light in the morning, I suspect he’s one of the few people to have seen the city, but not in the light.
Venice to me though was the starting point of my life after the death of my late wife. Not this trip, as this was the second since she died.
This is what I wrote in March 2008 under the title, Friends in Funny Places.
It was probably in about 1975 and I’d perhaps had a bit too much to drink and I was getting a bit Bolshi. I couldn’t have been that bad though, as I remembered the tale and especially the bit about a lady from that city who called herself a Baltimoron. Her words not mine. This American was going on about how they had won the Second World War and if there’s anything that gets my goat it’s that. I can be a bit of a patriot, but I’m much more of a seeker after the truth. We didn’t win it alone, but the war was won on a collective effort, where a large number of countries, races and creeds all played their part.
My premise was that the war was effectively won by the Battle of Britain.
Does anybody other than me remember the French documentary on that battle, made perhaps for the 25th anniversary in 1965, where the French said we were selfish to call it the Battle of Britain? They believed it should have been called the Battle of Europe, as if the RAF and their ragbag collection of gallant aerial knights had lost, then everything would have been over for the continent.
So by winning the Battle of Britain, we held the line long enough for Hitler to make his fatal mistake of attacking Russia and for the Japanese to bring America into the war at Pearl Harbor.
My father, who had been some sort of advisor to Lord Beaverbrook in the War, had also told me that if we’d lost then the Americans would have washed their hands of Britain.
But in that bar in Baltimore, it was a forlorn argument against four or five Americans and I wasn’t doing well, although I can usually keep my end up in that sort of contest.
And then there was the dramatic intervention, by an elderly man at the end of the bar!
He looked very much like Colonel Sanders, with the certain sort of bearing that senior officers in the armed services often have. (They also clean their shoes better, than us riff-raff!) He introduced himself as a man, who had worked with Franklin Roosevelt before and in the early years of the Second World War.
He just said that the Englishman is right and wished us all a good night.
I slept well and from that day on a lonely trip turned into a very happy one.
Now that night in Venice, I was cold, but thankfully not wet, and missing my late wife terribly as I walked the streets. I was however looking forward to dinner in a fish restaurant by the Rialto Bridge.
The Ostaria Antico Dolo was small with perhaps ten tables and lots of pictures of the owner, his father and grandfather on the walls. You know the type of restaurant.
As I sat down to drink a complimentary glass of prosecco, the familiar tones of John Lennon’s harmonica quietly filled the room. It was Love Me Do. I thought for a moment, perhaps shed a small tear and then smiled. One by one the tunes came through in droves; She Loves You, Eleanor Rigby, I Want To Hold Your Hand…
They knew I was a celiachia and I had carpaccio of Saint Pietro followed by some exquisite tuna. The waitress asked if I was OK with the music after I had told her the story seeing the Beatles in 1964 at Hammersmith, meeting my wife in Liverpool in 1968 and her death a few months ago. I said yes and more songs followed.
Included was We Can Work It Out and it may sound trite, but I must.
Perhaps about ten, I’d finished the meal and was expecting to go, but somehow I got invited by the waitress and her friends from University to talk and share a few drinks.
I shall always be grateful to those four students, as we talked through the problems of the world and tried to put things to rights. I’m too old to have much effect now, but they just might.
Just like I smile when I think of Baltimore, I shall now always remember those students in that restaurant in Venice.
Venice will always be where I go, when I am in trouble.
Venice is a World Heritage Site.
The Anonymous Widower 