I'm almost ready

The garbage has been taken out, long-life milk and frozen food have been laid in against my return, my bags are very nearly packed.

I'm off to Venice (and I don't mean California), call it my summer holiday. Seven whole days in the Pearl of the Adriatic (well, OK, two of them spent mostly on trains) sucking down the Campari Soda and the Dolce Vita in dizzying doses. Oh, and not to forget the cappucino, and the restaurants. Ah, and the beach at the Lido. And the Biennale, of course. Architecture this year, can't be helped.

I love Venice. I've been there almost every year since moving to Europe twenty-seven years ago. At a dinner party recently, a pretentious Parisian poseur proclaimed that one cannot "love" Venice, no no, the city is so terribly touristic and those tourists are such awful people (meaning: not like us). But he was wearing yellow shoes and no socks, so we may safely discount his opinion.

I love the carlessness (not a misprint: car-lessness) and how swiftly it comes to seem normal. Already on the first evening, one has forgotten to look left & right before crossing a street. And the quiet! "Normal" cities are immersed in the noise of car-borne traffic, Venice is so still that even by day you can distinguish individual people by the sound of their footsteps.

Last summer, I had a revelation: Venice is not a city, it is a small town through which a tourist superhighway runs, comparable to the little northern Ontario towns that line the Trans-Canada Highway. In both cases a flood of tourism washes all but its own kind before it: no stores that don't cater to thousands; no restaurants that cannot feed dozens; no merchandise but the lowest and commonest denominator of crud. This tide of trivia follows a narrowly defined route from one tourist attraction to the next ("is that on the list?" "No, it's just a church").

It's just like the highway: you drive from A to C, stopping at B for some greasy food, and tell yourself you've seen it all. In fact, you have seen a self-fulfilling prophecy: the density of the flow of money expels individuality, and trash fills the vacuum. I've never understood why one would travel thousands of miles to shop in a chain-store that can be found in your hometown high street, but clearly many people want nothing else.

However, and fortunately, the tourist stream is as narrowly focussed as the highway. If you walk just twenty metres aside from this cultural gutter, you are alone in a different world. There are doorways where cats sit and wait; there are tiny parks holding one tree and two benches where three children play; there are real stores where people buy actual cook-it-yourself foodstuffs. Did you know that Venice has a university? and therefore a university quarter with good bookshops and cheerful cafés and restaurants where the food is cheap and the conversation lively? True, and only a hundred metres from the Accademia bridge.

I'll be back in a week, until then be good and take care.

[Update: read the comments for a brief description of the Biennale. I'll write in depth about it at another time.]