The Slums of Venice

It’s safe to say that in Venice, all roads most assuredly do not lead to Rome, if you know what I mean. The streets and alleyways snake around, fold in on themselves, and end abruptly - either by running into a wall, or by falling off into a canal. There are countless narrow passageways with centuries-old buildings, the pastel-coloured cracked plaster exposing the ancient brick. Houses like that in North America would be condemned (or the exposed brick would be on the inside – how 1993!). In Venice, it’s awe-inspiring. It’s very easy to get lost. Or rather, it’s very difficult to get lost, but very easy to get temporarily misplaced. (Venice is not very big, and there are big yellow signs everywhere on the buildings telling you the big landmarks are, like St. Mark’s or the train station). Nevertheless, I saw countless groups of tourists today, huddled around a map, each member pointing in a different direction. At least 4 people came up to me and asked for directions. (One young lady, reading from her phrase book in apologetic Italian, asked me where the train station was, and I said back to her; “Sola? Perduta? Abbadonata?” She looked puzzled, and I told her in English to follow the signs.)

All this to say that I had about 4 hours to myself this afternoon before I had to be back on the ship for passenger boat drill, so I decided to purposefully get lost. My friend Steven has decided that getting lost is my super power, since I have a tremendously poor sense of direction. But I just wanted to find a Venice that had something other than 3 Euro bottled water or cheesy Pierette masks. Well, a turn down an alley here, a jaunt down a laneway there, and I found myself in what can only be described as the Venetian Projects. There were about 10 of these tacky and poorly built pre-fab complexes with bars on the windows (the first floor anyway), all facing onto this un-maintained court yard. There were graffiti tags from Italian street gangs (is graffiti an Italian word?) – one said “West Side”. (I’ll have to ask my sax player Chris what this represents. You see, in every picture we’ve taken of him, he is either flipping the bird, or is giving the “West Side” symbol – the one where you spread you fingers wide apart, but the middle ones are crossed, forming a “W”). The only thing that distinguished this from run-down neighbourhoods elsewhere in the world was that each of these buildings was built on pylons, and had a parking garage for motorboats. I’m not quite sure why I was so touched by this. It’s almost as if I finally realized that, for me, as much as Venice is Venice, for most Venetians, Venice is merely their home. A city with grocery stores and traffic and street people and schools and nice neighbourhoods and not-so-nice neighbourhoods. Some of the magic was lost, but it made me love it even more.

In ship news, a piece of scenery fell from the rafters about 5 minutes before a rehearsal was supposed to have begun, narrowly missing our beloved assistant stage manager by about 10 seconds. There were countless reasons why people should have been on stage at the time, but luckily, no one was. I have a show on that stage tonight. I’m not nervous.

UPDATE: show went fine, no one died. And I'm up too too late, yet again.