Venice
Everything is weathered. The buildings are is crooked. Every passageway is slightly askew. The stucco is patchy. The rising and falling tide stained the canals, walls, and stoops. People complain about the smell—which I don’t find to be too abrasive, but I also love New York in the summer so I’m not the best judge.
Venice is honest and imperfect. Which is what I like about it so much.
But Italy has become every American tourist’s Mecca. Central Venice is so commercialized and completely lacks integrity. Hundreds of souvenir shops practically ate the city alive, leaving just enough room for shitty restaurants and artificially flavored gelato.
Every day there is an estimated 60,000 selfie-stick wielding tourists, clumsily bouncing from piazza to piazza ogling at shit they don’t actually know or care about, spending all their euros on overpriced t-shirts and foreign-factory manufactured tablewares. We wonder how they plan their days. Making itineraries with the sole purpose of ‘checking it off.’
Despite all of this, we still fell in love with the city. We found an Airbnb on the outskirts of town. Far from the gondolas path. The only boats that pass through the narrow canals are small, packed with locals or construction supplies or cases of fruit.
The paths are small and empty. There are no souvenir shops nearby. The cafes have warped wooden stools, mostly occupied by old men arguing. The few canal-side restaurants are cozy and unassuming, without English-version menus. Between the hours of 3pm and 6pm the whole neighborhood becomes a ghost town. And we can quietly explore, far from the crowds of day-trippers being ushered on and off their ferries.
