Giudecca

Other considerations apart, they dared not risk the expense of a journey across the Atlantic.

So they were heading instead for the Nelson Vanderlands palace on the Giudecca.

They were agreed that, for reasons of expediency, it might be wise to return to New York for the coming winter.

It would keep them in view, and probably lead to fresh opportunities.

For some reason, my mind went back to Venice, where I had worked that first summer after I left home as a cleaner in a small three-star hotel.

The place was in Giudecca, across the water from the historic center of Venice.

I didn't speak the language.

I didn't speak any language except my own.

...

Giudecca in Venice.

Let me out.

Uh, all right.

I walk past the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, thinking I should come back to see the surrealist paintings properly on another day.

Today, I'm drawn to the Zattera, that long promenade facing the Giudecca Canal.

There's a breeze here that you don't get in the cramped interior streets.

I find a spot on a bench with my feet up on the low stone wall, looking across the water to the Island of Giudecca.

The sun is starting to soften, the light turning a misty gold.

The Accademia Bridge looks elegant in the distance.

After dinner, I walked to the Zattere, the long promenade on the southern edge of Dorsoduro, and I watched the sun go down over the lagoon, the water turning the color of apricots and then the sky going all pink and violet.

And the lights starting to come on along the Giudecca.

It's a moment I'd been dreaming about without knowing I'd been dreaming about it, and there I was living it.

The air was still warm, 22 degrees or so, and there was a breeze off the water, and I thought, dolce far niente, the sweet doing of nothing.

I wanna learn enough Venetian to say good morning to the man at the bakery.

I want, in other words, to live here.

But tonight, I am just sitting on a bench on the Zattere, watching the lights of the Giudecca come on, and I am happy.

I'm thinking about what it means to arrive somewhere new and to have it live up to the dream and then to have it be more, too, because the dream is always a bit flat, and the city is round and full and impossible.

[gentle music] Poveglia has been inhabited on and off since at least the fifth century, first as a small fishing and farming community, later as a military checkpoint guarding the entrance to Venice.

In 1379, during a war with Genoa, the island's residents were evacuated to Giudecca and Poveglia sat largely empty for centuries afterward.

[bell ringing] [water splashing] Its real purpose came later, and it's grim.

Venice sat at the center of Mediterranean trade routes, which meant every ship arriving from abroad carried a chance of bringing plague with it.

Or, like Shakespeare's Portia, they might come from Padua, travelling by barge along the Brenta, through the level green water meadows to Fossina, and there embarking on the common ferry which trades to Venice.

They approached the city by the broad Giudecca Channel.

Or again, if they had crossed the Alps by the Brenner Pass, they left their carriages and all the toils and fatigues of travel at Mestre, and there entered a gondola, the reviving salt breeze and the masses of heaving seaweed proclaiming the vicinity of the Adriatic.

Then they rode across the lagoon, slowly nearing the city, which lay like a big lotus leaf on its bosom, not surrounded, like other medieval towns, by defences of masonry, but having these shining expanses of water alike for road and rampart.

Overhearing the altercation, they dismissed the gondolier with a threat of report to the vigili, police, and themselves carried their compatriots' trunks to the pension entrance.

Again, if a moonlight night on the lagoons holds a charm unknown to the mainland, if the dawn seems more magical, the midday sunshine more effulgent, it cannot be denied that a wet day is drearier and more uncomfortable in Venice than in any other European city.

There are days when we would thankfully exchange the steamer for a rattling bus and the noiseless gondola for a snorting taxi cab when all traffic is dislocated by fog or wind, when even the shelter of a felze, the hearse-like hood of the gondola, is denied to us, and it is an adventure to cross the Grand Canal near its mouth and impossible to steer across the channel of the Giudecca.

In such weather, an arrival at night is no delicious dream but a veritable nightmare.