Archive for Tourism
Venice goes postal
Posted by: | CommentsTo be fair, it’s not just Venice: It’s all of Italy.
Brace yourselves, because I’ve got some news. At the post office today I noticed a sign giving the new postage rates.
To mail a postcard — not your novel, not the story of your life — a measly little postcard, from Italy to the U S and A now costs 1 euro and 60 cents.
Not only is that double the previous rate (already high, in my opinion), it is the equivalent of $2.08.
Two dollars and eight cents for one (1) stamp to mail one (1) postcard.
The woman at the window told me that it wasn’t Italy that shot the rates into outer space, it was My Country, ‘Tis of Thee. I have no idea how these things work, but I do know what it feels like to knock your elbow against the edge of the door, and this is like that.
What I hear now is the sound of text messages and e-mails flying around the stratosphere bringing greetings from your Italian vacation to Aunt Bertha, your twin sister, your niece, your dog. What I also hear is the sound of postcards not being sold, and stamps not being sold, at least to Americans.
You had to know, and better now than later. Now you can plan to spend the money you would have paid for stamps and postcards on something else. Like buying a house. Or a horse.
A different Venetian carnival
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s not exactly the swallows returning to Capistrano, but a few mornings ago saw the arrival of a modestly historic moment in the calendar: The amusement park began to set up shop.
One of the ferryboats that normally plods between the Lido and Tronchetto makes a special run (and there will be more) loaded with trucks that are going to turn into irresistible rides, games and food stalls. Irresistible if you don't mind the cold weather, and the prices.
Admittedly Venice, in its long history, has often seen its embankments loaded with heavy objects destined for commerce -- timber, marble, and bricks come to mind -- but there is something a little startling about trucks.
The rides and games, not to mention the stands selling cotton candy, fried dough slathered with nutritional hot-air balloons such as Nutella, caramelized peanuts, and anything else that can emit a powerful odor of imminent obesity, started to disembark, all folded up inside the trucks, on the Riva dei Sette Martiri at the head of via Garibaldi. They will be open for business on Saturday and will remain until the end of Big Famous Bloated Carnival, which this year will be March 8.
Just to avert any possible misunderstanding, BFB Carnival is known here as, well, Carnival, or if you prefer, Carnevale. This little county-fair assortment of playthings is generically called a “Luna Park.” Probably after an Ur-version somewhere bearing that name which I have been unable to identify. It’s no competition for Coney Island or the Prater in Vienna but as everyone knows, available space in Venice is calculated in millimeters.
Till last year, this annual event was set up on the Riva degli Schiavoni between the Arsenal and the next canal on the way to San Marco. But the residents’ complaints about noise, confusion, smells, and garbage finally overrode the carny-people’s desire to be as close to the center of the touristic hurricane as possible.
You can't just drive ashore -- you must prepare the way very, very carefully with damage-blunting boards. Even so, the fondamenta when they're gone is pocked with cement patches where the stones have somehow disappeared.
So last year they were moved just a little bit downstream, to an area beyond the invisible demarcation line separating Tourist Motherlode and Just Somewhere Else in Venice. Hence we now have residents here in this new strip of space that are just as unhappy as their predecessors were over the way, plus unhappy carny-people because they’re missing out, they believe, on loads of business.
They probably have a point (and they ought to know, considering that they’re the ones standing out there in the freezing cold for hours waiting for customers). Whatever their dreams may be of cashing in on the typical tourists, my impression is that this amusement park is frequented almost exclusively by locals.
Which means: Parents and grandparents with small children, and shoals of bored teenagers who will go anywhere in any weather as long as they can hang out with each other and not be home. Of course weekends are the prime moments, but the stands are open every day from mid-afternoon till about 8:00 PM, even though there are few things on earth as unappealing as an amusement park in the middle of a weekday afternoon. The magic of this extraordinary collection of stuff and stimulation, at least for people over ten years old, is that it happens in the dark under glowing, flashing lights. Otherwise this wonderland is just Norma Desmond before her coffee, so to speak, even if it is in the most beautiful city in the world.
This is so much what the stand-owner doesn't want to see. He's thinking about making it up on the weekend, and during Christmas, and Epiphany, and the two weeks of Carnival.
In any case, next year, if the plan is fulfilled, they will move to yet another location, at Tronchetto. This will have the advantage of offering more space, and will solve the problem of irritating the locals with the noise, etc., because there are no locals. I have deep doubts that they will make anything like the money they do here, because Tronchetto is about as convenient to everybody in the city, tourists as well as Venetians, as Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.
I’ll be sorry to see them move away, because no matter how funky it may be, this Luna Park does a lot to sparkle up the winter atmosphere, at least in a neighborhood like ours where the minute you go out the door you run into the same old people doing the same old things making the same old comments. I can tell you that it’s as much fun to watch all the goings-on as it is to participate (I speak as a veteran of the kiddies’ roller-coaster, who last year appalled and offended the two little girls in the car ahead of me not only because I’m an adult but because I screamed on the turns. One of them turned around and asked me scornfully, “Aren’t you a little old to be on this?” This made me laugh, which by the look on her face was not her intention).
Correct answer: Of course I am. So sue me.
Sunday afternoon during Carnival in the sunshine. This is more like it.
Marie Antoinette is training for Monza.
But even if after three months you've grown completely used to it, an amusement park in Venice is still a very curious thing to have.
Venice vaporettos: give me a sign
Posted by: | CommentsI saw something today that I have longed — longed – to see, and had despaired of ever seeing. Ever. And had ceased to believe that my grandchildren, if I ever had any, would see it either.
Signs. They have finally installed signs showing route maps on the vaporettos indicating each blessed stop of the blessed line being ridden. You can’t believe it? I can’t either, but there they are.
Not only does the sign exist, it has been placed in a useful location (there's another on the other side of the aisle), and it's legible, unlike the other supposedly useful announcements you can just barely make out stuck to the right-hand window. They thought of everything.
The Big Cities I know have always done this on their buses and subways: New York, Paris, Moscow, London, Rome, San Francisco … I think Oslo, too, but I can’t remember at the moment. Probably. Norway’s supposed to have the highest quality of life of any place on the planet, and I’d put bus maps right up there with free flu shots in the Great Scheme of Human Development.
In any case, it’s such an obviously simple and useful thing to do that not doing it must have required an impressive amount of density and sloth on the part of everybody here who could have made it happen.
But then again, there are countless things in life that seem so obvious, so simple, so helpful, and even so inexpensive, that it seems impossible that there should be people who can’t see the need or find the means to do them. Kissing your kid goodnight, say, or putting your hand on your heart when your national flag goes by, or running to help somebody get up who’s just tripped on the sidewalk.
But in Venice, the obvious and the simple have found an oddly inhospitable environment, where “We have no time,” “There is no money,” “The guy who knows how to do it is on vacation/ retired/dead” smothers a very large number of ideas on how to make daily life just a little bit more liveable.
This sign is a thing of true beauty. I wouldn't put it in the same league as the ABAB sonnet, but it's close.
Why — I have asked myself ever since I first came here, back in the Bronze Age –why should public transport have been made so thrillingly complicated for ordinary people who, let’s face it, comprise 98 percent of the world’s population and 99.9 percent of the visitors to Venice? (I made that up, but it could still be true.)
I don’t know the answer. But I do know that many, many people whom I have seen with these very eyes have struggled not only with their luggage and their hysterical offspring and their own fatigue and lack of fluency in Italian, but with a bus system which gave you no intelligent means of knowing where you are or how to get where you’re going.
I have seen frantic people with big suitcases pull up to the Lido stop and ask the vaporetto conductor, “Is this the train station?” Not only is the correct answer “No, it’s not,” but the full phrase is “The station is at the other end of town and it will take you 50 minutes to get there. Sorry about you missing your train.” (Actually, they don’t say “Sorry.”)
Then they decided to put another map further back in the cabin, showing both of the routes which this type of vehicle is likely to take, plus the N, or night-time abbreviated route which begins around midnight, depending on where you are.
In any civilized settlement in the world, from Scott City, Kansas on up, the traveler would have had some means of confirming his progress by consulting a conveniently placed and easy-to-read map, then looking out the window at the name of the upcoming stop. It takes less than half a second to know if you’re headed in the wrong direction.
Of course there are plenty of maps around. Tiny, Gordian diagrams in guidebooks or given out by the hotel, with supposedly helpful colors and numbers of lines, but the colors twist themselves into macrame and some of the numbers no longer exist. You can spend a long time waiting for the #82 before you find out that it doesn’t run after September 13. And that it is now called the #2.
Or the route map on the bus-stop dock. It would be an intrepid traveler indeed to be able to read, and remember after boarding, what the next stops are called which lead toward one’s destination as one struggles through the wildebeest-migration that occurs on most docks.
Say what you will about the not-so-new mayor, Giorgio Orsoni; he seems to have put a few people in positions of authority who not only have intelligent, grown-up ideas on how to make things work, but have figured out how to bring them to pass before the next Ice Age, which by the way is probably never going to happen considering which way the climate is going. But you see my point.
So I give two thumbs-up to Carla Rey, the new councilor (or as I translate assessore, sub-mayor) for Commerce, Consumer Affairs, and Urban Quality. I don’t know that she is behind this leap into the future, but what she has done so far in other areas leads me to believe it’s highly likely. Hers is a title which never existed before and has a bracingly modern, Big-City ring to it.
“Urban”? Little old us?
So what’s my next Impossible Dream? Large to Very Large public trash bins placed everywhere. To be specific, I want there to be at least one large trash bin no further than 50 feet from any point in the entire city where you may be standing. Wherever you stop, you need to be able to see a trash bin. This is not, I can assure you, the case at the moment.
I know, it sounds like crazy talk. But now there are route maps on the vaporettos.
This changes everything.
Running around Venice
Posted by: | CommentsAnd they're off: another handful of orienteers has just grabbed their maps and the clock is running.
I started scribbling this yesterday to the sound just outside the window of a lot of people going by in a hurry. Sometimes a large hurry. I could hear the thudding of feet, the puffing of lungs, and incoherent voices of various ages and genders that sounded either baffled or urgent, or both.
This went on Saturday and Sunday. ”This” was the 31st edition of the Venice Orienteering Meeting. Each year, on the second Sunday of November, our neighborhood is besieged by people who’ve come from all over Europe (though I’m sure you’d be welcome no matter where you live. Pitcairn Island? Cool!). They are competing in a timed race armed only with a map and a compass, and a list of checkpoints to cover in the correct order in the shortest time possible. That’s my homespun definition of orienteering, an undertaking which has now reached the level of a sport. It even has a federation.
When an activity passes from being a game to a sport, things get serious. (A shout-out to Ernest Hemingway, who said “There are only three sports, bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”) Frankly, some of the orientators didn’t look so serious to me.
The famous division of labor: The men do the hunting, the women do the talking about clothes and makeup.
In a way, much more than boating or swimming, orienteering is the city’s natural sport. In fact, I’d say it was Venice’s destiny to present itself, not merely as the repository of historical and artistic magnificence, but as a serious challenge to the brains and legs of people who are looking at it as terrain.
However willing your team may be, doing anything as a group always takes large amounts of time, as anyone who has traveled with a couple of friends or relatives can attest. These girls are about two minutes from the starting line and already there is discussion and doubt.
What, after all, are mere forests and torrents and ravines compared to the seductive complexity of dark, narrow streets, canals, dead ends, and bridges to everywhere? Any newbie who has ever set out for a specific destination armed only with the primitive map the hotel gave out can tell you that there may be moments here when negotiating forests and ravines would be simpler.
Two things about the course: First, it was designed by a German man. I don’t comment, I merely note it. Make of it what you will.
However, being on your own doesn't appear to make it any easier.
Second, there were many different courses, divided according to the gender and skill of the orientizers. These courses varied in length and in “dislivello,” a complicated topographic term which I can only manage to remember as being the distance in the difference of the heights of any two points. (Perhaps a humorous idea in Venice, but deeply meaningful in the mountains. If you’re running in the mountains, it probably interests you much more to know how far up and down you’re going to have to go than the kilometers to cover. If you live in the Lincolnshire fens or downtown Houston, it is a totally foreign concept.)
The longest course was, logically, for the serious athletes in the Elite Category. For the men, it covered 10,500 meters and 80 meters of dislivello (six and a half miles and 262 feet). Winner: Alessio Tenani of Italy, who finished in 1 hour 9 minutes and 51 seconds. The last in this category came in at twice the time: 2:20:23.
For the women, the Elite course covered 8,700 meters and 73 meters of dislivello (five and a half miles and 239 feet). Winner: Sarka Svobodna of the Czech Republic, who made it in 1:08:27. Last to come in here clocked 2:00:41.
Behind all these paladins were large squadrons of students of assorted ages, and a richly variegated quantity of people — couples with small children, some of whom could race like the wind, or quartets of young adults, or pairs of roundish older people taking the whole thing at a pace that could have been calculated in phases of the moon.
Three cadets from the Francesco Morosini naval college forge ahead. John Paul Jones would have been proud.
But while we’re talking about walking, you should know that there is another annual event that might be more appealing, or at least less competitive. It’s called “Su e Zo per i Ponti“ (Up and Down the Bridges), and groups turn out in hordes. Here too there is a laid-out course to follow, but no need at all to use your brain. I’ve seen pods of people as they go by and most of them seem more interested in laughing and talking than in getting home before dark.
Next year’s “Su e Zo” will be on April 10 (2011) and if you’re going to be here it could be a very diverting and different thing to do. After all, if you’re going to be tramping around from hither to yon anyway, why not join the masses of people who are so cheerfully blocking the streets? You’re going to have to mingle with a lot of them anyway, and if you register you get refreshments and a medal, which you can’t say every day in Venice.
If there are tickets left you can register the morning of the event, at the departure point in the Piazza San Marco. It costs six euros, less than a vaporetto ticket. I think you should do it.
A runner punches his ticket at whichever checkpoint this is and is off again.
I myself have never thought of participating, mainly because walking around Venice takes up so much of my daily existence that it would seem bizarre to do what I do every day with a batch of people who regard it as entertainment. I’m not saying I don’t love walking around Venice, it’s just that I usually do it in second or third gear. I need to get places.
If I had any free time on a Sunday, I’d be taking a nap.
No rules against participants carrying their beloved stuffed creature.
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A checkpoint symbol that missed the pickup at the end. I wonder how long it will stay here before somebody does something.
These are two people to whom earning the maximum points hasn't even occurred.
