10 Nov

For the sake of this blog, this trip, and my memories of it, Venice, and anywhere else for that matter, is made unique in how I experience it. I, as I’m sure everyone else, have had a certain pre-experience of Venice– on postcards, in short anecdotes, in scenes from movies. But postcards don’t show you how lost you’ll get trying to find that pretty picture.

Venice as I now know it (as little as I now know it) is much much more than these snapshots of bustling bridges and romantic gondola rides. Venice is a maze. I have a naturally horrible sense of direction. The odds should not be in my favor here. But in Venice, unlike in other cities I’ve traveled to, there is a found sense of direction. This sense is found in signs. Simple, clear, reductive. Signs telling me where the train station is; where the Rialto, the Accademia, the Scalzi cross the Grand Canal; how to get to Piazza San Marco and where to catch the vaporetti. Without these signs leading me down seemingly endless circles of narrow and narrower streets, I would be a lost cause– pun intended. Venice is surely unique in its topography, in its grid– or lack thereof, in its very foundation. But Venice as I experience it, is Venice because of the signs.