Italian Vices

Venice was well-behaved while we were there; it only flooded very slightly on one evening. Because we’re idiots, we sat in the restaurant watching with great interest as men with trolleys erected duckboards. We even noted that we appeared to be the last people left in the restaurant and everyone else seemed to have gone home early. It was only when we actually tried to go back to our hotel, and spotted people wading past with bin bags knotted around their feet, that we put two and two together and got seven. “Ah,” we thought, “this must be the famous Acqua Alta that we could have seen coming if we had a shred of common sense between us.”

I’ve discovered that the best and possibly only technique for climbing onto a duckboard in a short, tight skirt is the one that involves showing my bottom to all the waiters in the restaurant and D heroically got wet to a depth of two inches carrying me from the end of the duckboards to the hotel.

On the other days we had blazing, non-Novemberish sunshine. On Torcello we lay on the grass under the campanile in our t-shirts, blinking through sunglasses. While I went in to gaze at gloomy Byzantine mosaics, D attracted cats until he had six keeping guard (or keeping him hostage, it’s hard to be sure as Torcello is an island that seems to belong to cats which kindly permit people to visit as long as they bring sandwiches and chin scratching with them).

Venice isn’t a late-night kind of city so we had plenty of early nights for me to indulge one of my favourite vices – Italian television. Seriously, it’s the home of the incomprehensible game show and I got addicted to one that superficially resembled Who Wants to Be a Millionaire but with dancing and eight contestants, all of whom brought their families with them, every member of which was interviewed before any questions were asked. I never even got close to working out the rules and I swear at one point a woman got knocked out because she was standing next to someone who got a question wrong.

Also of some puzzlement was the local news where the big story appeared to be the funeral of a woman with stigmata. Archive footage showed an elderly lady with jet-black dyed hair and very obviously self-inflicted scars. Rather than being in the more conventional hands and feet positions, these were up her arms and on her knees. On her right knee she had an unintentionally hilarious face of Jesus and on her left knee a less recognisable face that most closely resembled Chewbacca from Star Wars. Proof, if any more were needed, that God does indeed move in mysterious ways.

D’s great pleasure in European cities is going to supermarkets. I tease him about this but secretly agree with him that it’s great. We can quite happily spend up to an hour in the local Co-op reading packets of foreign biscuits and gazing at fierce-looking, unfamiliar fish, and we’ve come home with our usual haul of Italian groceries.

We’ve been to Venice often enough to pass as jaded and sneery Europeans towards confused American tourists (it’s the only consolation the English have since we lost the Empire) and this trip’s ‘tourism excellence’ prize goes to the girls who asked us if we knew where St Peter’s was (it’s in Rome) with runner-up prize going to the lady who dealt with the unfamiliar availability of cake in the hotel’s breakfast buffet by solemnly eating her muffin with a knife and fork.

My only slight disappointment was that the hotel, a former Doge's palace with silk wall-hangings, Murano glass chandeliers and Medieval ceiling beams was not, as promised by one of the comments on Venere.com 'an ideal location for visiting Venus'.