Venezia

"If you read a lot, nothing is as great as you've imagined. Venice is — Venice is better."

-Fred Lebowitz

Venice stole my heart the moment I stepped into its labyrinth of beauty, as I had a feeling it would. Every time I saw a brilliant turquoise canal, I inwardly gasped a little sigh of admiration. The achingly gorgeous buildings, rising out of the water- tall, colorful, and proud. The food and wine hardly need be described- as per usual, Italian cuisine did not (for the most) disappoint. Venice, or Venezia as known to Italians, was better than anything I could have imagined. 

Finding our hotel proved to be one of the more challenging activities we have ever completed. I read somewhere that everyone gets lost in Venice. I (erroneously) assumed that my solid sense of direction & ability to recognize a place after seeing it only once paired with Zack's land nav skills, we would be a formidable opponent to Venetian streets. Within 5 minutes of being on the island, we were already confused. There are no real street signs (at least none that made sense to me), no roads (as there are no cars), and plenty of dead ends that if you don't watch where you're going, you'll end up taking a splash in a canal. What should have been a 7 minute walk according to Google Maps took us 1.5 hours, but we finally found our "hotel." Accommodations in Venice are pretty much absurd, so I booked us a questionable, but cheap, little room smack dab in the heart of the city. It was basically a room above an ancient Italian lady's home. She was adorable and spoke no English- but did somehow manage to warn us that the neighbors can see our bed from their windows and that I was "bella bella bella!" Grazie, on both accounts, signora. 

After settling in, we explored the area where we were staying. Hungry, we found a restaurant and ate what ended up being our favorite meal of the trip. Fresh bread, a pizza so big and dripping with cheese that it had to be wheeled out to us on a cart, and 2 liters of the casa de vino.

After a meal like that, we were down for the count. Our unintended afternoon nap turned into us waking up at 9 PM, disoriented and foggy. Coupled with some irritability over wasting an evening and impending rain- our night wasn't exactly note-worthy. I fell asleep to the sound of rain pattering our window awning and hoping for a better tomorrow. 

Saturday morning (7 AM) we awoke to what might possibly be the longest and most obnoxious church bells in the history of forever. I'm not kidding- I think they rang about 30 times and were so jarring that I had to rush to the window to see if we were actually staying inside a church and I had somehow missed that fact. At least it got us up early, and the day got much brighter when we found a small bakery and gorged ourselves on cappuccinos and unidentifiable (but delicious!) pastries. 

We didn't have a set plan for the day, which was fabulous, so we just began to wander. I think that was my favorite part of the trip- the aimless, casual strolling with no agenda, no pressure, and no real worry except which flavor of gelato to try next. During our meandering we found a fish market, Zack developed an intense obsession with the popular Carnival masks, I searched (in vain) for the perfect Italian leather purse, we happened upon St. Mark's Square and played with the pigeons, discovered spritz, and found out gondola rides run a mere 100 € (um, what?) 

After our morning of exploration, we took a water bus (the public transportation in Venice- so cool!) over to the lido for an afternoon of sunbathing, crab-catching, and topless women watching. The views of Venice from the Grand Canal were wonderful, and it (kind of) made up for our gondola-less trip. 

Our dinner that evening was pretty disappointing. The service was horrendous, and I'm pretty sure I've had better fried seafood at Captain D's. We extracted revenge on the restaurant by crushing all of their little bread sticks they had on the table. That'll show 'em. After finishing dinner at 10:30 (!) we took a bottle of wine down to the canal opening beside our hotel. Many typical lizack shenanigans ensued, most of which aren't fit to be put in writing. 

Sunday we took a train to Verona (which deserves it's own post entirely) for the day, but made it back to Venice in time for dinner. Our last meal in Italy was quite disenchanting. We stupidly ate at a place right off of the Grand Canal, and a 5 minute walk from the Rialto Bridge, so I knew it would be touristy and overpriced. I really wouldn't have minded those things, if the food had been decent. But the seafood risotto was some of the worst I have ever tasted, and Zack's pepperoni pizza was on par with elementary school pizza. (Actually, those rectangle pizzas made with yellow cheese that we used to get in school were pretty bomb, so this pizza was worse than an elementary school lunch.) But the conversation was good, and we talked for hours over our wine & neon-orange spritz- long after the sun dipped down. 

Dizzying mazes, old cobblestones, rich red wine, sugary pastries, well-timed siestas, countless snacks of gelato, green shutters, slow gondolas, elegant bridges, lovers at every corner, - it is all wrapped up neatly and stored away in my memory. Italy kept yet another piece of me.