Venice this go-around

Evenings are quiet, laid back. A stroll along the quieter canals, a sip of a sweet spritz in the shadow of a familiar campo. The sun sets at last on the pitched roofs of the campanile. Dinner's not a big deal, it's a plate of mixed cicchetti, a tapas-like affair of fried seafood, meatballs, tomato, something like that.

And you bump elbows with friends so easily. By chance. This town is so small, so tight that you can't help but run across the people you know, few though they may be.

Sitting on the steps of the train station before Brandolin took the train back to Treviso, two carabinieri approached. In slurred, accented Italian they asked for our documents, hands open, gesturing impatiently against their blue uniforms. My American citizenship unsettled them, and they flipped my drivers license over and over, looking for something, always hoping to find it on the other side.

Alice returns home from the mountains with shopping bags filled with wood, with paper, pens and exacto-knives for her architectural thesis. In the single-bulbed light of the kitchen she knocks down some calculations on an oversized calculator before constructing a maze of ruler-straight lines on paper.

To the drill of a construction site, to the clink of plates and tiny espresso cups, the bump and roll of carts over bridges, the people walk. They walk with purpose in sharp suits and bright silk ties and shiny shoes; they walk frailly, with a cane, or two, stopping for a rest at the uneven street corner; they walk under pressure, weighed down by a heavy camper's backpack and the need to catch an 8:00 train; they walk elegantly, with calm, hands behind their backs, swaying back and forth with a glance at each decorated storefront, an ear open for the nearest bell tower's chime. They walk carelessly, bumping their shopping bags against strangers' legs and poking themselves in the eyes with their sunglasses. Everyone walks in awe, wrinkles of disbelief on their foreheads -- it's almost too overwhelming, the volume of crenelated and tiled marble on such raw and chewed-away, soggy wooden supports.

But this Venice is normal; this go-around, the Venice that I see is normal and calm. It is normal, it is calm, and yet it is absolutely exceptional. I feel the flux of the crowds in my blood, in my lungs; I feel the range of prices and the qualities of products, the taste of fruit and fish, the silences and uproars of empty churches and crowded squares.

Culture shock.
-a