Venice: slag & vaporetto roulette.

December 30, 2017 - By Leslie Coff

Venice…Venezia.
I want to embrace you.
Wrap my arms around you.
I adore you.

I am excited just being here. I cannot explain the reason why — I have no idea.
I love the green Adriatic, rising and falling between your structures.
Buildings, where we stand and sit and rest and eat — always knowing that sea life is teeming under us. I love knowing that the magical underneath is always underneath me. I love knowing that while I sleep, octopus chase in the deep below.

You are amazing. You are a hodgepodge of old and new and good and bad…like me. You are plaster and brick and old stone and rotting wood and repair and experience and hope.
Like me.
We are sisters, Serenissima.
You are well-trodden, you have beauty that is old and a bit hidden.
Like me.
Your beauty, lovely Venezia, is your brokenness.

Like me — like so many.

I have been told that there are new systems to try to save Venezia from sinking. There is a new system in process called M.O.S.E. Read about it HERE!!

I would like a series of pumps and bellows for when I am feeling underwater.

But we. Here. Now.

We were lucky to find a rental on the Giudecca — the cigar-shaped residential area across the lagoon from central Venezia.

From my bedroom window I can fall into the sea.
Come va, I want to say to the sea.
How is it going? Have you missed me?

Best thing to do in Venice is to get lost. This is unnamed member of my group working super hard at getting lost.

First day. We walk. We see glass. We walk more.

Here is the thing about glass…you need to melt it to make it into something new. Also like us — we need to melt inside to become something new.

Yep, this is SLAG. It is the byproduct of making glass — and what you melt to make more!

This super cool gate in the Murano — very old metalwork, depicts 800-year old art of glass-blowing in its design if you look closely….AND — that is not Disneyland water which is that green…it is the actual Adriatic Sea….L’Adriatico. It’s real.

We went to the Venetian Ghetto…the oldest Jewish Ghetto in the world. We ate amazing food. More walking. Many tourists.
Then back for down time.

Back out on a vaporetto. This time to San Marco…Piazza in the dark. Moon rising next to clock tower.

Yes, this is real. Yes…I took it quickly with my cellphone.

Sea beginning to be a bit choppy.

In spite of the dark you can still tell that the sky is dark blue and the sea a dark green.

Dinner with la principessa at La Principessa.

More walking. A house opera. Rigoletto. La maledizione. A curse. A father’s curse. A what-did-you-think-would-happen-if-you-continued-to-behave-this-way-curse.

R wants to play “vaporetto roulette” (roulette vaporetti). The rules? You get on the next arriving vaporetto. Rock/Paper/Scissors to determine how many stops to ride to. You get off, walk less than five minutes and go to first place.

Best meal in two months.

Beautiful in its brokenness, magical in its unpredictability. You teach me so much.

Venezia…ci vedremo presto. Mi già manchi.