Where has the Time Gone?

Only just a few days ago I left Italy, and I realized as I was leaving that I had been in Italy a month! Arriving September 10^th and leaving on October 9^th. I had been to a villa in Tuscany, Sienna, Montepellicino, Florence, Rome, Venice/Padova and Milan, and still feel I could have stayed much, much longer.

Venice was beautiful. I kept thinking of Brideshead Revisited and picturing Charles and Sebastian together in the gondola, walking the streets at night. It is in Venice that there is one of but a few interludes in Brideshead where all is perfect and nothing tragic has yet come to pass. Venice is like that. But arriving in Venice I was annoyed, the bus we were on to take us into the city centre had advertisement all over the windows, seeing out of them was impossible. I could tell by how the light moved and from maps that I had seen we were indeed on the stretch of road that would take us into the floating city. I was thinking how badly I wanted to see the entrance into the city as we arrived the first time, my prevailing thought: was does it look like? Getting off the bus my annoyance faded away. Most people know of Venice, of its homes built floating on water,of the boats that are the transportation of the city and the bridges that really are the connection from one road to the next. It was something else to be standing in the midst of it.

When I come to these places that I have seen only in photographs, on film or just heard about, my first thought usually is that it can’t be real, somehow I am on a Hollywood set and any moment a gust of wind is due to arrive and blow down the cardboard cut-outs used to make up this place. When that does not happen I begin to relax.

The first stop we made was for food. Just over yonder, across two bridges and next to a church sits a hole in the wall place. Here they serve bite size sandwiches and glass of Prosecco, which you can enjoy sitting on the ledge near the canal.  (Everything was so good and so well priced that we went there again the next day.) Once satisfied and once the pigeons realized we had no more crumbs of bread to give we made our way further into the city, getting lost more than once, coming across a dead end road, and roads that just ended into the water of a canal.

It was for the next three days we would take the bus into the city and just explore the streets. That was the best part of Venice. Gazing at the buildings and watching the people was all the entertainment you needed. The simple tasks you needed to learn also formed part of that entertainment. Finding the small eateries, where once you ordered you were then tasked with finding a place to sit, on either the few chairs that were offered or objects that suddenly became as good as a chair. Sometime it was even a task learning to eat your food while holding your full glass of wine. (I have not yet mastered this.)Entertainment was sitting near the water and doing nothing, just knowing where you are sitting is enough.

All I can think about now is re-reading Brideshead Revisited, and though I know only a small part of the story takes place in Venice, it was just so perfect for Charles and Sebastian, seems like it just makes sense as it was perfect for me.