Grand Tour Di Italia - 1. Venice

Grad Tour Di Italia-

1. Venice

Its 4am and my phone is ringing.

“Mel, wasn’t your flight at 4am? Kelly’s not moving.”

And so it begins.

“What you mean she’s not moving, is she alive?”

 There is a pause as Dave gives her a poke.

 “Yeah, I mean she’s humming and singing, she’s just not moving.”

Great, a drunk/hungover Kelly is an element I am not ready for at these hours of the morning. The flight isn’t at 4am thank god, but that’s the time we were supposed to be waking up, and my best friend has got a little too jolly the night before and is now in a pickle. Telling Kelly to stay in for an evening is like trying to get a cat in a cage when you’re going to the vet. She is not staying in.

At 4.23am, she’s not out of bed, or finished packing and the cab is booked for 4.45am.

“Dave,” I say to her housemate, having called him back. “Put me on speaker phone and put the phone next to her ear.”

Dave follows the instructions.

“DUDE? What are you doing? Get up, we’re going in 15mins. Get up NOW.”

I hear her jump out of her skin.

“I’m awake I’m awake!!”

**

Kelly sits on the suitcase as we desperately try to zip the thing up. We’re sitting in the middle of City Airport at 5am and the guy on the BA desk is staring at us, unamused.

Now this isn’t Ryanair stingy 15k weight, BA give you a generous 23K, but Kelly’s face is aghast as the scales flash -29k.

“Dude, what have you got in there?”

She looks at me blankly.

“It’s a £65 charge for luggage over the weight limit,” says the unamused BA guy.

“Really? It's just that £65 is really expensive and I don’t have a lot of money...”

He is unmoved by this plea. “Did you know what the weight allowance was?”

“Yes.”

“But you chose to pack 6 extra kilograms?”

Kelly pauses – “yes.”

There is an awkward silence.

“Well I didn’t mean to,” she adds.

“Kel, just pay the man,” I whisper in a slightly desperate tone. Her credit card comes out reluctantly and I wonder if 5am is too early for me to start drinking.

**

The next adventure comes after landing- after a quick and comfortable flight we’re queuing for our luggage, round and round and round bags go, trolleys come and are wheeled away and guess who’s bag does not appear…

Kelly’s.

She starts to sweat, “The Chanel” she says to me, a look of fear in her eyes. “The Chanel is in there, and I don’t have travel insurance.”

I tell her to breathe, and curse that damn handbag. When she moved to London with nothing but a hope for a fresh start, she clung to that bag in this crazy city like it held the secrets of the universe.

“Dude,” I would tell her, “that’s a deposit and 4 months’ rent! Sell the thing!”

“Never,” she would hiss at me.

‘Delivery Ended.’ the screen above the conveyer belt flashed. One solitary black bag was still going round, that and a broken push chair. I came back from the lost and found desk and asked one last question; "are you sure that’s not you bag?"

She pauses, and I roll the case over as it comes past us for the eleventh time.

“Ah! That is my case my case after all!”

I resist the urge to punch her in the face.

 **

We take a water bus to the island, following a water motorway as boats fly back and forth on glorious turquoise water. From the minute we step off and start dragging our bags through cobbled streets, I am in love.

Over the next two days I find no signs of the haunted or the sinking and stinking that I have often heard described. This city is bursting full of colour and light, a never ending maze of beautiful canals, every bit as authentic as you could hope.

I have an obsession with maps, a trait that comes in handy as I quickly notice the streets make no sense at all, tiny winding paths of crumbling brick and grand rusting doors, finding ourselves at dead ends and secret courtyards with every turn. Of course it doesn’t help that Kelly drops my map to the canal within 24 hours and I don’t know where we live without out it, since it had our apartment circled clearly by our airbnb host.

The place looks like a movie set, so true it is to any picture you have in your head and there is so much detail to drink in, wherever your home is will never look the same again in comparison. I don’t think much of the water buses, crammed and irregular- on the way to the station on the last day I’m convinced it will sink- people and suitcases jammed together like sardines and I cling onto the side for dear life. But the key to Venice, to feel you have seen this crazy magical place is to walk and walk and walk.

We make picnics and use the drinking fountains to drink all day as we wander through each quarter, stopping to sunbathe on canal corners and eat gelato in sunny open squares. We listen to the orchestra in San Marco’s square and eat pizza in tiny pizzerias that are so fresh and sweet it could almost be dessert.

As a place it feels surreal- how does it work? It’s so beautiful but makes no sense- in the middle of nowhere, on water, decadent architecture and basilica’s everywhere you turn. The city, I discover, was founded in 400bc, a place for refuges that came to the lagoon in the Adriatic Sea, safe from enemies who couldn’t sail, and eventually attempted to build a city on the water so they could stay. Unbelievably the original foundations of Venice are made of wood- pikes going down in to the deeper sand and clay, the lack of oxygen meaning the wood doesn’t rot but in fact turns into a solid structure. I look around at the buildings, built almost on top of each other they are so close together, a boat pulling up to a restaurant, delivering the fish from the boat through the window. It seems impossible that it works but it does.

An added bonus is we have accidentally arrived in Venice on their biggest holiday weekend of the year, a celebration of the church built after God spared the city from the plague. We join in with hundreds and hundreds of boats filling the water with mini floating parties, an astonishing sight in the evening water, music playing all along the grand canal. Prosecco in hand we watch a fireworks display that is simply breath taking, exploding light illuminating the Venetian skyline of basilicas and domes. The whole city lights up with a show that lasts 45minutes and the whole city cheers as midnight strikes.

It is magic.

*Next stop Florence!*