Balancing the Shamed Line Between Tourist and Invisible, Part II

Palazzo Ducale, Photo Credit: Lindsay Needels

The Author of this article spent the week of October 14 in Treviso, Venice, Bologna, Rome, and Naples, Italy. In this three part series she will share her reflections on being a solo tourist and learning to define the relation between herself and the greater society around her.

Landing in Venice was a lot like landing on top of an icon and spending two days perched on their body, wandering, getting lost in the previously unknown complexities they contain. This is to say that it was humbling and completely nonsensical.

Venice refused to let me make sense of it, no matter how many times I tried to google map it, find directions to a spot of tourist interest, the lists and order provided by the internet were empty lines of jumbled language that signified nothing but something for the city to laugh at, if it only could.

I could only find my way by giving up and letting myself become lost.

The woman who owned the B&B Ca’Dor, where I stayed for two days, gave me directions, in English, to my bed. My heart beat on the phone. There is an urgency in the melody of Italian speech that may come off to the more timid woman, spending most of her time in the more timid culture of the UK, as a scolding. Italian is faster and louder and I often left conversations feeling I’d done something wrong. Sometimes I found myself claiming I knew what was said, just to hear the approval from the other side.

I did manage to find the B&B, after walking into a quiet square behind the loud one, and then following a dark, narrow street to a golden doorknob, that I never quite got the hang of unlocking. I walked up sets of stairs that made me lose my sense of which way I faced to a room whose window sat above the golden doorknob. At certain hours of the night when the streets got still, solitary footsteps would echo through the city to my ears like something no one was ever meant to hear, and I would think about Donald Sutherland wandering through Venice chasing that murderous red coat through the ancient mazes that lined the canals.

Venice was a dreamscape. The streets would begin bustling, voices rising up and down in linguistic rhythm but then lead to quiet squares that seemed to have been forgotten, not even haunted. The silence was so startling, that idiot in me would think to take a picture, as if I could somehow capture the shock.

Some streets were like tunnels, and they dripped as you walked through the dark, the tension in your imagination rising and stopping, waiting for something dramatic to push it over the edge, only to be confronted with a dead end, useless to anyone without a motorboat waiting for them on the other side.

At times, the surreality of Venice made me feel that I was never there at all. From the time I landed there to the last view I got of it, staring at a turquoise dome against a silver sun outside of Stazione Santa Lucia, I didn’t believe that I was there. I thought of Venice as an Italian New Orleans, a city visited as much, if not more so, by the human imagination as the senses. Everything there conjured a narrative that had been read or seen across a screen. Everything conjured a timeline far behind.

But there was something very present tense in Venice, too. No one, certainly not I, could ever deny that.

The graffiti was barely past wet and dripping.

Fliers informed me that I had arrived a day after a major student protest, and the aggression glared at me from the words painted to every bank wall in the city. Now they served only as something to trigger my imagination, images of students marching through the wet, winding streets with swagger and rage ran through my mind, and I felt a void in my stomach like I had missed something.

As my trip continued, I began to realize that this grafitti, the anger it expressed, was present throughout the country.
But all I have written couldn’t even cross my mind until arriving in Bologna, until arriving in a city that gave me all the perspective I never thought I needed, where the graffiti overlapped years of anger.