Mission Venice

I made my way to Venice last year to settle a score. With the city, with the past. My last visit there some seventeen years ago was a thoroughly disheartening experience.

I was a postulant in an order of religious at the time, herded one September day on a forced march through the city carrying an expedition back pack full to the zipper pulls with packages of boxed juices. Everywhere we went, we rushed. Touring Venice was a steeple chase training run. Only a person with a photographic memory could have captured the glory of St. Mark's facade and interior within the microsecond I had to see it. My optic synapses had barely the time to fire. Rods and cones missed it entirely. Ditto at the Doge's Palace. No time to sip from a juice box. Race-walking my way in Birkenstocks along the Riva degli Schiavoni and past the ornate Bridge of Sighs, I heard one of my fellow religious plebes mutter, and I translate from the Italian, "If we had time to actually stop and look at the bridge, we'd leave a few sighs of our own...just like the prisoners once did..." My experience of La Serenissima was Hobbesian - nasty, brutish, and short. Not surprisingly, my religious vocation took the same trajectory.

With that memory of 1992 in mind, I was heading back to Venice, but things were different. I was different, too. I was heading there in good company with friends, faith, breathing space, fluent Italian, no backpacks, no juice boxes, and no planned agenda. I was on a mission to savor Venice without an itinerary. I would wander aimfully at an unhurried pace. Listen. Observe. Interact. Connect with the faces before me, the voices, sounds, aromas around me, and with the stones beneath my feet.