Popular Travel

Think of this as an invitation to travel, where the people in far-flung places are the first items on the itinerary, and their famous places are the second. I don't mean necessarily that we should go and knock on a stranger's door as soon as we arrive in Paris or Casablanca and introduce ourselves. What I do mean is that we travel to places and enter cultures with a people-centered perspective. If doing that means changing our attitude about travel, we'll be dazzled by the change.

Let's think about every place we've dreamed of going, near or far, of where we'd go and what we'd do. The sights, the sounds, the aromas. Now remove from that image all the residents of that place. Focus on what remains. When you do, I would venture to bet a lot of round trip air fares that the daydream goes muddy.

Unless your destination is a national park or a UNESCO World Heritage site, then you'll soon realize as I did, that your favorite destinations lose their color and life at the thought of absented people. Venice for example, the city beloved for its water-locked beauty, it mysterious serpentine streets, the Doge's Palace, the canals, and magical architecture. Delete the Venetians, who live and work in and around the city. Delete any contact with them, all appreciation for the Italian language and the lyrical Venetian dialect, their knowledge and memory of life there, their skills, their personal and regional histories, their way of preparing and eating food, their greetings as you walk their streets. And just like that, our magical city becomes an international theme park with some beautiful museums and gorgeous blown glass. A slow ride in a water taxi along the Grand Canal without a friendly, chatty pilot from Mestre suddenly isn't any grander than a ride in an ersatz gondola at a hotel in Vegas.

Recapturing the dream doesn't require drastic action. You're not obliged to learn the local language, although certainly a few phrases would be thoughtful. And as a linguist, I can't emphasize enough the joys of communication; but, what's most necessary is a dash of an explorer's sense of wonder, and an open heart that's given a few moments of recollection to let the words, the lessons, and the lives around it touch and sink into the openings. Then, and only then, will the miracle perform. Everyone from our Venice, Paris, Casablanca or Khartoum will be able to fit inside us, as soon as we set foot on their soil. The grand and unknown will shrink and recognize. Venice's name might change to "Giuseppe from the gallery" or "Marco the super friendly water taxi pilot" or "Gigina who lived across the calle from us."

Our places becomes people, and we carry them home. They live on with a kind of bilocation, there where they are, and here in us.

The Lady Venice and I

I've been told that Venetians consider their city to be a most noble lady, worthy of her name, "La Serenissima." Some will go so far as to say that an outsider's impressions of Venice are directly proportional to her impression of the visitor. The Lady sizes you up, and if she likes what she sees, she will enchant. If she finds you lacking, she will rebuff. It's a romantic notion, as befits a city redolent with romance and the memory of stupendous political and social power. It's a notion that makes perfect sense to me.

My first trip to Venice came in 1985, during my junior year abroad at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The Lady Venice cracked the door open to me then, considering me from a reserved distance and offering a glimpse at what I would enjoy most about her in future; her mystery, her silence, her indescribable power to overwhelm the senses. I explored the city as many foreign students do, multi-city tour on spring vacation, traveling light, putting up in an inexpensive pensione, dining prix-fixe at trattorias, a guide book and phrase book in each hand. I discovered her mystery and silence in early evening walks. I lost myself safely among the warren of small and still smaller streets unpeopled by tourists, angling off and randomly ending at lagoons, stony dead ends, or in a campo's blaze of sunlight, color, and sound. The streets took me unawares, herding me in disorienting directions. Navigating the random twists, cut-offs, and shadowed alcoves, I remember thinking that espionage must have taken a delicious evolutionary turn in the days of Venice's domination of the Adriatic. Still, somehow, either naively or presciently, I wasn't afraid. I liked the silent wandering. It allowed me to listen to Venice, even if for only a few minutes. Listen to the past, to the present, hoping to return and listen in its future.

Preparing to leave two days later, I paused at the steps of the train station. Looking over my shoulder, I caught the Lady's face reflected in the canal, a knowing gaze from a palazzo's half-shuttered window. I turned, hoping to someday meet her face to face.

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.