Arrival

     Each day, cruise ships disgorge their passengers by the thousands into Saint Mark’s Square, the grand public space in Venice, so they can have their photos taken with pigeons on their shoulders, take a gondola ride, and wander a few of its narrow streets before returning to those floating malls a few hours later. Some people come to Venice to check it off from a list of places they are told they have to see. These fanny-pack wearing hordes roam the streets in T-shirts and jeans boorishly shrieking to their companions. They wander into cafés demanding decaf ‘to go,’ then complain that it’s too bitter. They grouse that a waterlogged city smells “musty.” These are the infamous Ugly Americans and I was determined to never join their ranks.

     No, I was going to represent my country as an ambassador of good taste and refinement, showing my respect for Italy by dressing appropriately, which for me includes a tie and jacket and adopting as much as the culture as my two weeks here would allow. At the very least, I was going to look good in my snapshots.

     Like many aspirant writers of my generation, Ernest Hemingway looms large, so I went to Venice to find whatever traces of him might be left fifty years after his last visit. I went looking for Hemingway, but what I found was the Ugly American, and he was much closer than I had ever imagined.

     Approaching by train from terra firma, Venice shimmers on the fold of horizon like a mirage. Down the long causeway, I pressed my face against the glass as we drew closer, and watched the rooftops emerging from the fog. At once I began to question what a Gothic city full of massive Cathedrals, Golden Palaces, and innumerable medieval houses was doing floating in the sea this far out? Is it possible that it had broken loose from some Italian coastline and was bobbing there out to sea was bobbing there out to sea tethered by a narrow train-track?

     Before I could compose an answer, the train had stopped in Stazione S. Lucia, I tugged my bags from the overhead, and was pushed out with the Italians who had commuted here from as far away as Rome and Florence; to them I was just an obstacle. 

     In the open air of the Fondamenta S. Lucia, I was immediately confronted by one of the many irreconcilable sights of Venice. No, it’s not that the streets are flooded (which they are), and it’s not that the buildings appear to be floating on foundations of water (which they are not); it’s the high bridge of steps I had to cross known as the Ponte di Scalzi.

     Nothing does a better job of introducing you to how things are done in Venice than a broad medieval stone bridge made of steps, which one must lug their luggage up one side and down the other before reaching Venice proper. Nothing here makes sense, nothing here is easy, and before too long, you feel disorientated, as if you are lost inside an M.C. Escher drawing.

     In the maze of Venice, lost, and looking for my hotel, I realized immediately that much of the Italy I had come to know did not exist here. There were no Vespas in sight, no cars, no fountains, and not a single bicycle. Instead, there was a maze of interlocking passageways emptying into wide campi, or squares, then more passageways leading to further squares. Bridges appeared seemingly out of nowhere, some arched, some stepped, and some made of brick or marble. Some stairways went nowhere.

     After wandering around the first hour, I thought I would have gotten my bearings, but what I had gotten was lost. I would come to know that for most of my time spent in Venice I would be lost. Lost would become my Venetian state of normal.

     By the seventh time I had consulted my map, I wished I had spent the hundred Euros for a water taxi. I watched one passing down the narrow canal beside me pushing up a wake of water, its smug occupants seated in back beneath a canopy of polished wood, chrome, and glass, glaring at the lost American weighed down by luggage, trying to find a street sign, and wearing a look of hopeless desperation. American street smarts are of no use here.

     Hours later and finally at my hotel, I settled in. The hotel is a former palace, this one of some renown, once occupied by a painter whose name I scribbled into my Moleskine and quickly forgot. The room is typical for a Venetian four-star hotel: a large bed with a thin mattress taking up the center of the room, a baroque frame of wood rises behind it with curtains draping from its top to the sides of the bed. On either side is a Venetian glass sconce of transparent crystal trimmed with pink and blue flowers. The sconces match the six-light chandelier in the center of the room. A flat screen television is kitty-corner on the desk in case I wanted to spend my entire week in this iconic city watching soccer or Ghostbusters dubbed into Italian.

     I threw open the sash to allow some cool air into the room; the Italians seem to prefer hot interior spaces. Across the way, over a narrow side canal, I could see into the kitchen of an old woman dressed in the drab black uniform of the Italian widow. She was deftly chopping vegetables on a cutting board with machine-like precision: whack, whack, whack! She scrapped them off and into a bowl, then crushed a fist full of garlic, pulled out its golden kernel, shaving off translucent slices, then tossed them into a hot pan of shallow oil with a hiss, popping, and the pungent aroma of roasted garlic. I wished I could invite myself over, because I was sure her cooking would be better than most of the restaurants catering to tourists, though perhaps, not where I was heading.

     I put on a tweed sport coat to keep the nighttime chill of the lagoon at bay and stuffed enough Euros into my wallet to finance a third world country’s revolution. I was going to need them; I was off to Harry’s Bar, Hemingway’s favorite haunt just outside of one of the most expensive tourist areas of the world: Piazza San Marco. Going to Venice without a stop at Harry’s Bar is like going to New York City without seeing The Empire State Building; it just isn’t done.

     'Bar' is a misnomer, though, for Harry’s is one of the finest dining establishments in all of Venice, owned and operated by the Cipriani family for over seventy years. It was here that they founded their dining empire, and it would go on to include New York’s 'Rainbow Room,' a resort on Torcello, and 'Harry’s' franchises all over the world, but, of course, there is nothing quite like an original.

Harry's

     Harry’s is located at the edge of Piazza San Marco, which is a large open square full of pigeons, tourists, cafes, and Austrian waltz bands with people dancing lazy circles around them. The Basilica of Saint Mark is there, squat, muscular, and foreboding. Four rearing horses are atop the arched entranceway like martial sentinels glaring down with their polished equine eyes. Strange for a church, but this is Venice where nothing is as expected. The Doge’s Palace is beside it. Dark and ominous, it is the former seat of government for the Venetian Empire and looking every bit as intimidating as it ever has, especially at night. Across from the palace and at the edge of the expansive square is the Campanile of Saint Mark. Completed in the 15th Century and, at 315 feet, it's so tall one wonders how the skyscraper wasn’t invented earlier – probably because this one collapsed in 1908 and was rebuilt exactly as it was.
     Coming into Harry’s Bar, the room is immediately larger than it seems from the outside. There was seating in front of me - groups of small tables covered with fine white linens with well-dressed jocular people speaking excitedly. The gray granite bar to the left is not very large with seating perhaps for ten. Well-stocked Art Deco curvilinear shelves are behind it with a brushed aluminum clock in the center that has been spinning the hours since the thirties. The space is intimate, inviting, if a little cramped. The waiters and bar-staff wear double-breasted white dinner jackets and black evening trousers. Their service is patient and attentive. They are happy to make drink recommendations.

     Harry’s is famous for, among other things, inventing the Bellini: champagne mixed with freshly squeezed white peach juice. Although it’s an incomparably delicious drink and worth every one of the twelve Euros it costs, I simply couldn’t imagine Ernest knocking one back after a day of duck hunting in the lagoon. No, a Bellini would simply be too fruity for Papa.

     ‘I would like to have what Ernest Hemingway drank,’ and the bartender winked and made a Montgomery while describing to me how he had served this very drink to Ernest at his favorite table in the corner. About it were an attractive couple in their early thirties and, as if knowing why the bartender had gestured their way, they waved me over.

     ‘How do you do?’ the gentleman asked in that flawless British that is the envy of every Anglophile on my side of the Atlantic. He introduced me to his wife who had eyes like the serpentine marble on the façade of Saint Mark’s.

     He told me about other Americans they had seen and I cringed. I knew what was coming. He said how they could always tell who the Americans were; I wasn’t surprised when he described them as the loudest, the fattest, the worst dressed, and the tallest. Well, at least we were the tallest.

     ‘Ah, the Ugly American,’ I commiserated, ‘Dressing as though home in your living room is our cultural contribution to the world.’

     I asked him what had brought him to Venice and he answered with a single word, 'Hemingway.'

     Finding that we shared a similar pursuit and the same drink, we toasted, drank, and spoke until it had gotten very late and the slurring of our speech made communication difficult. After an unsuccessful attempt at conversing with a gorgeous young Italian woman (she smiling at me from the next table) and then enduring the gentle prod of the wait-staff to let us know it was time to leave, once the lights were turned down, we got the hint. Since our hotels were in the same direction, my new friends and I decided to walk home together. That was when things became very strange as things often do in Venice after dark.

     Leading the way and coming out of San Marco, I was accosted by a large man dressed in a black cloak, a black Bauto mask, and a tri-corn hat, an image most familiar to American audiences through the film Eyes Wide Shut. This sort of costume is typical for Carnivale, but that was months away. He said nothing, simply standing in front of me with his eyes staring out of the black sockets of his mask. If I had seen a fellow like this back home, I would have decked him. Here, though strange, it seemed kind of normal. I walked around him carefully and continued on.

     Our footsteps echoing off the exposed brick and plaster of the narrow alley, I heard a pitch-perfect vocalist bellowing an operatic scale from his shuttered window above us. He was doing this at two o’clock in the morning. I would hate to be this fellow’s neighbor. Until a few steps on, I heard the insistent thump-thumping of a techno bass beat. Peering down an alcove between two Medieval structures, I saw a large disco ball spinning above a writhing crowd as a mist was rising up from the canal.

     I was trying to make sense of all of this as we entered an obscure campo. A man was doing back-flips on a pair of short stilts under the dim light of a streetlamp while his girlfriend watched. I wondered if I had somehow stepped onto the set of a Fellini film.

     What a strange and surreal place this Venice is. It had reigned for over a thousand years as a capital of an empire in the eastern Mediterranean only to be overthrown by Napoleon, the Austrians, and Napoleon yet again. Its treasures had been violated, it’s dignity stripped, and it had been passed around more times than Jenna Jameson. Perhaps this has an effect on a place. Maybe, like some aging porn star, it would now do nearly anything for attention, not that I was in any position to argue with this, wandering its alleys in a drunken stupor.

     The young couple and I parted ways on the other side of the Rialto Bridge and somewhere near the fish market I sat down to rest and succumbed to the effects of a belly full of gin. I awoke perhaps an hour or two later, just as the sky was lightening over the church of San Giorgio Maggiore.

     I somehow found my hotel, woke up the night desk clerk by clanging the bell on the Baroque wooden counter, and he begrudgingly retrieved my key from the rack behind him while rubbing the sleep from his eyes. My room was at the top of the stairs leading down to the lobby. I stripped, lay down, and fell asleep safe in my bed, or so I thought.

     The next morning I awoke naked from the waist down and face pressed against the floor. I rose slowly, with my brain throbbing through my temples. I looked up and was shocked to lock eyes with a group of tourists coming up the staircase. I had left my door open all night. When I glanced at my watch, I realized it was open all morning as well; it was eleven-thirty. Why hadn’t anyone closed the door for me? Perhaps they were too polite, or too afraid to wake me up, or perhaps they were simply amused at the sight of a bare-assed American passed out on the floor and they wanted to share it with everyone else.

     And then the realization came, and it was more terrifying than anything else I could ever imagine. “Oh My God! It’s me. I am the Ugly American!”

     Yes, with one foolish, sophomoric, and undignified act, I had joined the hordes of obnoxious, the uneducated, and the unsophisticated. Oddly enough, I found the experience somehow liberating, as if I finally knew what it was to be American. Surely, passing out sprawled and naked on the floor was an inalienable right and it needed defending. Someone had to be that guy, and this time that guy was me. I had become part of a culture that had given the world so much and only asked for a little patience, understanding, and gratitude in return.

Laughing to myself, I closed the door, cleaned myself up, and then, trousers securely in place, bounded down the steps, through the lobby, and into the Venetian midday sun with my head held high. Needless to say, I skipped the complimentary breakfast.