Have you been to Venice this summer? Have you seen the loathing? Have you smelt the hatred? Because, dear reader, it’s directed at you. Venice is thinking about banning day-trippers. It may charge a flat fee for entry, or perhaps refuse admittance to people without hotel bookings. It isn’t sure of the details yet; it is only sure of its disgust for us, the people who keep Venice nailed to her respirator. Every day tourists double Venice’s population of 60,028 and the Venetians are up against an alley wall, staring at us with invisible shotguns. Why do they hate us? Shouldn’t they love us?
Venice Mayor Massimo Cacciari was recently asked if he would close Venice to tourists.
“Yes,” he replied, “or perhaps, on reflection, a little entrance examination and a little fee.”
They have a name for it in Venice — they call it “alley rage.”
Well, I have tourist rage. I love Venice and I will be sad when the final tower sinks and emits a little belch of “ciao!” But why must she go like this — ungraciously, without thanks for all the money I spent on ugly Harlequin masks and bad food and the pair of glass earrings that broke? It is a bitter end to a wonderful history — a Verdi opera ending with an aria by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Who are the Venetians? If you just pop into Venice, as most people do, you will imagine they are a surly people who sell ice-creams and, when the waters are high and everyone has to walk around on wooden duckboards, take pleasure in throwing tourists into the sea. This happened to a friend of mine who was on his way to Mass. He went to find God, but he swallowed sea-water.
But the Venetians are not ice-cream sellers by birthright. They fled from the marauding barbarians who kicked down the Roman Empire, swam into the lagoon and built a city. They became fantastically wealthy merchants and devised absurd, almost admirably ridiculous titles for themselves — La Serenissima, the serene one (it was a lie; they were greedy, not serene) and Lords and Masters of a Quarter and a Half-quarter of the Roman Empire. Each citizen seemed to be half spin doctor, half thief.
They stole an empire and branded it like Coke. They sacked Constantinople by tricking the second Crusader army into helping them. They weren’t nice to each other, either. Legend tells that the clock masters who built the clock in St Mark’s Square were blinded, to stop them designing a clock as beautiful for anyone else. And they strangled people a lot. Marry that state of mind to Disneyland and you get Venice. It’s Mickey Mouse with a club studded with razors; Rome with Rohypnol and a sack for your body.
In Venice, the hatred is like a smile. They hate the day-trippers who come in for just a day, gaze at St Mark’s and drop a piece of litter in greeting. They hate the wealthy people who come in, buy palazzos and stay in them for only a few months a year. And they hate the people who come in on the cruise ships. They greet cruise ships with huge signs outside the Doge’s Palace that say: “Tourists Go Home.” I have seen this with my own amazed eyes. There may be an idea to distribute “We Hate Tourists” pins to the pigeons of St Mark’s, or perhaps I dreamt that.
And when you go to Venice as a tourist, you tolerate it. The food is disgusting — the worst in Europe — and this is Italy, so it can only be deliberate. They are giggling over the horror in the kitchens — I know it. And the restaurants all close at 9pm. Possibly from shame, and possibly just for the pleasure of telling you to go starve because they are closed. Even if they are full of happy Venetians eating, they are closed. Closed. Closed. Closed.
Enjoy the apartheid! If you are a tourist and you get on a boat in Venice you pay 6.5 euros (US$9.48). If you are a resident you pay 1.1 euros. If you are a tourist and you go to a tomato stall and pick up a tomato, the guy will snatch it off you and give you an inferior tomato because he is saving the decent tomatoes for the Venetians. And I know why; I even feel a little pity for them. It is a hatred born of humiliation. In the 16th century the Emperor Charles V, the most powerful man in Europe, dropped to his knees to pick up the Venetian painter Titian’s paintbrush. Today, US President Barack Obama wouldn’t stoop down for a pencil. They have lost the empire. They want to keep the tomatoes.
I do partly blame the travel writers. The absence of cars sends all the travel writers into a kind of mass psychosis, like lemmings with plane tickets. They go mad in Venice; they explode with watery metaphors like too many ice-cubes loaded into a Bellini glass. There have been more rubbish metaphors written about Venice than any other city on Earth. And the Venetians absorb them, smile, and hate us some more.
Somebody needs to drag the Venetians out of the Adriatic onto a couch. The problem isn’t the people who want to view the sinking city, Lords and Masters of a Quarter and a Half-quarter of the Roman Empire. It’s the sea. Venice won’t survive global warming — it is the Bangladesh of Europe. So let us in, freely, Mayor Cacciari, and with thanks, before you drown. Ciao.
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