Step in to the wood-panelled embrace of Harry's bar on St Mark's waterfront and you can imagine Ernest Hemingway holding out his hand to greet you. At the next table Orson Welles would be knocking back a Bellini -- the cocktail invented in this very bar.
Nothing has changed since they were both regulars.
Outside too, Venice still feels like a playground for the 1950s jet set, from the Brylcreemed waiters in St Mark's square, to the sleek lines of the water taxis and the suave blazers worn by their drivers. It's a city fit for film stars. Just not tourists.
PHOTO: AFP
"Scusi sir," came the tap on the shoulder as I stood gawping in Harry's doorway. "You must have full length trousers to enter." The white-jacketed waiter showed me the door.
For the record, they were immaculate three-quarter lengths, with creases. And actually I was glad -- today a Bellini costs NT$439. But Venice is like that: Everything around is so perfect that you can't help feeling you are the only blot on the landscape. The culturally rich backdrop only serves to show up your worst side.
And Venice does nothing to put you at ease. It is the world's most beautiful city, and knows it only too well. Centuries of compliments and fawning visitors have made it spoilt and rude. We were turned away from restaurants, ignored in cafes and ripped off in shops. You end up apologetically joining the procession of tourists, making sure you keep moving to avoid causing a blockage.
PHOTO: AP
But there is another way. Arrive in town on your own yacht and no matter what the city throws at you, you can't help but feel like a fully paid up member of the jet set. When you disembark, you carry with you a sense of smugness and superiority. You are, one might say, seeing Venice through the eyes of a local.
Doing so has never been easier, even if you've never sailed before and don't have anything near a celebrity bank balance.
Connoisseur, a British boating company, has just opened a new base that puts Venice and the islands surrounding it within easy striking distance, even for a long weekend. From Treviso, Venice's cheapo second airport, it's a 10-minute taxi ride to the boat yard in Casier. Here you're thrown the keys to your gin palace and set sail for the four-hour trip down the beautiful River Sile to Venice lagoon.
"So, who is il capitano?" asked the Italian boatyard boss, looking at each of us in turn. We stared blankly at each other, before I eventually raised my hand. The boss, named Douglas (rather disappointingly for an Italian sailor), sprang into a 15 minute Anglo-Italian sailing course -- "Always piano (softly), piano, ok?"
By 10:30 Saturday morning, when I'd normally just be surfacing, I was having a waterborne driving test on an Italian river.
The controls on our 14m, three-bedroom cruiser, were simple: just a steering wheel and a single lever for speed. Going in a straight line was anything but. Try to turn left and you ended up oversteering, heading straight towards the left bank. Correct yourself and you veer too far the other way, immediately on a collision course with the right. Douglas seemed far more concerned about the toilets. There are three on board and they are very easy to block, he stressed, with the solemnity of a man who'd had to do plenty of unblocking.
But soon we were away, in charge of our own vessel, gliding through the gorgeous countryside, looking across the back lawns of breathtaking Renaissance villas, and desperately trying to stop zig-zagging. We decided to stop for lunch at the first town, Casale, and suddenly here it was, approaching rather fast. All hands were on deck as we came into dock. I brought her in close, a touch of reverse thrust, then Crack! -- off we bounced, back out into the river. In his concern about the toilets, Douglas hadn't really made clear that mooring is by far the trickiest maneuver to master.
True, there was a manual onboard, but as we frantically flipped through it to find the page on mooring, the bank loomed large again.
With a couple more cracks, a bit of frenzied lasso work, some frankly mutinous questioning of il capitano's commands, and much hilarity amongst the passers-by onshore, we succeeded in attaching ourselves to terra firma.
Luckily Douglas also hadn't mentioned that the boat was worth over NT$11 million, which might have put a more sober spin on the business of mooring.
Two hours more, through a lock, and the river opened into the wide expanse of the Venice lagoon. Fishermen sat in rowing boats in the shallows, seagulls perched on the shaved tree trunks that mark the deep water channels, and the city's spires and bell towers started to prick up on the horizon.
Crack! -- We made landfall at Burano, a picturesque outlying island, where the close-packed fishermen's houses are painted bright primary colors to help guide boats home through the mist. The area round the vaporetto (water bus) station was crammed with tourists, but we moored on a quiet back canal, and stocked up on provisions before setting off for Venice itself.
Seeing the cityscape, familiar from so many films and paintings, rise out of the water in front of the bows of your little boat is magical, especially at sunset, and even more so after several poop-deck snifters at Burano. The alternatives, coming in over the bridge by train or on a crowded ferry, don't come close.
After another white-knuckle mooring in a marina filled with expensive sailing boats, we set off into town. But the further away we got from the boat, the more its buzz wore off, and we found ourselves drifting back down to the reality of being a tourist in Venice.
We walked for ages to find La Zucca, a recommended restaurant on Ponte del Megio. When we finally found it I was dismayed to see a notice on the door: "Fully booked," I read out loud.
"Congratulations, someone can read!" said the women sitting at the table outside. I counted to 10 and remembered I had my own yacht.
Instead of La Zucca's riverside terrace, we ended up sitting inside a stiflingly hot pizzeria with American football memorabilia on the walls and other disappointed tourists for company. The menu had 100 different pizzas. On our testing, none of them turned out to be very nice. But stepping back on board the boat, to fall asleep to the sound of gently lapping water, was an instant tonic.
The next day brought the main event: cruising into the center of town, the stretch of water between St Mark's square, the end of the Grand Canal, and the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore on the opposite bank. Everywhere we looked grand palaces and churches jostled to get to the water's edge. The sun was blazing, the water blue, and we couldn't quite believe someone had allowed us to be here, bobbing among the gondoliers and vaporetti. I also couldn't believe how much the Doges' Palace looked like the one in Las Vegas.
It was around this time that our boat started to feel extremely slow. Presumably to reduce the danger of tourists ramming the Rialto bridge, our Elegance cruiser was limited to about 8kph. Back on the river this seemed more than enough. Crossing the central waterways, dodging the bows of eight lanes of shipping from rowboats to car ferries, it felt like tip-toeing across a motorway.
Thrilled by the view, and delighted to have survived the traffic, we pulled up at some free moorings just down from the Hotel Cipriani (where suites cost up to NT$150,000 a night). We piled off the boat elated, and headed to the restaurant Los Murales. Sitting down outside, we marvelled at the view back across the water to St Mark's.
Then the owner stuck her head out of the door to greet us: "Scusi! Closed!" She literally spat at us, even though it was an hour before closing time.
While having your own boat is a glorious way of seeing the sights of central Venice, it also opens the door to the numerous less-visited islands of the lagoon.
On our final day, we headed for lunch to the island of Torcello, a few kilometers across the water from Venice's tourist-swamped city center. On Torcello you suddenly find yourself in the middle of the countryside. We walked along a path from the deserted quayside to the stunning 11th-century church, and saw no one except old men pulling vegetables in the field.
Hidden in the heart of the island is a little cluster of restaurants. Among them is Locanda Cipriani, which although it looks nothing from the outside, is Italy's most famous restaurant, its sumptuous seafood a magnet for film stars and royals. It was shut.
We ended up having lunch back on deck. As we sat there, a ferry load of tourists pulled up at the quayside beside us. They spilled onto the land, looking at us with envious eyes. Lunch may have been only a commercially produced cake, but we felt like film stars all the same.
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