I might have added gondolas and water taxis as well, for Venice was one of the destinations in my latest adventure.  As it happened, among the many means of transport we had to employ to get to our various watering holes, gondolas and donkeys were spared.  We did, however, take regional buses – I hear the gasps in the gallery – and even bicycles to get here and there.  Ah yes, not to mention an Italian regional train, which must perforce have its own classification.

 

I digress. (If this were a legal submission written by one of my colleagues, I would have written on the margins, in bold and blue type, that first, an introduction can hardly be a digression but, second, the paragraph above, telling you exactly nothing about the where and the how and the why of this email, could never serve as an introduction in any event. And if you were my colleague, you would have told me, “your point is noted” and went on with whatever you were doing without paying the least attention to my comments.  But of course, this is not a legal submission, and had it been one, you would not bother to read it.  This assumes an interest on your part to read something other than a legal submission, of course – such as a travelogue … a tall assumption, I grant you.  Still.  I digress again.)

 

I went first to Sienna to have lunch with friends of mine who were visiting Italy from Canada.  Getting the Italian railway's timetable to work with my dining hours did not prove entirely successful, so I ended up taking the train from Geneva to Florence, only to rent a car there to drive down to Sienna.  The train ride was uneventful; indeed, the first train was only 30 minutes late and so I had lots of time – exactly five minutes – to get to the next train.  This one also arrived late – I don't know if Mussolini really did make the trains run on time, but if he did, I can see the sense of awe and wonder among his countrymen. 

 

So the train was late: no matter, for there was, already, a huge lineup at the car hire company.  I finally got to the agent, who dealt with my reservation while shouting into the phone (she could well have been making a reservation at the local pizzeria for all I know – in Italy, everyone seems to be shouting over one thing or another), dealing with the drivers, talking to three other customers, and occasionally throwing things at the computer.  The forms printed out, she marched out to shout some more at no one in particular, gave directions to a stranded tourist – they can be ever so helpful, those Italians – and absent-mindedly put some stuff in front of me to sign.  She then gave me the keys to a White Fiat Punta, which on closer inspection (after fifteen minutes of looking for it) established itself as a Blue Fiat Panda.  No matter.  While answering the phone, cursing the computer, and taking another customer, the good lady distractedly marked some squiggles on the map, purportedly pointing the way to the road to Sienna.  I thanked her, got into the White Punta parading as a Blue Panda and drove off.

 

Getting out of Florence by car is about as difficult as your imagination can handle, and then some, but get out I eventually did (when in doubt, follow what looks like a regional bus, even if you have to inhale carcinogenic fumes for fifteen minutes – at least they know where they are going).  Finding the road to Sienna was not a problem only after I determined that the blotch of blue on the blue of a sign at a major fork in the road was actually “Sienna” covered over by a prankster. 

Oh that Italian sense of humour. 

 

In Sienna, I parked the car at the “Il Campo” parking lot, which is a twenty minute walk through a maze of medieval road from the “Il Campo” Piazza (as opposed to half a dozen other parking lots that were under the Piazza itself but that had less alluring names – the University Parking, the Central Parking, the Fleece-the-Tourist Parking and so on).  Much like elsewhere in Italy, so as to ensure that tourists fully see the city, the city fathers of Sienna had decided that signage was to be alternately unhelpful, positively misleading or, thankfully, often nonexistent.  It was at these junctures, when I had no idea where things were, that I simply followed the crowds, who eventually led me to the great Piazza.

 

I finally found Val and Anne, my friends from Canada, seated at a lovely restaurant across from the Tower.  I say this much about the Piazza del Campo: it is immense.  And, in its shape and the slant of the ground, unique among all the piazzas, places and town squares I have seen in Europe.  The lunch was excellent; the company superlative; the weather wonderful, and the biscotti afterwards simply divine.  Around six we wandered back to the car to drive to Venice for the evening.

 

It has been said that Venice is among the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful, of European cities.  And the most romantic.  Beauty and Romance being in the eyes of the beholder, I have to say bully for whoever thinks so.  Don't get me wrong: it is indeed a beautiful city, once you get past the immense number of tourists choking the waterways and the July stench of the lagoon and the canals choking the tourists.  What's more, we stayed at a lovely hotel right on the Grand Canal, across the water from the train station and beautiful bridges and so on.  Whatever the city had to offer, then, was not in any way diminished by the experience of actually staying there.  And yet …

 

The first night we set out to go to the Piazza San Marco.  Once we got there, of course, it was well worth the trip.  The Piazza was all lit up; musical stands were set up underneath the arcades and small bands and orchestras played the Blue Danube (??!!), Glen Miller classics and the odd Cole Porter.  On more than one occasion I was tempted to go and ask a Nike-clad American tourist for a Waltz or belt out “Night and Day” to the accompaniment of the slightly out of tune orchestra.  It was Venice, after all: along with the Doge's grand palace, a little bit of cheese was not only to be expected, but positively required. 

 

But it had taken us a good hour to get there on foot from the hotel (“Steps Away From All Major Attractions”).  Here and there along the way there had been signs to “Pza S. Marco” taking us down alley ways that ended in canals, or over birdges that led to nowhere in particular.  Some signs led us into Piazzas with a dozen exits of their own and no further signs to guide us through.  For the most part, however, it was a pure guessing game on our part getting to the San Marco.  Between fatigue (I had got on the train to Florence at 5:40 that same morning) and frustration (visions of getting lost in Cinque Terre, and getting lost in Sienna, and getting lost … you get the picture) the utter unhelpfulness of the signs had begun to get to me.  And then, fifteen minutes after we got to the San Marco, the bands wrapped up, the bars closed, and we had to stagger back to the hotel.  How, I cannot now recall, even though I was stone sober.  Perhaps because I was stone sober.

 

The next day we headed back to the San Marco.  Having learned our lesson, this time we simply followed the crowds – including when the said crowds themselves got confused and started bleating like sheep for their shepherd.  I exaggerate, though it is not unusual to see whole groups of people aimlessly turning round and round trying to find a way out of the labyrinth of the city.  I guess we could have taken a water taxi, or a gondola.  Next time.

 

The San Marco is every bit as lovely as writers and cinematographers make it, and every bit as crowded as it is reputed to be.  And it is stunningly attractive.  It has not the charm of the Grand Place in Brussels – there is a cold mathematical quality to the arcades around the Piazza – but in that it rivals my favourite public square in Europe for character and beauty there is no doubt.  We scaled the campanile and had a wonderful view of the city.  Simply gorgeous.  After that, we walked around exploring hidden nooks and crags.  We stopped briefly for lunch, only to be mugged by the licensed highway robbers that do double duty as waiting staff at restaurants.  We walked around some more, drank beer, found a place to hang out for the World Cup

finals, drank more beer, watched the game, saw Zidane's head butt, drank some more beer and stumbled back to the hotel without once falling into a canal.

 

Final impressions?  Standing before the Duomo and the Doge's palace in Piazza San Marco, I was of course impressed, awed even, by the artistry of the architects, and the sheer wealth of the Republic that built and maintained, over many centuries, this magnificent monument to human ingenuity.  Aye, but there's the rub.  For the immense wealth of the city and its domination of the Eastern Mediterranean had its origins in an act of pillage and rapine unparalleled in savagery even in its own time, the early Thirteenth Century, not one known for the gentleness of its plunder.  This is the sack of Constantinople in the course of what is bewilderingly known as the Fourth Crusade. 

 

Bewildering, because of course Constantinople was the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire, against which the Christian Venetian Republic, armed with the sanction of the Christian Roman Pope, waged a “crusade”.  It is an invention of Western historians, convenient for the pride of the Oriental, that the Eastern Roman Empire was felled by the Ottomans in the course of the Fifteenth Century; it was a Christian hand, supported by the Catholic Church, that put the dagger in the heart of the ailing kingdom. 

 

And let us be clear: the object was not the mere recovery of something the West had lost; it was not even mere rapine.  Venetians, or their agents, did not just steal all there was to take (including some 22 purported heads of St. John).  Rather, the invaders set the city on fire with the hope of putting it out of commission for good, so that Venice would become the chief trade intermediary between the Muslims of Asia Minor and the Levant, and the Christian world.  That Constantinople lasted for another three hundred years to finally fall to the Ottomans simply underlines the city's ancient residual strength.

 

Why mention this?  Because, standing there in front of the Doge's palace built on the blood of Greek Christians, I thought how utterly fantastic, how absurdly idiotic, how deliciously odd it would be if a batch of Greek suicide bombers were to seek revenge against Venice for its violence during the Crusades.  Is that not the language Osama uses in reference to the Christian world, after all?  What is more, it seems to me that the Greeks would have a far better case against the Venetians than the Muslims do against the Christian world: I mean, the First Crusade was launched only after the Muslims attacked and conquered Christian Jerusalem; it was, in the vernacular of our times, a search and recovery outing for the European crusaders.  The Christians went back in the Second and Third Crusades, but then were resisted and repelled by the Muslim troops.  Unable to take back the Holy Land – unable, that is, to inflict any real harm on Muslim conquests – the “crusaders” turned on the soft Greeks of Asia Minor who represented a far more attractive target.  While Saladdin, the Conqueror of Jerusalem, and his progeny lolled about their Harems in relative peace and signed commercial treaties with the city states of the Italian peninsula, the Greek Emperor was castrated, flayed, quartered and fed to the dogs, by Venetian troops, as his capital burned to a cinder.

 

Well, who has a right to be aggrieved?

 

Historical grievances abound the world over; all we need to do to find them is to look around us: every church stone was laid upon its foundations by the sweat, tears and blood of some oppressed peoples somewhere.  It is what we do with that grievance that sets us apart, the civilised from the uncivilised.  And so it is that eight hundred years after the sack of the jewel of the Byzantine Empire, Venetian taxpayers pay for Greek roads and Olympic pavilions, while Osama's men perform ritual acts of slaughter against the innocent. 

 

And so it goes.

 

From Venice we took a train to Trieste, a bus to Rijeka, and a catamaran to the island of Rab.  The walled principal hamlet is actually an ancient Venetian colony and dates from … you guessed it, the XI-XIII centuries, when Venice was at the height of its commercial and military prowess.  The village of Rab is quite fetching, with its four bell-towers, medieval walls and large stone streets. There are gelaterias and pizzerias every two steps, catering mostly to the German tourists who have little notion and less interest as to where they really are, as long as the food is plentiful, meaty and cheap, and the sun is accommodating.  There were a few good restaurants that sold overgrilled fish and steak and soggy salads; but after our dining experience in Venice (€75 for a pasta lunch), just about anything in Croatia would have been welcome.

 

For the first three days our principal mode of transport was the bicycles we had rented upon arrival.  There were a few steep hills to traverse, but well worth the effort.  The first day we spent in a natural reserve on the north west of the island; on the second day we headed straight north for more developed areas; and on the third day we went to the extreme south in search of relatively secluded beaches.  On the fourth day we took a bus to the north east, where there are a few sandy beaches around – if you go there, keep to the sand, for the rest of the area is covered in fairly sharp volcanic rocks.  Our last dinner was a huge Sea Bream that we finished with some difficulty (and with the help of a scrawny black cat who insistent on stealing food from my fork).

 

The return trip proved a bit of a challenge.  We got to the port around 6:30 to take the catamaran back to Rijeka, where we got the bus to Trieste.  Between passport checks and traffic, the bus ended up being about 30 minutes late, giving me all of ten minutes to get my tickets and run to the train.  From there, I went back to Venice, waited around another 30 minutes, and caught the Cisalpine direct to Geneva.  I had an overpriced and totally unsatisfactory risotto in the train restaurant – but the aperitif was free, the decor elegant, and the sights outside simply enchanting (we were travelling all along the Lakes).  I got back to Geneva exactly eighteen hours after having left the hotel room.

 

Pictures you can find at: