Roger Zubrinich and Judy Peters like to travel. A lot. And primarily, but not exclusively, to Europe. The attraction of Europe, apart from its more or less limitless offerings, is that they are able to drive their way around. Every European summer from 1994 to 2019 after which the pandemic halted travel, they’ve picked up a lease car, most often in Paris but not always, and have driven to places large and small across Europe and the UK. Roger drives, Judy navigates, and yes, they’re still together.
Sometimes the excursions have been as short as four weeks, other times as long as 12 weeks. They have driven as far north as Lulea in Sweden, which is about 110 kilometres below the Arctic Circle, and as far east as the Black Sea in Romania and Bulgaria. In fact, they’ve driven through most countries in Europe, some numerous times, with the exceptions being countries such as the Ukraine that are excluded by the lease car insurance. Given that they can’t travel at present, Roger has decided to revisit some of their destinations in writing. He has no doubt that driving to them is infinitely easier.
By Robert Zubrinich
Welcome to Venice
When Judy and I arrived in Venice for the very first time, at the end of a night train ride following the return of our lease car in Nice, we weren’t predisposed to extol the virtues of this watery city. We picked our way, fatigued and gritty eyed, through travellers sitting on the steps at the entrance to the St Lucia railway station, unprepared for the alien world we were about to encounter.
We wrestled our cases down the steps to the plaza in front of the station, tasted the sour
tang of the salt rich Venetian air and heard for the first time the gurgling roar of a vaporetto docking at a nearby stop. Directly opposite, from our position on Fondamenta Santa Lucia, we had our first viewing of the Grand Canal. Whining outboards, throaty water taxis and chugging industrial barges forged through waters still recovering from the churning of the vaporetto.
On the other side of the canal, in plain view from the railway station, squatted San Simeon Piccolo. This surely must be one of the odder of the multitude of churches in Venice. It’s narrow, tallish and strangely disproportionate. The church, with its columned porch and engraved pediment, has sitting on top a green oxidised dome that is almost as tall as the church itself. The sum effect is that of a green egg sitting in an ornate eggcup.
But I am of course claiming knowledge that I didn’t possess then. I had no idea that I was viewing the church from a fondamenta. For those interested, it actually means a street that runs parallel to a canal.
I had no idea of the name of the church. I didn’t know that the water ferries were called vaporetti (vaporetto singular and meaning steamboats, as they originally were) and I didn’t know that the Venice railway station was called the Santa Lucia station. If you’re wondering (and I wasn’t) how it came to pass that a railway station carries the name of a female saint, it’s because a church of the same name was demolished in around 1860 to make way for it. Fair enough too. Venice has churches to spare.
On that sunny morning, standing before the Grand Canal in front of the railway station, the only certain knowledge I had was scribbled on a snatch of paper – the name and address of the hotel that we’d belatedly booked from Nice. That had been no easy task. We’d tried calling a number of hotels that we could afford from a list in a travel guide. All except one was full. We were told that the problem was created by an international convention of gynaecologists. Fancy that. Well-heeled gynaecologists slumming it in Venice. Mind you, I didn’t for a moment think that they’d taken rooms in hotels that we could afford. Those rooms surely had been taken by people who were shut out of their preferred hotels by advance convention bookings.
The upshot of this is that we managed to scrabble a hotel room with no bathroom for the first night and one with ensuite facilities in the same hotel for the remainder of our stay. The hotel, a one-star outfit of course, was on Rio Terra Lisca Di Spagna, and no, we didn’t have a clue where that place was, or indeed what it was. We know now of course that any address beginning with Rio Terra is a street created by a landfilled canal.
By the time we found the hotel, patience was in short supply and frustration and ill temper were abundant – a perfect formula for appreciating the down-at-heel area just past the entrance door.
We had walked into what appeared to be a burgeoning brawl. A mixed group of youngish travellers was at a shabby reception counter in animated debate with the young man behind it and were it seemed, losing. He spoke Italian louder and faster, gestured more grandly, segued neatly between frowns, smiles and grimaces, and when necessary, underscored his argument by pounding the palm of his hand on the countertop.
While we waited at the rear of the group for the imbroglio to be sorted, we surveyed our surroundings. We were in a room that real estate agents would call compact, but which we would describe generously as small. It was narrow, crowded, possessed of nicotine-stained green walls and doubled as a reception area and breakfast cranny. The strident voices in front of us competing with the shouting of the breakfast crowd and the crashing and clanging of dishes and utensils demanded industry-rated ear protectors.
The host eventually noticed us and bellowed at us in Italian.
‘Australian,’ we shouted back.
‘Reservation?’ This in English.
‘Yes.’
‘Name?’
We’d booked in my wife’s name because it contains two syllables and is pronounceable. He checked the booking sheet. Meanwhile the crowd in front continued to assail him with demands.
‘Not cleaned. Have a coffee.’ He gestured towards the breakfast circus.
We eased into seats at the only unoccupied table that was squeezed under stairs. Eventually a waitress dumped cups of coffee in front of us with a curt ‘Prego’ that sounded like a threat. Spilled coffee swilled in the saucers as she marched off.
Welcome to Venice.
The coffee was excessively black, smelled excessively stewed, and possessed the texture and quite possibly the taste of canal silt. The bonus serves of toast were brick hard and inedible.
We were standing in our room within an hour or so which, to be fair, given the bedlam around us and an obviously full house, was not a bad outcome given that it was only about 10 am and the room had to be cleaned. It too was painted green; the soiled and peeling state of the walls suggested at some time in the distant past. The room was cell-like and devoid of windows. A metal almost double bed was pushed up against a wall, a ramshackle wardrobe leaned against another, and a rust-stained washbasin was plugged into the wall that housed the door. I eyed the basin suspiciously, quite reasonably assuming that it had been pissed in regularly by occupants of the room for the century or so since it was installed.
We were impatient for a recuperative shower, but impatience is rarely rewarded, and this occasion was no exception. We were at the end of a line of wasted young men and women who had dragged themselves from bed after a night of anything that had nothing to do with virtue. Their age also led me to a belated understanding that the fourth floor of the hotel was in effect a quasi-backpacker’s hostel and that we were fortunate to have a bed and room to ourselves rather than bunks in a shared room.
When I eventually got into the shower cubicle I found a forensic scientist’s delight. Dark mould grew enthusiastically at the junction of the tiled floor and the walls, and there was no doubt about the provenance of the dark curly hair that bunched around the floor drain and decorated the soap holder. Within a minute or so I could feel tinea growing between my toes and heading towards my ankles.
Possibly refreshed after impossibly quick showers, and hoping we were disease free, we hurried down the stairs and out the front door. Venice was waiting.
Venerable Venice
Venice. The word evokes in most people images of canals, gondolas and gondoliers with striped shirts. The more informed will think of Piazza San Marco, the Basilica, the Doges’ Palace, the grand palaces on the very Grand Canal and agree that Venice is the place to visit. When we escaped from our down-at-heel hotel on the very first morning of our very first visit some years ago, eager to check the place out, that was pretty much the sum of our knowledge too.
Now, numerous visits later, my knowledge of Venice is rather more elaborated than it was then, even though Venice is beguiling and elusive in equal parts and the visitor is destined always to be the outsider.
My wife and I understood this instinctively on that first day during a transcendental moment on the Rialto Bridge that spans the Grand Canal. We had managed to find the bridge – a genuine achievement for the neophyte visitor – and to push our way up the outer steps on the northern side. We waited patiently for a place at the top of the centre hump that was crammed with gawking tourists, and eventually from that high point looked down over the canal. Below and before us it carved a salty green, north-westerly arc past what we later discovered to be the fish market on the west bank.
Transcendental? Indeed. Enough for us to know even then after a mere day we would be back. And we have been, and on each visit have learned more, discovered more, seen more and felt more of Venice. Its pull doesn’t fade so long as the curious visitor adapts as the city does to its changing circumstances.
On that first occasion, looking down from our elevated perspective from the hump of the bridge, it seemed we were witness to a magnificent city emerged from ebbing floodwaters; a latter-day Atlantis risen. Exotic pastel-hued palaces; grand, elegant, often decrepit, furnished with ornate window arches and entrances, lined the right bank. The water of the canal lapping at their footings cast rippled patterns on the walls. Striped mooring poles and platforms afforded access to watercraft in front of many. On the left bank an elegant stained palace abutted the bridge. Vaporetti with snub noses and plump rears, brimful with tourists, carved through the water. Sleek, tanned timber-hulled water taxis ferried the more affluent who lounged nonchalantly at the rear on plush red cushions. Barges carrying building materials, produce and other necessities of life grumbled past below: a water ambulance with the prow lifted proud of the water sped around the curve with its lights flashing and siren blaring. And crossing the canal were glossy black, hard-shelled gondolas, unhurried, propelled with grace by gondoliers wearing distinctive striped shirts and flat straw hats: the pervasive symbols of Venice made real. The sensation was visceral.
This was Venice … and we were there.
Much later, when I reflected on these first moments on the Rialto Bridge, I understood that the intensity of my response was informed not simply by the grand palaces and the river activity, but also by an unrealised sense of just how alien the Venice environment actually is. Buildings lining the main thoroughfare surrounded by lapping water while various watercraft ferried people back and forth was, in my experience, the stuff of natural disasters caught on television news. So, it took some adjustment, to accommodate the fact that the watery thoroughfares and byways that separate the 118 islands that constitute Venice were the main transport conduits by which the Venetians got around – as well of course, as the numerous calle, fondamenta, and rio tera that are pathways for foot traffic. The 400 or so footbridges arching over in the vicinity of 170 canals assist in this enterprise.
Venice, like any city, is a living organism that depends on complex systems to survive. People need to move about and walking is not always feasible – think crowds of tourists. Or sensible – think winter with rain and tides. There is public transport – vaporetti, water taxis, traghetti, and gondolas – but Venetians also like independence. We possess cars, motorcycles and bicycles; they possess boats. Goods need to be moved. We have trucks and vans; they have barges. Rubbish has to be collected. How? By boat of course, after it’s initially taken from streets and lanes by person drawn carts. People get sick. Water ambulances take them to hospital. Houses and shops catch fire. Fireboats extinguish them.
I half-registered these oddities when I first saw the canal, but many years hence, and after numerous visits, the canals as conduits for daily life continue to fascinate. Sitting with a glass of prosecco watching boat traffic on the Grand Canal is a pleasure to be enjoyed only in this remarkable place. Or slumming it at night, drinking cheap wine and watching the boat traffic and the water-borne hoons on the lagoon opposite Murano and the communal cemetery island isn’t to be sniffed at either.
Honesty also compels me to say that the many pleasures and mysteries of Venice have offsets, the most significant being the crushing high-season crowds of day-trippers in the popular tourist spots and on the routes to them. The consequences for residents are almost unimaginable. Pedestrians risk suffocation, kneecapping, corked thighs, grazed calves and cardiac arrest as they fight their way to their destinations. But that’s a story for another time.