Baby in La Serenissima
If anyone is looking into pitching a new reality show, my idea is a series of absurd challenges for first-time parents with a tiny baby. The first challenge (and by ‘first’ I mean after mastering the concepts of feeding, changing, bathing, and generally dealing with a baby, all of which would constitute an entire absurd reality show alone) should be to take the baby on a crowded train ride into the most thronging, touristed, and inconvenient city in the world on a holiday weekend: that would be Venice, and that would be exactly what we did on Easter Monday. Iwona and Lech, who work as restorers of art, had always wanted to see Venice, and being so close it seemed silly to let a little thing like a baby get in the way of taking a quick day-trip. We did debate about one of us staying home with the boy, but the weather was beautiful and it seemed like a good opportunity to begin living more or less normally in spite of the little dictator.
So it was a day of many firsts for Adam: first train ride, first meal on a train, first boat ride, first meal on a boat, etc. He snoozed serenely through most of it all, surprisingly (and fortunately) through the most hectic stages, for example when the train got too crowded to breathe, and pretty much every step we took through the packed, milling, uneven, stepped-bridged and rubbish-strewn-yet-still-amazing streets of Venice. Speaking city-wise, this is the last place you want to try pushing a voziček.
But the public transport situation was a lot less nightmarish than anticipated. Here’s Adam lunching his way past the Ca’ d’Oro stop on the No. 1 vaporetto:
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Venice’s Grand Canal |
When we got to the Piazza San Marco stop we were overwhelmed by the crowds. It shouldn’t have come as any surprise. It seems to me that no matter when you go nowadays, Venice is going to be a zoo so you may as well just try to deal with it. In this case dealing with it entailed using the Dortmunders as linebackers, bodyguards, and stevedores to help us move the voziček through the city’s squares and alleys and over the fondimenti and bridges at a glacial pace. Below is the obligatory touristy photo in front of the Doge’s Palace. Unfortunately none of these photographs, not even the panorama at the top, do justice to the claustrophobic CRUSH of people. I think this was intensified for me by the stress of keeping Adam from being carried away by the tide of gapers in his robust voziček or tipped into a canal from a crowded bridge as we carried him over sedan-chair style.
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I wanted to find the church of Sta. Maria Formosa because of what my mother’s Edwardian guidebook had to say about it. In addition to being set in a peaceful and pleasant campo (where they apparently used to hold bullfights), its campanile was supposed to have an interesting sculpture on it. My interest in art and architecture isn’t what it once was, but I was taken by this quote from Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice:
“A head, — huge, inhuman, and monstrous, leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be beheld for more than an instant.”
So of course we had to go find it so we could do the obvious:
bestial degradation” |
Each time I go to Venice I like it a little better. It still smells more like a sewer than you might wish and the crowds get more and more intense as the watery end draws nearer, but it is a damn compelling place that everyone ought to see once, if only to experience what the 1,500-year culmination of a sketchy idea for a city looks like. It’s always nice, too, to go with someone who hasn’t been there before, and to get vicariously some of the shock the place can instill. And I think that, no matter how many pictures, documentaries, travelogues you’ve seen, it’s a little like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon: nothing can really prepare you for what it’s like to actually be there. Adam slept through almost his entire first visit to
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just waking up |
La Serenissima, which I can’t really blame him for. He may regret this when Venice finally dips beneath the waves (yes, it’s still sinking), but then again I doubt that he’d remember much about the trip even if he’d been wide awake. And with luck and the complicated tidal-management system under discussion it may last long enough for him to take his son there one day. Maybe. And he did wake up fully just in time for the train ride home, which he did not seem to love. His commentary on the shortcomings of the Italian rail system no doubt delighted all in 2nd class.
hey, wonderful blog! nice also to see someone else negotiating different parts of Europe with a baby. We’ve been travelling with our son since he was three months old. (he is now 18 months), It’s ALWAYS worth it, but never quite the same as before-baby, obviously!
Comment by faith — Friday 1 April 05 @ 23.14 MST+2.00
Well, we have many the same troubles when we take the baby to the local Wal-Mart–but at least you were in Venice, man.
Comment by julie — Tuesday 3 May 05 @ 20.50 MDT+2.00
Nice. Went to Venice between Palm Sunday & day before Easter when I was 18 & living in Graz. This brought back memories. Man, I want to go back to Europe so bad I can taste it, so if you can post link to the job fair you went to in London, I would appreciate it to help me afford to spend some time in Eastern Europe starting w/ Ljubljana.
Comment by dstile — Wednesday 7 January 09 @ 09.31 MST+2.00