Venice is an Eel

30 April 2010

On a map it was pointed out to me that Venice is like a fish; actually it’s more like a pudgy eel.  The city has banned straight lines and has made them all into intricate squiggles.  It is a place without cars – where would they go?  Even bicycles are rare as you couldn’t ride them over the myriad of step bridges.  So people walk.  And when the labyrinth you are walking down hits an impasse – as it often does – you simply turn around and connect to another part of the maze of narrow streets, alleys, passages, tunnels and then – low and behold – a magnificent square, a campo, opens up like a giant field of cobblestone, bright and airy as the passageway is dark. You don’t know where you are, but it doesn’t matter anymore.  Everywhere is home.

Water defines this place like nowhere else in the world – at least nowhere I know.  The tapestry of canals is the city’s circulatory system – part of an urban biology that is unique and surprisingly liveable.  Everything that is done elsewhere by gas guzzling trucks and cars is done here by boat and barge – quicker, easier, safer, cleaner.

At first I wondered about the elderly and the disabled.  How do they ever manage such a complex obstacle course?  Surprisingly Venice has a higher percentage of elderly and retired than most Italian cities – the average age here is well into the forties.  So how do the elderly get around?  They seem to manage.  I’ve seen people on crutches negotiate the steepest bridge, step by step.  They do it slowly without complaint.  When I was lugging my heavy bag over yet another barrier, climbing narrow stairways that led over one canal after another and muttering to myself how life must be an endurance test every day for people who live here, I noticed a man older than myself taking a barrow of building supplies that must have weighed twice as much as my suitcase over the same bridge with an ease and agility I could only admire.  Perhaps people live longer here because they have managed to make their entire city into an urban fitness trail where they work out daily till they die.  And it’s rare, I’m told, for children to ever fall into the canal.  Only tourists do that. Then they’re quickly fished out since the canals are alive all hours of the day and night.