Italy: By any nickname, Venice is lovely

Venice: Our Italian gondolier, Lorenzo, told us Venice has nearly as many nicknames as bridges.

This is an exaggeration, for spans over the canals number nearly 400, but Lorenzo did easily spit out a mouthful of sobriquets: La Serenissima (The Most Serene), Queen of the Adriatic, The Floating City, and The City of (take your pick) Canals / Water / Bridges / Love / Masks, the latter relating to the annual Carnival.

Not to quibble with Lorenzo, who shares his name with Jessica’s lover in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and whose own family roots reach down through the shallow waters of the canals deep into the earth below, but I always thought Paris owned trademark rights to “The City of Love.”

And yet after an hour gliding as serenely as an autumn breeze through a labyrinth of canals, I concluded that all of the nicknames are fitting — most especially, perhaps, The City of Love. After all, my wife and I, seated together on a narrow wooden seat, on a Venetian afternoon as sunny and warm as the Ventura day we exchanged wedding vows exactly 40 years earlier, at one point floated past Casanova’s Palace.

To be sure, there is much to love about this enchanted city. Upon our arrival less than 24 hours before, after checking into our hotel after a long, long, long night, day and evening of travel, we found a nearby trattoria — cozy Italian restaurant. It was well past 9 o’clock when we were seated at a table for two on the patio, under the stars with an orange half-moon rising, the lapping water of the Grand Canal a short stone toss away. The pasta and desserts, all homemade by Maria the owner, were as perfect as the setting.

The following day, our actual anniversary, we visited St. Mark’s Square and the magnificent Basilica di San Marco. Thereupon, we took to heart — and feet — the sage advice a dear friend of mine, a travel writer who has visited the four corners of the globe, always reminds me of before I embark on a trip: “Be sure to turn down a hidden alleyway, or go inside a quiet doorway off the beaten path, because that’s where you’ll find some of the most memorable experiences.”

Venice has pedestrian alleyways off of alleyways off of alleyways. Getting lost in this funhouse-like mirror maze was how we found a quiet doorway to a small shop that was like a museum exhibition of hand-blown glassworks made on nearby Murano island. The breathtaking pieces ranged from elegant goblets and bowls that seemed as delicate as butterfly wings; to graceful butterflies themselves; to a resplendent turtle the size of a couch cushion and an even larger dolphin, both featuring swirling currents of blues and greens within as if filled with colorful seawater.

Less beautifully, the canals are so opaque they seemed filled with wet paint. This filled Lorenzo with great sadness.

“The water was so clean during the worst of the pandemic,” he recalled, referring to the Grand Canal, “we saw dolphins.”

Meanwhile, the inner canals — measuring one to two meters in depth, depending on the tide — were so crystalline that a gondolier peering down from his standing perch could see to the water’s bottom with such clarity as to accurately call a coin heads or tails.

Alas, motorboat traffic has returned fully, and with it the green-sheened murkiness, causing 62-year-old Lorenzo to lament: “Man never learns. Man is a dummy.”