A Week in Venice

Breakfast at the Gritti Palace

I had not been back to Venice for more than a decade.

The first time I went it was when I was a kid with a backpack.

The second time I went, it was with my ex-wife.

So let’s say neither was a particularly pleasant experience. 

If we were going to Venice, I wanted, at long last to do it right. So we booked in for a week at the Gritti Palace.

The Gritti is one of the Grand Hotels, appropriately, on the Grand Canal, which runs through the center of the city.

One gets to Venice in one of three ways, (or a fourth, if you are unimaginably rich, but more on this later).  The three primary ways of arriving at the city are by private car, by train or by plane.  Venice is an island, or rather a series of islands. There are no cars in Venice, so if you should arrive by car, you have to leave it at one of several large parking lots on the mainland and take a ferry to the city.  Planes arrive at Marco Polo airport and trains arrive at the main train station in Venice.

In any of the above cases, you are on your own, so the best advice is to travel light.  

We arrived by train, 3 hours from Milan on the TrenItalia, a modern and efficient ride.  When we got to the train station in Venice, there was no alternative but to schlep our bags to the ferry landing where we grabbed a private water taxi to the Gritti.  The fare was 60 Euros, or about $90 at current exchange rates.  The public vaporetto, a kind of water borne cross town bus costs $22.

The Gritti is one of several 5-star hotels in Venice, and they make every effort to make you as welcome and comfortable as possible.  The building itself is from the 16th century, and the rooms reflect to the heritage. Stone floors, dark woods, and high ceilings. Although the air conditioning and plumbing are very much 21st Century.  There was wifi and satellite TV, but who comes to Venice to watch TV?

As soon as we landed and dropped the bags, we headed off for the city itself. Venice is a walking town, and that is what people go there to do.  So we walked.  Note: Bring and wear comfortable shoes!

There are lots of tourist attractions in Venice, and in August the place is chock a block with tourists, but the best thing to do, and the simplest, is to get off the tourist track. Just walk a few blocks from the central Piazza San Marco and you are soon rid of 90% of the tourists, away from the Hermes and Prada shops and cast into a kind of adult Disneyland that has not changed, seemingly, in 400 years or so.  

On our first walk, we headed east up the Grand Canal, and there came upon the previously mentioned fourth way of getting to Venice.

Docked along the banks of the canal was the Mayan Queen.

This is not a cruise ship, although the harbor around Venice is filled with them.  This is a private 300 foot yacht owned by one Alberto Bailleres, the second wealthiest many in Mexico.  (One may only wonder what the first wealthiest is sailing these days).

For the super super rich, the best way to get to Venice is simply to sail and and tie up, which many apparently do.

The Mayan Queen is listed at an estimated $300 million to build, but there were a few ‘smaller’ yachts of equal interest, including a tiny 165 foot Perini Navi sailboat which charters out for a mere $250,000 a week.  

Venice is not only a walking town, it is a seaborne town, and one of the very best things we did while we were in town was to hire a private motor launch for the day, while giving Paulo, our drive (who spoke no English at all) the instructions that we wanted to see the non-tourist parts of Venice.

This, he told us, (and thanks Paulo for being so honest) was not possible.

Venice is a tourist town.

There were, however, a few places a bit more off the beaten tourist path that we should like to recommend.

After the usual stops at Murano for the requisite glass factory and purchase, and Burano, a bit less touristy, for the lace show, Paulo took us to the even less frequented Island of Torcello.

This was once, I was astonished to learn, the most populated of all of Venice’s Islands. But that was in the 12th Century.  A host of ruined monasteries and churches from that period bear witness to its former greatness.  

The island’s surrounding marshes filled in and the inaccessability and the malaria that mosquitos brought caused Torcello to be abandoned in the 16th Century.  Today, it has only 50 full-time inhabitants.  

However… it has two of the very best restaurants in Venice.

We at at Restaurante Villa 600 on Torcello.

You could not image a better or more lovely meal. 

Venice is not a city known for its food.  It is so popular with tourists, it does not have to work all that hard to provide a cuisine, so for the most part, there are not a lot of truly great eateries in the city. One is pretty much the same as the next, despite a wide range of prices.

Restaurante Villa 600 (+39 041 5272254) on Torcello is different. 

The food was extraordinary, and the prices, while a bit high, reasonable for what was offered.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mixed seafood appetizer at Villa 600 in Torcello

Of course, this is Venice, and the only way to go is for the seafood.

Just across the street, and I use this term lightly, as there are no streets and only about 4 buildings in Torcello, save the ruins, so nothing is hard to find… across the street is the Cipriani.

Cipriani is Venice.

We had contemplated booking at the Cipriani Hotel (about $1200 a night), but its location far from the center of town put us off, (although it does have the only swimming pool in town, as far as I know). But the restaurant there is great, (albeit expensive). The Cirpiani family opened their restaurant on Torcello in the 1930s, so it’s not like they have rushed to fill the tourist demand, There isn’t one.  We did not eat there but I am told the food is spectacular was well. You can also book to spend a few nights in the small hotel that is part of the restaurant.  Ernest Hemmingway, so they tell me, lived there for several months in the 50s. My guess is that there were even fewer visitors then than now, if that is possible.

The private boat hire is 90 Euros or about $140 an hours and well worth the investment.

After all, how many times are you going to do this?

Our last day in Venice we devoted almost exclusively to the Biennale, the once every other year modern art show that Venice hosts.

I had heard of the Biennale, but I had never been, and it is far more impressive than anything I could have imagined. 

An entire park is given over to a mass of pavilions, one from each country, housing modern and cutting edge art.

The Hungarian video face wall, I already showed you.

It was a kind of  ‘Worlds Fair’ of modern art, (as someone who went to the 1965 Worlds Fair in NY and still remembers the thrill). This is the same kind of feeling.

Because the exhibits are so large, and because they are up for so long.. a year, I think, the artists can afford to play with concepts and approaches that you just can’t do in most museums and certainly not on anyone’s walls at home.

At left, Lisa stands next to a dead body floating in a swimming pool outside an ultra modern ‘home’ on the grounds. The inside of the house is all themed around the ‘murder’ seen outside.  Desk covered with an partly written manuscript, unmade bed, paintings on the walls reflective of the unfolding ‘story’.

The pavilion is one shared by Norway, Sweden and Finland and they commissioned about a dozen Scandinavian artists to submit original works that fit into the theme and the house.  Brilliant.  Admission to the Biennale is $20 per person, and well worth the cost.

Of course, not everyone ‘gets’ the art.  I sent the above photo to the desk at our building in New York. 

The concierge wrote back to ask “If Mr. Rosenblum would be returning to NY with Mrs. Rosenblum”.