Moving Out of the Center of Venice, The Most Difficult Decision I've Ever Made

We awoke the next morning to the videos of the MSC Opera crashing into the pier in Venice. I had picked up guests at precisely that spot almost exactly a year before. But, it was my husband who immediately flew into a vocal fit of rage on the morning of June 2nd. The greed! The danger! The damage! The risk! He took to the internet news sites and social media, becoming the enraged scrivener that I honestly never knew he could be. While I, after a decade of yelling, and writing, and analyzing and begging, and protesting, sat stunned with my jaw agape and my heart pounding in my ears. I felt as though I had stepped out of a building, or a bus at Piazzale Roma if you prefer, and turned around to see it go up in flames; A destruction so inevitable, which I was so helpless to stop, and which only the hand of fate had kept me from being embroiled in. Venice is not mine. I can not wrap my arms around it and hoist it out of the path of wayward running cruise ships.

Over the past couple of months a few people have asked me to write or interview about our decision to move out of the center of Venice. I flatter myself that they thought me capable of a measured social, political and economic discussion of the woes of Venice and how they had touched our lives. Maybe they forget that I am not, and never could be, Venetian. And, with my voice so entangled in talk of Venice for so long, perhaps they don't realize that my everyday life in this world is personal. The decision to move out of the center of Venice was a hard one, much more difficult than was the decision to stay there in the first place.

I Grieved...

I grieved. I grieved for months in the selfish, solitary, and sometimes soggy way that one might grieve while trying to nurse a dream through a terminal illness. I awoke before dawn and roamed the streets, soaking up every possible moment of wonder and every possible sensation of belonging. I threw fits of rage, both outwardly and inwardly. And, I slowly removed myself from the world that could not be mine anymore. I drank too much and wailed into Facetime, “I have everything I ever wanted! Why the hell am I getting ready to give half of it up?!”

Sometimes, taking a long walk alone in Venice feels like the most gluttonous and luxurious thing in the world...

Was what I wanted so much? I could have lasted for years in that overpriced dark and moldy apartment. I was accustomed to doing my errands at dawn and after dusk, and going far away from the center of town as early and often as ever I could. I had learned to live with transitory neighbors and without the convenience of practical shops. Because, to me, though I never quite verbalized to myself, the privilege and pleasure of seeing Venice every day, was worth almost any sacrifice.

I just don't know who the hell cares what it looks like INSIDE, when just outside lies Venice.

Venice was worth thousands of dollars in travel expenses. And, devil-may-care about the many jobs I put at risk, and often lost, by not requesting but, rather, insisting upon, vacation time. At least three times a year. Every year. For the first fifteen years of what would otherwise have been my “career”. And, it was worth the anxiety that came with eventually planting myself there without a home to call my own, without a real job and without exactly having permission to stay either. No, I really didn't need too many creature comforts in my life...

In exchange for living in Venice, for taking part in that unique pedestrian-aquatic society, for eating the produce of the lagoon and for roaming freely in the sandy dunes, I could put a vaporetto pass in the place where someone else's peace of mind might reside. I could lose all my cares in lagoon breezes, artichoke blossoms and glass sculptures. And, I could contribute to my new home town by taking up at least one small corner of the mantle born by all those who struggled to protect one aspect or another of Venice. I could march, chant and protest, for the cameras. I could pick up garbage, even if only to see it replaced by a thousand more pieces only a few hours later. And I could, oh yes I truly could, show others how to see the place and love it as I do.

I probably could have also continued to insist that my husband fight his lonely way home on the overcrowded boats every night. I might have been able to convince myself that our dog didn't need to run very much, and that he would eventually lose his overpowering fear of being trampled by crowds. Not-crossing-the-bridge between 10AM and 7PM could have become normal. And, I probably could even have held out for a while longer paying 30% more for everything from my rent to my food. What did I need with family and stability and plans for the future when my everyday reality was graced by the magic of Venice?

...From 6AM to 9AM and pretty much anytime after 7PM in the evening, as long as I didn't plan to enjoy it on weekends or holidays or any days between May 1st and September 15th. And anyway, there was Amazon Prime if I really needed something...

But I was Sinking, Along with Venice...

Storms were always brewing...

At 5:23 every afternoon, my email news alerts came in. I sat down in my musty, and mustard-colored, kitchen with a glass of wine to read them. When the news was bad, I would go ahead and pour another glass. It was usually bad. From the Cruising News to the Port of Marghera's prospects as part of the New Silk Road project, hospitality group investments and the government's divestment of publicly owned palaces. There was, and there is, the never ending seaweed-covered, sand-filled and money-munching saga of the MOSE. There were, and there are, air pollution alerts, erosion of the barene, and collapsing pilings in the lagoon. There was a violent gang wreaking havoc in the streets, and the group of purse snatchers who somehow found the nerve to yell and curse at the cameramen for violating their privacy.


Every day, there are, and there were, images of idiots jumping off of the bridges, swimming in acqua alta or holding babies up to poop into public trash bins. There are piles of garbage left here and there and everywhere. But, we're supposed to magically forget all of these things when the occasional, self-congratulatory, and completely irrelevant, news of some small conquest against people who behave indecorously - Such as those two caught cooking over an open flame on the steps of one of the most beautiful monuments in the world... - comes out and makes the newspaper tour du monde. Clap...clap...nope, don't have it in me. How's that new hotel on Tronchetto, the parking garage island, coming along?

It hurt. Observing, through living it, the grotesque mutilation of something that I considered so precious and putting myself through a daily confrontation which forced me to realize that it is guaranteed to get worse before it gets better, hurt. It hurt with a pain that eventually turned the euphoria I had always felt at merely seeing Venice every day into the kind of painful wonder that comes from loving something not long for this world. I felt that pain every day. I would wander into the streets, run into a friend (or an unfortunate acquaintance who did not yet know what a boozy buzzkill I was rapidly becoming), order another glass wine... And, together, we would sit and sip and sigh at the beauty, the sadness and the grotesque unfairness of it all.

But I Fought...

I fought. I fought and I raged, balling my fists, stamping my feet and, once, even slicing my own palm open in a distracted angry moment. I made unreasonable demands. Damn in! Outside of my dark and moldy apartment, with the three windows that could never be opened and the cavernous cracks in the pavimento - in Venice - nothing less luxurious than a seven star hotel would suffice. Assuming that such a hotel would also deliver me a private garden of my own design, and a custom kitchen while they were at it. And, it had better be located in a damned pretty town very close to Venice!

Yeah...I guess it's a pretty town...

In other words: When hell freezes over. That's when I would move. And, that should have been final. Except for the one thing: Hell did freeze over. For two months – Which, as it turns out, is the amount of time that it really takes to find an acceptable, even if it is abandoned, house with a big garden in a damned pretty town not far at all from Venice – we battled the cold, the dust, and the dampness of a 500 year old apartment which suddenly had no bathroom and no hot water. Believe it or not, the slumlords there insisted that the law provides for absolutely no reduction in expenses for such mere inconveniences as those. They even asked us to pay for the heating of their house as well. I'm not joking.  

OK, maybe I do care a little bit about what it looks like inside. Why the hell did those guys throw mud at my living room door?!

As the work loudly progressed, with no one present to oversee it but myself, my husband suffered horrible allergies and our new puppy barked and howled in fear. And yet, I fought. I fought to keep working through the noise, the filth, and the two hours of cleaning I was obliged to do to make the house passable at the end of each day. I fought a slight fear of the strange men roaming in and out who sometimes seemed to forget that they were supposed to be working in the bathroom; Not the closet. And, a small part of me also fought to keep believing that Venice could still be my home...
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I visited apartments in renovated ex-glass factories, repeating to myself the fable that any life in such places is better than none at all. I pretended that we, and real twelve-months-per-year-neighbors too, would invest the money needed to give them a life with four seasons of continuity. The shops of cobblers and grocers and bakers and butchers would open up all around like blossoms in spring, and my dog would run in the park with the neighbors pets for company. But, of course, not-even-too-deep inside I knew that those apartments were priced for the tourist market, destined to become pied-a-terres and Airbnbs. It wasn't a neighborhood and real neighbors were not to be found there.

One of my dream houses in Venice.

I followed the local housing auctions like a spy, spending free afternoons tracking down the sad facades, some still inhabited, of homes with defaulted mortgages. Some of those even have gardens. And, I reveled in imaginings of restoring them to their former grandeur. If they were too big, they could be divided into apartments, for long-term lease only. Because, who cares that one could never recoup one's investment by living that way in Venice?

I even fantasized about just renting another apartment... A dream that quickly turned ugly as I remembered the horrible months it had taken me just to find frozen hell. House hunting was truly the worst experience I ever had in Venice. And, one quick search of the rental market confirmed that the prices of such luxurious lodgings ours had only gone up, while the selection had decreased to nearly non-existent.

And, I worked...

Meanwhile, I worked. I spent hours on the phone with frantic travel agents who would have wished for their clients to choose any destination in the world other than Venice. The crowds! The mess! The cheap souvenirs! The protesting locals! And, the ever present risk that their clients would fall into the hands of one or another of the charlatans who rely on the magic of Venice to gloss over over-priced and subpar service... So, I comforted them. We would pick up their clients and whisk them away to a place that 99% percent of people never know of as Venice. They would see the untouched corners of the lagoon, taste the freshest of foods and meet the most renowned of glass masters. I would personally vet every guide, every boat and every bar. Don't fret. From under my wing, your clients will never set foot in that horrible Venice you've seen on TV. No no. Venice it what you make it, and we'll make a pristine one for them.

Holding moeche is not for everyone...

Not every taxi driver goes out of his way to cheer up a tired kid...

I exchanged emails... 10, 15, 30 emails, with moms, cousins, fiancees, friends of friends all of whom were lost in the stormy sea of online news and reviews and just wanted something nice, something personal, something fun and something safe for themselves and their loved ones in Venice. So, I coddled and I coaxed and I cajoled these people - always keeping the boat owners, glass masters, chefs and babysitters in the other chatbox- as I did everything I could to reassure them. And, here's what I now know: The hourly rate for exchanging 30 emails, even when guests book in the end, doesn't pay for dinner. And, that is only semi-OK because the person who does this job writes emails during the Venetian dinner hour anyway...

I smiled, and nodded, and listened. I learned the licensure and insurance requirements for the itineraries I proposed, and always did my best to hire the right guides. I visited accountants. I hunted down the most ephemeral of object in all of Italy: the fiscal receipt. And, I brought unqualified respect to absolutely everyone professionally involved in tourism in Venice. “Thank you so much for your confidence,” I said to the concierge who invited me to make a deposit into his pay-to-play scheme. “But, my business is much too small to handle such an increase in demand as I'm sure your recommendation would create.”

Murano Glass? Try working it yourself!

And, that's what I call a "welcome" basket.

I fielded the phone calls, messages and emails of publicity-hunting tourist traps for all budgets, each of whom wanted to invite me to “stop bye” their... “luxury” apartments renovated into the soulless style of my New York dentists' office, “alimentari” offering five different kinds of limoncello in bottles shaped like boots, “historic”(ally) overpriced restaurants serving the defrosted version of what my neighborhood osteria made fresh every day... “Thank you so much for calling. If you can explain to me exactly how your business is relevant and beneficial to my readers, I'd be happy to come bye and hear your story. But, I have to tell you right now that I don't work for defrosted lunches, even if they are free.”
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Meanwhile, I donated. I donated my photographs, my words, my reputation and my time to the promotion of amazing things like disappearing arts, hopeful designers, local foods, newly opened shops... Donated. Because, all of these things, like so many other things in Venice, deserve to exist and I could help to make that happen. Or was it because innocent newcomers deserve an opportunity to know that they exist, and how will they find them without me? Or was I playing a long game through which I hoped against hope to prove by example that there really is an intersection at which what's best for tourists and what's best for Venice really are the same. Who remembers why they did what they did?

But, I Felt Guilty...

This guy deserves nothing but love.

And, I felt guilty. Oh so guilty... Was it fair to make the people, and the innocent pets, in my life suffer just so that I could continue being one of those foreigners whose idiotic insistence on taking up space in Venice leads to high housing prices? (30% above the legal rent per square meter in our case...even without a bathroom or hot water.) Was it right to be working with tourists - and enjoying it too by the way – on the same day as joining a protest against cruise ships entering the lagoon? Was it honest to share pictures of views that most people would only catch a glimpse of from behind the shoulders and beyond the baseball caps of others? Was it OK to never really be certain how my guests would be treated by someone I had recommended to them? Was it just that my husband should commute three hours per day, only to come home to a dark and moldy apartment that no amount of elbow grease could clean?



Was it forgivable that I had so long ago checked-out of virtually every other aspect of my own life just to be in Venice?

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I Made a Decision.

There are those who believe that the decision to move out of Venice was made for me. Someone said that to me. Someone who clearly has no understanding of the depth and breadth of the genuinely crazy decisions, investments and risks that I have taken over the years just to be in Venice. Someone who clearly doesn't realize that I had abandoned my family, my friends, my home and my career prospects, because I did not want any of those things as much as I wanted Venice. Hell, I was once held at gun point while trying to board a flight to Venice. (That is a true, but also other, story.) I am the only one who really knows how much I altered my life and my relationships in favor of being in Venice as much as possible. But, it should at least be clear that no one else's decisions could ever keep me out of Venice.

​It would be truer to say that it was easier for us to go because neither of us is Venetian. I wouldn't argue with that, knowing as well as I do what it means to abandon one's home and strike out to create a life in the wilds of a foreign place...  

And, some might have read this far expecting me to say that tourists drove me out of Venice. Well... Considering my own history that would just be absurd and hypocritical in way that genuinely does not merit discussion.

​No. I made a decision.  The hardest decision of my life.  I decided that my life needed to include Venice, without revolving around it.  

I Wept and I Slept...

I boarded the boat, sitting behind my husband, our dog, and what little we had worth bringing along, and I wept. I was exhausted, from packing and moving. I was nervous. What do I know about Italy outside of Venice? I was relieved. The conditions in our apartment had deteriorated so far by then that I had had cameras installed and had lived for weeks feeling as afraid to go out as I was to stay home. And, I was excited. Do I really get a chance to build a whole life, again? That's not going to be easy...

We did everything, the entire move from door-to-boat-to-truck-to-door, in four hours. I unpacked the same day. And, that night, I slept. I slept the sleep of someone who hadn't spent two hours of the afternoon drinking her way through newspaper articles, analysts reports, blogs and various industry newsletters dedicated to the delivery of bad news about Venice.

I Have Lived in Venice.

Nothing in my background, family history, nor education should have brought me any closer to Venice then a lunch at the Cipriani and an evening tour of the Basilica di San Marco. But, I have lived in Venice.

 I have lived in Venice in the lagoon-foraging, pouring over the unpublished plans for the illusive offshore port, camping out in an abandoned squero, shaking hands with the minister of tourism, spritzing with the (other) neighborhood drunks, having a wedding reception in the officers club at the Arsenale, going to a birthday party for a member of the Albanian mafia, driving an ape on the Lido, being invited to pay-to-play, having lunch at grandma's house, wading through acqua alta, dragging a wheely cart everywhere and eating dozens of violet artichokes, way that very few foreigners ever will. Most of the time, it was amazing. Some of the time, it was terrifying. I may not actually have loved every minute of it. But, I wouldn't give a minute of it back for double what it cost me to have it in the first place.

There is just no place like Venice...

And, in Venice I received a gift. In Venice I received the gift of finally realizing that I could want both Venice and more. I could want to plant a garden. (Or hand-cut 250 meters of 2 meter high sorghum as the case may be...) I could strive for our small family to live in a spacious, peaceful and stable home. I could take our dog out to trot around in a small town, eating treats from the butcher shop, without a fear in his furry little head. I could care about myself and others more than about a twenty-year-long obsession with a place that had been strong enough to drive me to renounce everything else in my life. And, I could want all of that within a thirty minute commute of that place!

So...

The hairy little guy is happy...

This will be an amazing garden...

And, this is a damned pretty town, very close to Venice.

So? Here we are. In a damned pretty town, within spitting distance of Venice, just bending our backs to the work of restoring our future garden. There are surely many many challenges ahead. I am certainly beginning to suspect that this having real neighbors thing might not be all it's cracked it up to be....