Venice Italy & Your New Year's Resolution: OG Venice for Expats

Someone among you has made a New Year's resolution to make the big move to Venice! Congratulations!  What do you need to know before you take the plunge? Surely, you already know that you absolutely can not ever actually take a plunge into the canals. And, if you're really considering moving to Venice, surely you can deal with a some unpredictability in the little things in life such as how, when and whether-or-not your mail is delivered. You probably get a little kick out of unpredictability, you have the patience to work through petty annoyances, and you enjoy a little challenge in your everyday life. So, lets not talk about the flexibility, patience and pivotability needed in order to survive the mysterious twists and turns of life in Italy. Lets focus instead, as OG Venice often does, on those aspects of everyday life in Venice that are so obvious that many people neglect to mention them.

Did I mention that I'm waiting for the locksmith to come back? I am. He left to go get something.... More than two months ago! A few weeks back, he called and said that work had interfered with his ability to return to working. He didn't know why he hadn't called until just then. I said I didn't know why either. He promised to come back soon. He didn't.  But, I still like him better than the other locksmith who left over a year ago, with half a set of keys, never to be heard from again.

8 Painfully Obvious, Yet Profoundly Impactful, Things to Consider When Moving to Venice

1. Make sure that you like the climate of the lagoon.

“Humid” is far to weak a word to describe Venice' weather. We don't live “by the water”, “near the water”, nor “on the water”. We live in the lagoon. Here in the World Heritage Site of “Venice and The Lagoon”, water comes from everywhere. When it rains, it comes from above. When a winter high tide coincides with a full moon, it comes from below. When it's windy, it comes from the sides. When there's a storm, it comes from everywhere all at once. And, it comes for all of us. When the stucco walls in your stairway have become over-saturated by humidity, they will crumble at a thunder clap. I've seen it happen.

A couple of years ago, I locked myself out of the house. Late at night. With my roommate's two dogs. During acqua alta! The only option was wake to up the landlord and splash on over to his house, where he tossed the spare keys down the stairs to where I stood in his foyer, knee-deep in freezing cold lagoon water. The dogs, who couldn't fairly be expected to do their business without a patch of dry ground to crouch on, waited on the bridge with the guy who was then my boyfriend and is now my husband. In Venice, a guy who'll wade across town for you in the middle of the night is a keeper!

During the hottest days of summer, you will feel as though you've been locked inside of a sauna from which only God can release you. During the coldest days of winter, it will feel as though the fog is actually composed of an army bearing trillions of minuscule ice-spades capable of penetrating whatever armor you choose to don against them.

However, if you can manage the Venetian climate on its extremes, and you like a humid climate otherwise, Venice will reward you with some truly unique and beautiful lagoon weather phenomena. My favorite is “fog-from-the-sun”, when the blanket of fog sits so low over the city that, though one sees the surrounding buildings shrouded in fog, one also sees blue sky overhead and feels the warmth of the sun. Venice' fast moving summer storms can also be spectacularly beautiful when dark clouds race across the sky and their reflections chase them across the water. When such storms approach the city, the facebook pages of local people always abound with dramatic photos and warnings that we all need to run home and close our windows.

2. Venetian basic equipment, are you ready to own it?

No matter what your origins, age, socio-economic status, personal interests, or opinion about your own sense of style, there are two pieces of basic equipment that absolutely everyone in Venice has: A wheeling cart and a pair of rubber boots. Sound unglamorous? They are! But, they are absolutely essential to comfortable living in Venice. 

A few days ago, a friend and I took a trip out to a shopping in center in Marghera. Only after we arrived did I realize that we were not holiday shopping. No. We were bargain hunting for hand trolleys. She picked one with a water-resistant fabric bag and hooks suspended from the back of the frame while I ogled a collapsible model almost small enough to fit in my purse. Unfortunately, my friend was right to point out that the wheels on the one I liked were entirely too flimsy for the bumpy roads of Venice. Bummer.

Why the wheeling cart? Well, how much can you comfortably carry and how far can you carry it? The main island of Venice is the largest pedestrian-only urban center in Europe. The only interruptions to pedestrian streets, aside from canals, are the more than 400 bridges that we pedestrians must walk over in order to proceed with our walking. On a day-to-day basis, this means that transporting supplies from place to place can be rather physically demanding. A small wheeling cart takes a lot of weight off of the shoulders and, if you're super organized and very lucky, it might even help you get all your groceries home in one trip!   

Now, about those rubber boots...  

When I tell you that we all have a pair of rubber boots, that's not actually true. The truth is that we all have at least two pairs of rubber boots.  We have the ones we like, and the ones that we bought because we got caught outside during acqua alta without the ones we like.

Before you scoff at these, remember that in some parts of the world they are considered fashionable foot ware. They are practical shoes popular with hunters, fishermen, Queen Elizabeth of England, and lots of other people who like to keep their feet dry. The difference here in Venice is that the need for wellies is not limited to sportsmen. The phenomenon of acqua alta – the high tides which occasionally rise up above street level in Venice – dictates that we all need rubber boots if we expect to go about our daily lives with dry feet. This is especially true during the winter months when the levels of the tide tend to be more extreme. ​​

This is what the high water alarm sounds like:

This is what happens if one ignores the high water alarm:

One day last winter, two friends and I stepped out of a building on Murano only to discover that the rising tide had swallowed the street. It didn't matter that the bridge was only about five feet away. The street on our side of the bridge was flooded, as was the street on the other side. Our choices were to either stay put until the tide went out, find a way to cover our feet, or wear soggy and cold shoes all day. We adjourned to a supermarket upstairs where we each bought a “pair” of plastic shopping bags to wrap our feet in. Had we planned ahead, we would certainly have already been wearing our wellies.

So there you have your two, unglamorous, pieces of essential equipment for life in Venice. I will only add that it is highly inadvisable to place yourself in a situation where you need both of these things at the same time. It doesn't work that way. You can imagine why.

3. This is "slow living", like it or not.

Moving to Venice?  Congratulations!  Your carbon footprint is about to virtually disappear!

“Slow living”, in Venice, is not a personal socio-environmental choice any more than it is a label on a plastic bag full of quinoa that's been shipped half-way around the world. Nor is it something that we here in town ever really discuss. It is far too obvious to mention. Choosing to live in the historic center of Venice means that you are choosing to live without regular access to a car. You are choosing to physically carry anything that you purchase for yourself. You are choosing to rely on your own two feet and public transportation for 90% of your transportation needs. And, you are choosing to consume primarily that which is made available to you locally, which will be largely locally and domestically produced. Meanwhile, any tendencies that you may have towards over-consumption of energy, shopping or even just collecting of anything will likely be curtailed by the simple fact that it takes a major commitment of time, energy and space to do such things in Venice.  

Did I mention that the mailman yelled at me? He did. Apparently my inconsiderateness at allowing someone to send me a parcel that did not fit comfortably into a wheeling cart is unendurable. I've gotten nine packages this year. Nine! That's it. And, I promised him that I wouldn't do it again. So, really, I guess that's it. No more shopping online, or receiving gifts, for me.

And, please also forget that saying you've heard about having a boat in Venice being the equivalent of having a car elsewhere in the world. I have yet to meet the Venetian who uses her/his boat to take the kids to school, stop bye the market, drop off the dry-cleaning and then run to the hardware store. There are no docks at the school, the market, the dry-cleaner or the hardware store. Here in Venice, boats are used for work and recreation.

Welcome to slow living! Grab your wheeling cart.  Start walking.

4. Venice really is a small town.

Moving to Venice on your own? Don't worry! Venice may be a labyrinth, but none of us is invisible within it. It may sound contradictory to the sophisticated image of the city that hosts the International Biennale D'Arte, but Venice is a very small town by number of residents and the community is highly interactive. Through the sea of tourists, even regular visitors who come once or twice per year are remembered. If you move here, everyone in your neighborhood will quickly come to recognize you.

When you leave the house in the morning, everyone who happens to be out at the time will greet you and expect a greeting in return. Everyone. The ladies in the bakery, the neighbor out walking dog, the guy who begs on the bridge, the workmen restoring the house on the corner, the guy who rents the storeroom downstairs, the lady who sells vintage Murano glass, even the neighbors' kids will mumble “Ciao” as they scurry past on their way to school.

It was two weeks after I moved into my apartment, when I first started planting flowers out the kitchen window, that  my neighbor across the way called out her window to me: "Rimani un po'?" (“Are you staying for a while?”)  I responded that I was moving in. A few days after that, all of the neighbors, even those whom I hadn't met in the windows, began greeting me by name. A year later, it takes me half an hour to buy a loaf of bread from the bakery downstairs. There's just always so much to catch up on, someone passing bye, something to know about someone else who regularly passes bye...  

This does not mean that you'll become bosom-buddies with everyone in town. Venetian's are human people who form friendships on the same basis as other human people. (Things like shared interests and experiences help a lot.) Nevertheless, because your newly adopted pedestrian lifestyle and the unique topography of Venice mean that you will encounter your neighbors often, and because as a new-comer you really never know with whom you might strike up a friendship, and because your neighbors know the answers to all of the questions that you will eventually have about Venice, it certainly behooves you to be pleasant in your interactions. Don't worry too much if you do not yet speak Venetian. In my experience, that will not stop anyone from trying to speak to you.

5. Make sure that you like the food.

The only people who do not like Italian food are people who've never had any. Right?! The food is, or at least it should be, one of the main reasons that you want to move here in the first place!

I could so happily eat a plate of seafood antipasta every day.

Venice is perfect for you because you just can't get enough baccala mantecato, gelato, spaghetti with clams, steamed squid, paper thin slices of prosciutto and artichokes so fresh and sweet that one can even eat them raw. Right? Let's hope so! Because, like every region of Italy, the Veneto has a deeply engrained and highly pervasive food culture.

​In every day life, you will run into chefs at the fish market, see the vegetable boats from Sant'Erasmo dropping off crates for your neighbors and your neighborhood trattoria, and smell the scent of fresh bread as a baker wheels bye with a cart full of deliveries for the bars and restaurants. There really isn't much not to like.  

It's true...I like crostini better than "real" food.

There is only one real challenge when it comes to adapting to the Venetian food world of sea-foody-with-four-seasons-of-vegetables freshness and that is this: If you're moving to Venice from another urban center, you will have to say goodbye to having easy access to all other kinds of international cuisine. Here, you go out for Venetian, or you cook for yourself. We have a few decent international restaurants - the Middle Eastern and the Japanese are very good - but absolutely nothing approaching the variety you'd find in a big city overseas. As an expat, you will begin experimenting with cooking your favorite ethnic dishes, and comfort foods from home, in your own kitchen. (Fortunately, you'll be blessed with exceptional Italian produce to use as your base ingredients.) Meanwhile, like the rest of us, you will shop the back corner of Giacomo Rizzo, and you will treasure any international condiments that anyone is kind enough to smuggle into the country for you.

My own guilty culinary not-so-secret is that I hoard Szechuan peppercorns and prepare Szechuan stir-fries and stews when my husband is not home.

6. Expats are always foreigners.

I get it! You're trying to fit in and you'll never learn Italian if no one ever lets you practice! Nevertheless, and this should probably be expat-in-Venice survival rule number one: Do not take it as an insult when people in Venice speak to you in foreign languages. Keep in mind that the very vast majority of their clients and visitors are, in fact, foreigners. Venetian's are constantly making an effort to communicate with people in foreign languages. It might even be as nerve-wracking for them to speak English to you as it is for you to speak Venetian with them. So, please consider that before feeling insulted that someone (correctly) assumed that you are from out of town. As an expat in Venice, you will certainly find more complicated issues to contend with.

​The hardware store is the first and final frontier!

A few weeks after I moved in to my apartment, I stopped into a local hardware store to buy some spackle. The checkout line was rather long and populated with grouchy people who dislike waiting in lines. When my turn came, I plopped my little tub of spackle and a putty knife down on the counter and was waiting expectantly for the total when out of nowhere the store clerk began speaking to me, quite a lot, in German! Though my first reaction was to listen and try to understand his words, I couldn't even understand why in the world this clerk in a hardware store in Venice was speaking to me, an American, in German. Eventually, I blurted out, “Si, ma io non parlo Tedesco!” (Yes, but I don't speak German!) The long line of grouches all burst out laughing and we finished the transaction in Italian. I went home to spackle my wall and spent the rest of the day wondering how many German tourists go to the hardware store in Venice and buy spackle.

Integrating into a foreign society will be challenging wherever you go. But, Venetian society, unique in all ways, may be especially challenging because it is a culturally, socially and environmentally endangered society whose woes are largely due to the city's unique appeal to foreigners. You are moving in, but the foreigners who bought the apartment upstairs, the one downstairs, the one on the corner and the one across the street did not. They did a quick renovation and immediately handed the house keys over to a rental agent. You care about the condition of the school, the maintenance of the bridges, the accessibility of the market, the cleanliness of the streets, the erosion of the mudflats in the lagoon, the over-crowding of the public boats etc... But, the other millions upon millions of foreigners who flood the city, however much they may admire Venice, do not care about those things at all. They strut around in the streets half-naked, act haughty and entitled, never try to speak Italian, and leave garbage behind everywhere they go. You're fed up with them too!

Once you break through that frustrating language barrier, you, as an expat and a new friend, will become a sounding board for all of the wrongs done against Venice by other foreigners. By far your biggest social and emotional challenge as an expat in Venice is to figure out how to listen attentively and act sensitively without internalizing all of the guilt for all of the wrongs that all of these other foreigners have done to your adopted home. I'm not going to lie, this is difficult. There are even frequent visitors who begin to wonder if they need to make the ultimate sacrifice, staying away, in order to avoid harming their beloved Venice.

Some encouraging things to remember when these emotional crises strike: 1. Venetians will only discuss these things with you if they believe that you are receptive and helpful. They are not blaming you. They are inviting you to empathize. 2. Frequent visitors are recognized, welcomed back and, incidentally, have the most positive impact on the street-level economy of any of the millions who visit each year. 3. Becoming "Venetian-by-choice" by moving to, and actually living in, Venice is a huge positive investment in the City.  

7. Are you ready to be famous?!

OK, “famous” may be too strong of a word. But, there is something about the fascination of Venice that makes even the dullest among us here fascinating as well. You, filling your water bottle at a public fountain, are so enchanting that someone will make a video of it. You carrying a shopping bag with some celery sticking out? Enthralling! You sitting alone reading the newspaper and sipping an espresso? Irresistible! You helping your grandmother off of the vaporetto? Heartwarming! The only way to avoid being photographed in Venice is to avoid being caught doing anything normal in public. The same goes for doing anything abnormal. So, either stay home or hitch up your wellies and say "cheese"!

Early one morning in Campo San Giacomo dell'Orio, I sat on a bench reading my emails as my roommates' dogs rested near my feet. All was peaceful and quiet until the moment that I looked up and saw no fewer than seven camera lenses trained on me. Apparently, by seating myself in that peaceful public square and minding my own business so early in the morning, I had made myself the human subject of an early morning photo walk. At least I got a free refresher course in depth of field. 

If you live a quiet life, and do not run a business, do not volunteer, do not participate in group activities and do not work with the public at large, your fame may end there. But, probably not. Venice is universally fascinating and, because there are so few people living in the lagoon, sooner or later someone from the press, or a blog, or a publishing house, or a tv station will come around asking you too to comment about something to do with Venice and/or the lagoon and what you're doing in it. On these occasions, I'm sure that most people consider it an honor to be asked and then do their best to reflect well on their beloved Venice.  

8. Make sure that you can stand the crowds.

While it's true that moving to Venice means that you yourself will no longer be a tourist, it does not mean that the other tourists are going to go away. On the contrary, in means that rather than meandering joyfully among or away from them, you will now have to contend with them and find ways to pass either through or around them on a daily basis. You will be frustrated by overstuffed vaporettos. You will stand in lines twenty-deep of people who are buying only one thing at the grocery store. You will begin to avoid all of the places that you once considered to be the "center" of Venice during their busiest hours of the day, days of the week, or months of the year. When you see a large tour group approaching across a bridge, you will rapidly recalculate your route in order to circumvent it. You will learn every alley, back and side street between your home and the places you visit most often.

​You too will begin to recognize not only your neighbors, but also the people who visit your neighborhood most often. And, you will be so glad to see those familiar faces in the midst of what, on the most crowded days of the year, sometimes looks and feels like a zombie invasion.  

The last time I visited the Rialto Market after 10AM it was so crowded with sightseers that I couldn't politely get anywhere near the fishmongers. I scurried back forth for a while looking for an opening, thought about it, gathered my breath, and finally just started shouting “I would like to buy some fish!” in every language that would come to me. A path was eventually cleared and, doubtless, I myself was photographed buying some fish. Now-a-days, I get to the fish market before they've even opened.

In the winter, the crowd of sightseers is sometimes still smaller than the crowd of shoppers.  In the summer on the other hand...

The most encouraging words I can offer about living with the crowds are that, 1. It's behavior is highly predictable which makes it avoidable much of the time. 2. It is, though it won't always feel like it, actually composed of human people.  Most of those people will behave themselves and a precious few might even become friends.  

​One of them might even be you.