Blissfully Adrift in Venice
By ALAN FEUER - (The New York Times)
Published: July 25, 2004
The worst thing you can do, if lost in Venice, is to mind.
Venice is a city made for getting lost. Its streets are narrow, twisting and dark,
and half of them are made of water. If being lost has a certain drifty feeling to it,
one feels lost almost instantly in Venice, where everything -- even the parking lots
-- tends to float.
''Getting lost? It's easy, very easy,'' said Tommaso DeArcangeli, a Venetian
gondolier. ''There are not enough street signs in Venice, and too many one-way
streets.''
Mr. De Arcangeli, 38, was standing near his gondola in central Venice, waiting for a
customer to happen by. It was April, and the sun was shining brightly.
The visitor who had stopped to chat could not say where exactly in central Venice
because he was lost.
Being lost, however, gives one the opportunity to learn a thing or two -- for
example, that gondoliers must take a three-month course on navigation and other
skills to get their license. According to Mr. DeArcangeli, three out of five usually
fail the test.
Mr. DeArcangeli, who passed, claims that he has never gotten lost in Venice. This was
disputed, gently. ''Well, maybe,'' he acknowledged with a shrug, ''if I drink a glass
of wine.''
The strange thing is that one feels slightly drunk in Venice all the time. The
buildings list. Many of the porches sag. Except for the striped poles where people
moor their boats, there are few, if any, straight lines.
Getting lost in Venice usually means running into a number of dead-end streets. But
no dead-end street is ever really dead.
The following conversation, for example, took place down a dead-end street between a
lost visitor and a stranger in a gondola, who floated past him down a small canal:
Visitor: ''What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen in Venice?''
Stranger: ''We've only just arrived.''
Visitor: ''So what's the most beautiful thing you've seen so far?''
Stranger: ''Well, that would have to be you.''
One nice thing about getting lost is that unpleasant thoughts tend to get lost, too.
Lost in Venice, one tends not to think about the war, the presidential race, global
terror or the fact that one is underpaid.
Being lost, in fact, teaches you to concentrate on whatever is in front of your face.
This may include the four white bedsheets moving, like a mother and her daughters, on
a laundry line above the canal.
The other nice thing about getting lost is that people tell you the most amazing
things. Down an alleyway there was an old man carrying a bucket full of water. A
visitor explained to him that he was lost.
''Lost?'' the old man said. ''Well, it depends where you have to go.''
Having nowhere in particular to go, the visitor wandered toward a church -- San
Giovanni e Paolo it is called. One not only hears amazing things when one is lost;
one sees them, too. In this case, it was a blind man feeling the wooden sculpture of
the church's choir stall with his bare hands.
In some sense, Venice itself is lost. It is lost to history, which it basically
checked out of in the 18th century. It is also lost in the surrounding landscape, a
soupy swamp of islands, inlets and endless marsh.
Roberto Guiliani, for one, was lost on a bridge in central Venice with his wife.
''Yes, we are lost,'' Mr. Guiliani, 45, announced. He had a map and was visiting from
Naples. ''I ask questions and I find the way, but then I get lost again. This happens
every time.''
It is an oddity of Venice that mailing addresses do not contain street names. They
are simply four-digit numbers and district names. This, of course, is very hard on
the postmen.
''The only way to learn is by walking,'' said Roberto Berna, one of Venice's chief
letter carriers. ''More than once, people came here for a few days, then quit. They
couldn't handle the work.''
Considering that getting lost is often frightening, one develops sympathy for other
lost creatures when one is lost. Down a side street in the Castello district, for
example, was a piece of paper posted on the wall announcing that a cat was lost, and
its owners were trying desperately to find it.
''Its name is Lea,'' read the sign. ''Maybe the cat in question could have fallen
from the roof and could be hurt. My little girl is very attached to this cat, so if
you have any news please call at . ''
Carlo Setti, 55, has been living in Venice long enough that it is no longer possible
for him to get lost. Mr. Setti, a maskmaker who looks a little like Geppetto, seemed
saddened to report this.
When he first arrived in Venice, it was different. ''I would go out every night when
it was foggy,'' he said, ''and find every narrow street I hadn't been to yet. Ninety
percent of the time, it would end in a canal, but 10 percent of the time I would
discover marvelous things.''
''You have to want to get lost,'' Mr. Setti said, remembering that time in his life.
He no longer seemed so sad.
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