From Venice, With Love

“It’s hard finding your neighborhood; it’s even harder staying in your neighborhood.”

My friend summed up my day in 12 words. Today, after getting to a rather late start, my group and I headed to the mainland to explore our assigned neighborhood, Santa Croce. One aspect of the Duke in Venice program, based around a class solely about the city of Venice, is exploring an assigned neighborhood as a group. However the difficulty of exploring your neighborhood comes with finding it: The streets don’t run on any type of grid, which also explains the difficulty of remaining in your neighborhood.

We met to take the vaporetto to the mainland and spent the day meandering through the winding, Venetian streets. Our assigned neighborhood is on the west side of the large S-shaped Grand Canal that divides Venice into two. After misreading the map, I left the navigating to my groupmate Brendan, who we’ve deemed our Santa Croce compass. We examined a few things about our neighborhood as a group; our neighborhood was primarily residential, quiet and extremely ritzy.

There is no grass in Venice. This makes complete sense seeing as Venice is built on water—no dirt for plants to grow. The homes had tall brick walls and intricate stone balconies with cascading flowers, and some were outfitted with turrets. A number of the homes have wooden verandas on the rooftops. Italian women weren’t allowed to be out in the piazzas and campos during the day with the men, who were all merchants, so they would sit out on the verandas on their roofs, communicate with one another and know everything about their communities. After a lot of walking, we found a little hole-in-the-wall place that took our lunch vouchers. We sat down to a wonderful, long lunch filled with pasta bolognese, Margharita pizza and roasted chicken.

I’ve also figured out why Italians drink so much espresso. After such a long lunch, I was so tired. At the first bar I saw, I immediately ordered a shot of espresso. The coffee here in Italy is 50 million times better than anything I’ve ever had in the states, and the espresso was amazingly sweet. The shot was the perfect kick in the pants to keep me motivated to keep exploring the city. After some perfect weather, there was a bit of drizzle for the rest of the day, which consisted of finding the Millenium Wine Bar, going to the grocery store and observing Venetians.

Once I returned to San Servolo, I stayed far away from my bed and went to the library to do the assigned readings for tomorrow’s class. After about two hours of work, 12 of us organized an evening outing back to Venice. We spent about two hours on the mainland which consisted of a live five piece band playing “New York, New York” in St. Mark’s Square, a Becks beer in a very random bar, and a scoop of chocolate gelato.

Another fabulous day in Venice.

Senior Symone Snowden-Wright is studying abroad in Venice, Italy. This piece was a post from her summer blog.