Venice Reflection - (c)1999, Russell Johnson

Not Just a Pretty Face 

Venice is unabashedly a tourist trap. And that isn't bad.

It is chic for Italians to denegrate the place as not being the real Italy. It isn't. Venice isn't Italy just as Disneyland isn't Anaheim and Bali has very little to do with rest of Indonesia. Venice has lived for tourism for more than 400 years, since Vasco de Gama proved that you could reach India by sea by sailing around the tip of Africa. That put the kibosh on Venice as Europe's overland trading post for the Orient and it disintegrated into a pretty place with lots of festivals and people wearing frilly outfits that nobody took seriously.

But it is still charming in its schmaltz, with its tone-deaf gondoliers crooning O' Sol O Mio, its Titians and Tintorettos, its faint odor of cat pee and the remnants of a well-preserved history, both serious and frivolous.

Yes, Venice is sinking. The Piazza San Marco is flooded when the tides rise in the afternoon, but the pidgeons cluster on little islands, kids splash in the puddles and tourists line up along raised platforms to enter St. Mark's.

But maintenance work is happening all over and it is dry by nighttime for one of the world's greatest free concerts. In a battle of the sextets, three restaurants serve orchestra al-fresco: a piano, two violins, a bass, a clarinet and an accordion playing everything from Rachmaninov, to Verdi to the increasingly tiring theme from the movie Titanic.

I always like to go to the "So-and-So slept here" hotels, even if I can't afford to stay in them. We popped into the Danieli, where Balzac, Wagner and Dickens snoozed. It had been taken over by a Mary Kay cosmetics "top-producers" incentive party. Lots of blondes, with their tuxedoed husbands in tow, wearing lots of makeup (my wife bought some of this stuff once and she said you could patch sheetrock with it). We went to the piano bar. We heard a piano player, singing " Blue Suede Shoes" through an echo mike. We left. We presume Wagner or Balzac would have done the same.

We settled for a brandy under the stars at the Gritti Palace, overlooking the Grand Canal, a much more civilized place, if you can afford drinks at $15 a pop, which the 70ish gentleman with jet black hair and trophy blonde next to us certainly could do. We put it on our Visa card and collected a wonderful memory and 40 air miles.

Venice may seem a cliche' to some, but there are still surprises, if you look.

We wondered where Marco Polo lived. You think it would be in tourist guides or there would be some museum or monument on its spot. Not so.

With a little help from a woman at the tourism bureau - who said she visited it as a school child - and pointed it out on a map, a gondolier, who grunted "around the corner" and a lady in an interior decorator's shop who said "across the square, second floor" we found a dilapidated old unmarked building, with Byzantine windows, near the Rialto Bridge. It was not on the map and was not terribly charming. But it was neat to be there and to have found a bit of history off the tourist maps.

I also went looking for a mappamundi -- a map of the world - drawn by a monk named Fra Mauro, cartographer to the Court of Venice in the 16th Century, who is said to have used some of Polo's notes. Mauro didn't go anywhere, he just drew fanciful descriptions of the world based on talks he had with returning travelers and made them jive with the work of his predecessors.who described strange lands with headless men with eyes on their chests and birds that could pick up elephants in their claws. As a monk he couldn't, of course, forget to depict heaven as part of his map, but removed in a circle in a corner.

We had read about Fra Mauro in a wonderful little book called "A Mapmakers Dream," by James Cowan, who translated the monk's memoirs. We found one of the Mauro's maps in the National Library, off the Piazzo San Marco. It was not on public display so we had to ask for it. It was beautifully preserved, behind a curtain in a back gallery.

Venice is, in fact, very expensive but well worth it especially if you have never been there. There is no low season these days and it is difficult to get a decent room unless you book well in advance and pay through the nose. We got an excellent room with bath at the Hotel Georgioni for $225 per night including a decent buffet breakfast. Restaurants are expensive and not always good. Accept that, don't whine, and enjoy Venice for what it is, an old chestnut, worth returning to time and time again.

Fall and spring are great times to go. The weather is fine and the crowds not oppressive. Carnival time in winter is fun, too. But it is cold and damp (and I know what that is having lived in San Francisco). I was there a few years ago and got lost in the fog one night in Piazza San Marco. Couldn't see two feet in front of me. It was kind of spooky hearing whispering and murmurs nearby in a language I didn't understand.