The Venice Diaries 2:
From the very beginning.
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I have a frustrating habit of starting to write something that quickly develops a ‘voice’ or style of its own, which I neither meant, nor wanted, it to have. And which I don’t like.
It comes from years of writing for publications that require a certain in-house style. That style being . . . not mine.
As a writer, this is the kiss of death.
We ARE our writing voice and style, and if we lose it because we never get a chance to use it any more, we are little more than writing robots.
When I started writing this Venice Diaries entry a few days ago, I slipped straight into that trap; it was heavy, staid, dull and patronising, and read like a BBC news bulletin from the 1950s. It had no hint of my personality, voice or passion for what I was writing about. It might as well have been a travel article for a magazine I would never buy.
As serendipitous good fortune would have it, when I sat down to edit that piece this morning…..it hadn't saved. (Or rather, I hadn’t save it.) It was completely gone.
After a few juicy expletives, I thought . . . OK, good. It was shit anyway. I’m in a much better mood for writing it today, so let’s start from scratch and write it HOW I WANT TO WRITE IT.
The only editor here is me. The only boss and publisher is me. I can write EXACTLY how and what I want to write. That’s the whole wonderful thing about self publishing!
So. Writing from the heart now, me talking to you; my most natural writing style:
The way I see it is this: there are a million* books already written about Venice.
There are guidebooks, textbooks, history books and travel books, countless novels set here and academic papers documenting every significant event that’s ever taken place in the entire Veneto region. A quick Google search will tell you every piece of information about Venice you could ever want (and don’t want) to know about Doges and palazzi, what to drink, how to order it and how many steps there are on each and every bridge.
That information is already out there.
I could sit here and add to that with a blow-by-blow round-up of the history of Venice, tell you all about the formation of the Republic and the many wars fought during the Empire; I could list the opening times of every museum and tell you best place to order cicchetti (actually I can’t do that last bit; I’ve no idea.)
But I don’t want to do that. That’s not why I’m here (though it’s certainly an huge part of what makes it so fascinating and irresistible to me) and not what The Venice Diaries is all about.
This is my personal take on a City I love, and have lived in on-and-off for 6 years.
It’s my diary of this place, my eyes and ears on the things I do and learn each day I’m here; things which interest and excite me; the things I want to share with anyone who cares to read it, so they might be excited by it too.
So I won’t write about the Doges’ Palace itself, but about that fizzy moment when my heart skips a beat and I can’t avoid a sharp inhale of WOW! every time I turn the last corner in Piazza San Marco and see it standing there, pink and grey and magnificent, and I THINK ABOUT WHAT IT SIGNIFIES and what went on in there.
Or what it looks like at midnight in clear moonlight, shrouded in deep winter fog, or 2-feet deep in Acqua Alta.
THAT’s what I will write about.
The Venice Diaries is an account of what I feel, see, hear, smell, taste, touch, am enthused by, maddened by, enlivened by, saddened by, energised by, filled with love by and LIVE, every time I set foot in this insane jumble of islands.
I’ve written diaries of my days in Venice since I first came here in 1984 as a 9-year-old girl on a family holiday around Italy, when we lived in Nice for a while. It made a huge impression on me, and while I don’t remember what I was thinking when my father took this photograph of me looking out over the lagoon from a window in the Doge’s Palace (I think?! Ill check….) but I like to think it was, “One day I’m going to live here.”
This is a little snippet of one of my diary entries from that day, complete with my Biglietto d’Ingresso to the Palazzo Ducale:
There’s also a moving account of our dinner that night, which sounds all kinds of dramatic,
and a postcard stuck into my little notebook, of the Bridge of Sighs. It could have been taken last week.
I have many more of these - including a small collection of used vaporetto tickets (then 500 Lire, which I just LOVE seeing stamped at the top!) - and I might share them over the coming months, if you’re interested.
I came back to Venice in the early 2000s when my older children were young, and wrote more diaries then, and then again many times - the notebooks in the photograph at the top are a TINY fraction of the whole! - since 2018, when I moved here, and have since made my second place of work and life.
My understanding, intimate connection with and personal affection for this city have grown enormously over that time as I’ve got to know Venice, struggle with her, fight her . . and come to understand and love her so much I can’t imagine my life without her.
Venice is a place so extraordinary it almost defies description, and she can’t be experienced or understood fully any other way than being here, preferably for some time. Like all the best love affairs, it takes the difficult moments, the stripping back of a sprayed-on façade to reveal the raw, naked, vulnerable and loving, to make the best times possible - and you can’t have that in a day.
One thing that has never changed in all these years, and I honestly can’t imagine it ever will, is the sense of breath-stealing WONDER I feel every time I arrive here.
It’s like watching magic happen before my eyes, as the almost impossible world that is Venice comes closer and closer across the water, a mirage taking shape, and a history, a present and a future that pulses from every stone.
I wrote about it a few years ago in my memoir, Coming Clean, and I’m going to share a very few words here (slightly edited), mainly because then I don’t have to write it all again:
However you cross the Venetian lagoon, whether by road or water, in dazzling sunshine or torrential rain, watching the jumble of ancient bell towers and rooftops slowly rise above the horizon like gemstones in the water, is breathtaking. This dizzying labyrinth of waterways, glittering palazzi, tiny side streets, peaceful campi. hundreds of individual islands all linked by bridges until it appears as one seamless entity, was built in the 4th century on pillars of wood driven into the sand and mud by desperate people fleeing a barbarian invasion from the north. I still find it impossible to comprehend the work it must have taken to turn a clump of wooden huts on a salty sandbank into one of the most spectacular and powerful cities in the world, controlling a vast and world-changing Empire.
And this is what I’m going to write about in next week’s diary.
How this place came to be - not in a guidebook kind of a way, but the way that I feel and am always aware of Venice’s humble, desperate origins and the struggle to build this place, and how that impacts my everyday experience of living here. I think if anyone is to visit Venice, it’s essential to understand this; it partly explains why Venetians are, quite rightly, so proudly VENETIAN.
I’ll leave you with this photograph of the Venetian lagoon taken a few wears ago as I said goodbye to her - thankfully, not for long.
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*approximate figure, don’t quote me on this. It might be nearer 12.