Empty Venice is a dream

Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph says today:

"London, once the most vibrant cultural and social metropolis on earth (believe me, I have lived in great cities on two continents) looks as if it has been hit by a neutron bomb. It became, virtually overnight, a de-populated museum of weirdly preserved, unoccupied buildings like a set in some dystopian cinema epic."

She wonders why no-one seems to want to return to city life, preferring to work far from city centres.

"Where is the understanding that a great cosmopolitan conurbation - which attracts and throws together people of different ethnicities and backgrounds, varying trades and occupations, disparate classes and attitudes - is essential to the progress of civilised life? Indeed, since the Renaissance, the growth of the great cities of Europe has been central to the development of civilisation itself."

Empty London sounds irresistible and yet I know people who are too frightened to walk from Kensington Gardens to the National Gallery or take the tube in from South London.

Your intrepid hero, on the other hand, at very short notice went to an eerily empty Optopeni airport in Bucharest, took a plane that was mostly empty to Munich, sat in an empty first class train carriage (EUR 80) in a train to Innsbruck and then took the train on to Venice and Florence. 


The direct train from Innsbruck to Venice is suspended because of the pandemic and I decided to spend two nights in Verona instead of just changing trains there. I was in a first class carriage in the train from Innsbruck to Verona (EUR 29, a snip) and I shared the carriage with one other person.

In fair Verona where we lay our scene, to quote the second line of Romeo and Juliet, I was ravished by the emptiness. Few people and almost all Veronese. 

Take a cheap plane to Venice, gentle reader, next weekend, provided you are not Romanian. Romanians have to quarantine for fourteen days.

Verona needs two full days. In some ways I like it more than Venice but I would not like it with tourists. I did not bother to see Juliet's supposed balcony. I did eat an excellent risotto cooked in red wine in an empty tourist restaurant called Liston da Barca for three successive meals. 



All churches were closed when I arrived but many opened the next day.


Umberto Eco wrote an essay on the self-confidence of cities. First-tier cities, he said, (Paris, New York, Rome) are slogans in themselves, completely self-explanatory. You are not asked about your opinion on them as there can be only one. He might have included Venice and Florence. 

I don't know why he included New York. I never was in New York but decided early this year it wasn't interesting and instead bought ticket for New Orleans, which always sounded fascinating.

The premium class carriage from Verona to Venice was far from full but not very empty because it was Friday afternoon and Italians were going to spend the weekend Venice. I stayed in a soulless four star hotel, the Splendid, whose rooms were marked down from EUR 450 to 125, and felt at first depressed by the little shopping street the hotel is on, with expensive shops and tourists.  But only a handful of people make a narrow street busy.

Walking five minutes to Piazza San Marco was a revelation. I was almost alone. I couldn't get enough of this and sat there each day drinking aperol spritzes, which were invented in Venice, at Cafe Florian which claims to be the oldest cafe in the world. 

It was founded in 1720. Older London coffee houses morphed into White's and Brooks's and Lloyd's of London, I suppose. Goldoni was a regular when it opened. Casanova and Byron were fond of this cafe, perhaps because it always admitted women. 

White's and Brooks's still haven't, which is absolutely fine. 

Coffee has Christian origins, coming from Ethiopia, but it is Muslims who brought it to Venice and Europe, for which I am very grateful to them.

Googling on the train told me 2.4% of the almost five million strong population of Veneto (or, as it should be called in English, Venetia) is Romanian. 90% are Italian. 7.6% "others". When I got to Venice I found that most of the others in Venice are Bangladeshi waiters and shop assistants, who are or will become Italian citizens. Venice has a thriving Bangladeshi community and two mosques.

For the 2015 Venice Bienniale the church of Santa Maria dell’Abbazia della Misericordia, which had been closed for forty years, was turned into a fully functional mosque, but after the Biennale the mosque was shut down by the city council, the modern equivalent of the Ten that ruled the Most Serene Republic. The church now stands empty again. 

The Grand Canal was empty too and I glid serenely back and forth on it. I got round at last to reading 'Death in Venice' and sympathised with the bachelor protagonist traveling alone, though unlike him beautiful boys do not interest me. Apparently the fourteen year old boy represents an allegory of the pagan ideal of beauty, but it is obviously also about Mann's repressed homosexuality. 

It would not be published for the first time now, but I didn't think I thought of pederasty when I saw Visconti's haunting film in my first term at university, so unimaginably long ago.

In Italian quarantina means ‘forty days’, from quaranta ‘forty’. Quarantine was invented in Venice and imposed on ships from infected ports, which had to sit at anchor for forty days. 

Shortly after I left the Redeemer Festival would have taken place on the third Saturday in July to commemorate an outburst of the plague in 1575 that caused 50,000 deaths in two years and killed nearly one out of three Venetians. However it was cancelled because of the Coronavirus. 

The permanent population of Venice is now only about 50,000, so a Venetian schoolgirl whom I spoke to in Florence told me, which means it's one third of its population before the 1575 plague and less than a third of its population in 1945 of 175,000.

Venice is the only place I know of where the seaside is the one place free of tourists. It's also beautiful, chic and ten minutes on foot and then twenty by the vaporetto that goes every five or ten minutes to Piazza San Marco.


I don't plan ever to return to Venice but if I did I'd stay at the beach, where the film of 'Death in Venice' is set and which the guide books and the concierge said isn't really worth visiting.  

In fact, now I think of it, the idea of an Edwardian beach holiday there in September appeals....

If you follow my advice and visit, you'll find food in Venetian restaurants is expensive but not fattening as it is mainly freshly caught fish. I cannot praise too highly the fish soup at a newish restaurant with reasonable prices called Gransapor.

The Grand Canal at Venice is on my list of seven wonders of the modern world, but even without tourists Venice is not  a real place but a museum. It is a monument to a lost civilisation, which is now plant for much the biggest industry in the world, tourism.

What struck me in Venice is that all the cities of Europe are museums now and European Christian civilisation will before too long be as dead as the doges. 

The Coronavirus is a symbol. So are the beautiful churches where saying Mass has been made illegal.