Pictures of Dolomite, a Zemblan Interlude

I descended from the plane in Venice in deep confusion after 23 hours of travel from Kunming. The airport signs appeared in Italian, English, and Mandarin, exacerbating the airport’s liminality. How forward-looking, I thought, of Venice to acknowledge the growing importance of Mandarin-speaking tourists to the European economy. The place must be awfully futuristic.

All I knew about Venice when I showed up was that it’s so crowded nobody goes there anymore. The city is about as large as six or seven of the mega cruise ships that threaten to inundate it. A taxi from the airport took me to a dim dockyard where I was induced into an unmarked white boat. Safety first! This turned out to be a water taxi.

The driver didn’t say a word. I stood to marvel at the floating or sinking buildings that seemed at once Baroque, Islamic, and Italian once I remembered the boat had no “fasten seatbelts” sign. The windows sat recessed inside ornate arches. Some were roundly Roman, others had that Gothic point, and still more had the sort of Ottoman three-leaf clover shape. I don’t know, I never took art history. From what I could tell, they had a pleasantly variable color palette, like the row homes in Salzburg. Everything visible from the boat floated just out of reach in a surreal moonlight.

I had not heard a water taxi into Venice romanticized as a city entrance akin to the car over the 59th street bridge or the Senate invitation from the Campus Martius, but this was really something. In the wee hours of the morning, I didn’t see any of the crowds I’d heard would be the town’s primary non-climate-change problem. I peered at dimly lit grand churches standing naked with neither pigeons nor people to cover them.

The next day, it became clear why Venice is Venice. The novelty of a building sprouting out of a canal and doors that open onto the water without sidewalk cannot be overstated. Whatever the purpose for the doors opening straight into the canal, I like to imagine that homeowners use them to guide troublesome guests to watery graves. Neither Amsterdam nor Bruges, both allegedly Venices of the North, can match the chaos of this warren of canals.

The beauty of Venice’s labyrinth is its absurdity. Bridges cross canals only to dead end into walls. Busy thoroughfares lead to bridges that drop walkers at the front door of a glass museum and only a glass museum. Some bridges are magnanimous enough to allow people to move from point A to point B, but only if A and B are themselves flexible. Any results-oriented traveler will be driven insane, but those in no rush can find paradise.

As far as the tourism blight, half the souvenirs could have been sold on the boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ, while the rest were limoncello in lewdly shaped bottles. How far the city’s merchants, once the only people in the world who knew how to make mirrors, had fallen. But, all the convenience stores sell wine!

The architecture attests to the city’s glorious past and uncertain future. The Eastern influences, from the brick pattern on the Doge’s Palace to the Basilica San Marco’s golden mosaics, indicate how far Venetians sailed, traded, and learned at their height. The Venetians seemingly never bothered engaging with the bring-out-your-dead salesmen and knights who no longer say Ni in the then-backwaters to their north and west, and they didn’t miss out. The Venetians had a ton of money in the Middle Ages and spent it wisely.

Despite this history, time is running out. Everything is leaning. Why armies of people go to a smaller city for one leaning tower when Venice has at least seven leaning towers and a small mountain range of floor warping in the Basilica San Marco is beyond me. The water is coming in, so you never know when you’ll find yourself owning beachfront property.

Were I forced into a Venetian profession, I’d choose water taxi driver over mirror inventor. Some taxis are white fiberglass floating limousines, but many are wooden beauties that make a Chris-Craft look like a folded piece of paper. Drivers maneuver their charges with total confidence, driving heart-stoppingly close to cruise ships, ferry-buses, and gondolas, all while maintaining perfect hair, sharp sunglasses, and popped collars. None of them seem to care whether they even have passengers. They just drive, say “Pronto” when they answer the phone, and chat with their buddies when docked. Each is a partial king of this city. As for the gondolas, I suggested we take one, and my parents suggested that I take a Central Park carriage ride instead.

In China, I had been reading a Hemingway book about a 50 year old US Army colonel who dates an entirely too young countess. Their goings about from drink to drink at the Gritti Hotel, Harry’s Bar, and Café Florian, turned out to be more go-where-one-goes than is trendy. Nevertheless, they offered inspiration for how lead a life of leisure.

At some point in the book, they head north into the mountains. My sister and mother had roped themselves into some sort of wellness racket in the village of San Cassiano in the Dolomites. They invited me as a plus one, to share the hotel and none of the activities or vegan cooking. I leapt at the chance to spend a week not camping in some of the world’s most picturesque mountains.

The hotel was not happy to see me. “Couch surf” doesn’t translate easily, and the logic of couch surfing fails if the hosts are themselves guests. Once they warmed up to me, I became confident enough to take free cookies by the fistful. A few days in, the concierge snuck up on me with his silent hotelier’s trot to ask a critical follow-up question. Flustered, I dropped four of the fifteen cookies I’d been clutching. A seasoned veteran, he hid his disapproval when he said they would clean up my mess. I grabbed a few more from another bowl.

At breakfast, I eavesdropped on the other guests. On Monday, a spirited Italian man opined on how dirt was dirt and borders were absurd. On Tuesday, a woman talked through her husband’s newspaper about their upcoming home renovation. On Wednesday, the newspaper-holder himself shocked the world by carrying out a long, spirited conversation with the head waiter in what sounded like impeccable Italian. This would be a good moment to note that, in China, I had convinced myself Italian was so much closer to English than is Mandarin that I’d understand it. I speak no Italian, it turns out.

My days then included a gainful outdoor activity in the dramatic mountain setting. The trails were well enough marked that I always knew how far I was from the next glass of red wine, or a large weissbier if the multilingual locals happened to be spreken ze Deutsch. I remembered how much easier walking without 50 pounds of things I don’t need on my back is, and I managed a few spectacular hikes.

One in particular was a rather long loop that took me up a onetime glacier bed to a stark gray moonscape of rock and boulder far beyond the tree line, through a thick pine forest out into a lush, green valley, past a couple sparkling emerald ponds that they call lakes, and then down along a riverbed to a series of switchbacks beside a waterfall. This all but ruined hiking. If the White Mountains made the Berkshires look pathetic, then, well, the Dolomites, well, they’re something else.

I grew comfortable indeed. In the town of Badia, I confused the clerk at the local Spar by buying both postcards and a toothpaste too large to take on a plane. Maybe she thought I was a new resident, so she slipped deftly between German and Italian, presuming it made no difference to me. I paid and said “graci,” to which she said “auf wiedersehen.” I reconsidered and said “danke schoen,” and she said “ciao.”

The pinnacle of my mountain activities was the morning I spent rock climbing with Diego. To begin with, I told him I was experienced, and he believed me. He asked what types of climbs I climbed indoors, and I said generally 5.8s and 5.9s. I said I had been outside once or twice. So, he took me to the wall where he first told me to put on my harness and shoes and then said, “Ok, we climb.” I all but had my reading glasses on and a pen in my hand looking for a waiver to sign when we started climbing up the Via Miriam, a 230 meter face and one of the longest climbs at the Cinque Torri, a popular spot in the area.

I belayed him as he led each successive 50 foot pitch, though there was no way he was going to fall. It occurred to me how oversensitive we are to risk in the States, but then I looked below me and changed my mind. As I followed him up, the climb had some difficult moves but wasn’t so hard. He told me that it was about a 5.8 and that I had made good time. I asked him if I was right that it was a bit under two hours, and he said he never checks the time when he’s out here. “Climbing inside is good for the muscles, climbing out here is good for the soul,” he stated as I sat on a column of rock hundreds of feat above anything else around me, quivering with fear at the thought of standing up so exposed to the heights and the mountain emptiness.

On the way back, he told me how much good energy there was around the dolomites. Rather than a tie-dye shirt and a Bob Marley poster, however, Diego had white hair and a bald spot. He wore jeans and a button down shirt even during the climb. He had been guiding for 33 years, since age 22. Next week, he was off to climb in Nepal.

My days tended to end at the hotel’s jv restaurant unless I stopped for an early dinner at some place on a mountainside, because only two hotels in town had restaurants open for the slow season. The varsity restaurant here was kind of a big deal.

One night, I thought I’d try the other hotel’s place. The printer ran out of ink while printing the menu. I saw somebody sneeze into the salad bar. It was more expensive than my jv restaurant. I cleverly spied that every dish had meat, and I apologized to the waitress for my momentary vegetarianism before hightailing it back to familiar territory.

The sommelier greeted me with open arms and a couple free samples. I ate a calzone too large for the table and chose a bottle of whichever sample he said he preferred. I had begun my stay in the Dolomites avoiding eye contact with the hotel staff, but I managed to conclude it having a warm sense of familiarity with two identical bellmen, only one of whom ever remembered me.

The streets of San Cassiano were virtually empty. People in the area speak German, Italian, and Ladin, which is one of those Romance languages that actually hasn’t vanished. The absurdity of Venice and the cartoonish craginess of the Dolomiti gave the time a level of unreality, like the imagined mountain kingdom of Zembla. But, I got a cut on my hand that’s still there, so I guess it happened.