Viva Venezia

Venice is a fairy city of the heart. --Lord Byron

Whoever said that Venice can be seen in less than two days must have been talking about Venice, California. In the Italian original, it takes a week just to catch your breath. In fact, whatever you've heard about Venice, it's wise to take it all with a pinch of parmesan. Venice is a city you have to experience.

Even a dictionaryful of superlatives cannot adequately conjure its enchanting, provocative majesty; its history, romance, sexuality, pungency, color, mood--there we go. But it all applies. Just leaf through Byron sometime. Two ladies we know recently returned from a week in Venice, though they called the city by another name: paradise. The reason for their excitement?

It was dusk of our first day, and we'd exhausted ourselves sightseeing," they said. "We were crossing the Piazza San Marco, checking out the people on our way back to the hotel, when all of a sudden we said, 'What we really need now is two great-looking guys with their own boat who will take us for a spin on the Grand Canal.' Wishful thinking, right? But next thing we (continued on page 146)Viva Venezia(continued from page 70) know, these two great-looking men say, 'Ciao, bella. Hi, where you going?' One of the guys turned out of the rich kind in town; the other, the son of the president of the gondoliers' union. The first had his own boat. Thirty minutes later, we were on the water." Needless to say, their entire social schedule for the rest of the week was also easily filled. And our ladyfriends are already making plans to alight in Venice again as soon as possible. Venice is truly the place where fantasies come true.

There is also much to appreciate in Venice from the male perspective. One can't help noticing the fine, strong-willed and healthy women, from the waitress in a back-alley pizzeria to the sultry stranger staring at you from the next gondola; from the efficient agent at the local American Express office to the young tourist guide leading visitors through the ancient shadows of the Basilica San Marco. Their skins are luminescent and their cheekbones go on for days. They brush full, dark hair with long, tapering fingers while smiling with full, red mounths and hot doe eyes.

Of one thing you can be certain: The women of Venice are never boring.

A sexual odor [rises] from the canals and rotting palaces... in this city where revelry and vice were once derigueur, where a women married at 16 and by 17 took a lovers...in this city where gondolas plied the dark canals and love was made under the gondola's black hood on the water, or it little hideaways on canals not even other Venetians knew about; in this city where the lovely lapping of the brackish waters suggests sex even to the celibate....

--Erica John, "Parachutes & Kisses"

Venice holds perhaps the greatest adventure for couples, especially those who arrive with romance in mind. What one can do alone is better done together here. (Paris is not the World's only city for lovers.) A one-day scenario of exotica á deux could easily include the following: Let's assume you are staying at one of the hotels in the Campo Santa Maria del Giglio. If you're at the Ala or the Bel Sito, you wake with a view of the church after which the area is named. If you are at the opulent Gritti Palace, like former patrons Ernest Hemingway, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Greta Garbo, Winston Churchill, the Aga Khan and W. Somerset Maugham, your window may face the Grand Canal itself. There, about ten A.M., you begin with a Continental breakfast of espresso, rolls, croissants, butter and jams (in bed, if you like). You pore over the International Herald Tribune and the international edition of USA Today for news of home. Assured that no disasters have obliterated your principal residence, your stock portfolio or the exchange rate, it's off through winding passageways and narrow streets to the nearby Piazza San Marco. In the shadow of the world-famous Basilica San Marco and 20 paces from the equally renowned Caffé Florian, you can buy a bag of birdseed and feed the pigeons. These birds are used to visitors bearing gifts and will not hesitate to land in your hand or on top of your head--should a certain someone throw birdseed in your hair. At times, the burgeoning avian population can literally carpet the piazza. When there are no perches left, the unlucky pigeons must move to New York.

Next, walk through the Piazzetta San Marco, adjacent to its larger sister, past the sidewalk cafés, Biblioteca Marciana and Doges' Palace to the water's edge. There, lined with gondola and taxi stands, the Grand Canal (they city's version of the Champs Elysées) empties into the larger Bacino di San Marco. Across the water is the Lido, with its white-sand beaches and resort hotels. To the immediate left in the prison and, as you take another left turn up a small canal, the Bridge of Sights. Farther left is the Riva degli Schiavoni, home of such hotels as the Londra Palace. To the right is one of the few public parks in town featuring trees. Trees in Venice are a rarity and are one reason doges in Venice are kept muzzled. Having few familiar rest stops makes them a tad unruly.

After a brief stroll along the water, do an about-face, tromp through the Piazza San Marco and out the portal next to the clock tower. Follow the signs that read Per Rialto. They are not guiding you to the local moviehouse but to the Ponte di Rialto, Venice's most famous bridge. It spans the Grand Canal about mid-point and is usually jammed with tourists. Along the route are some of the city's best shopping areas. You can buy leather at bargain prices, exotic blown-glass creations, Borsalino hats, shoes, sculpture, artad infinitum. But if you turn a corner and suddenly find yourself in a Venetian twilight Zone. Empty courtyards, silent save for the heel-and-too clicks of occasional passersby, lurk in the most unexpected places.

They are especially picturesque and private, perfect for a stolen kiss. Then, a bit of ingenious navigation will eventually get you to the bridge just in time for lunch alongside the canal. While eating fresh fish and pasta and drinking a bottle of Bardolino, you can watch the vaporetti (water buses) chug by, spot cats darting across gondola tops and ponder whose idea it was to build this enduring monument to improbability in the eastern-Italian marshes, anyway.

Spend the remainder of the afternoon wandering through churches, discovering more hidden piazzas and visiting such museums as the stunning Guggenheim Collection (works by Pollock, Ernst, Picasso, Duchamp, Chagall, Mondriaan, Magritte, Miró. Giacometti and Moore) and, if you're in the mood for more art, the Gallerie dell' Accademia. As one Venice guidebook put it, "Venice is a city of art....[At the Accademia] the glory that was Venice lives on in a remarkable collection of paintings spanning the 14th to 18th centuries." Among the artists: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Bellini.

Make dinner reservations before the sun sets.

Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time--or returning thither after long absence--and stepping into a Venetian gondola?

--Thomas Mann, "Death in Venice"

A Gondola ride is mandatory and never a disappointment. Even the gondoliers themselves use this age-old conveyance to stage their own seductions (remember our previously mentioned ladyfriends?). Wait until the late afternoon and spend an hour gliding over the silvery-pink waters until you can cap your journey with a kiss at dusk under the Bridge of Sighs. If you're lucky, as you drift into the Grand Canal, observers will congratulate your sealing of romantic destiny with encouraging applause. Never mind that the "sighs" refer to the resigned exhalations of prisoners crossing the bridge from the Doges' Palace to the prison, where they would often as not die after barbarous tortures, Instead, lovers may want to imagine some delicious torments of their own in order to relate better to the bridge's true history.

Venice in sunshine is wonderful, but a raging thunderstorm witnessed from a dry hotel room while you dress of dinner is not to be missed, either. The thunder and lightning are especially intense as the sodden skies ache to merge with the rising waters. Torrents of raindrops cascade off shop awnings (stand under one if you are caught in the storm) to form little rivers overflowing the stone streets. Shopkeepers take their merchandise racks inside and furiously push back the water with large brooms. The metaphor is lost on no one. Later, when the rain has become an intermittent drizzle, nothing is as romantic as a late-night promenade through the city. Since the locals stay inside, Venice is yours alone.

But even if the skies remain clear, the mist will soon settle in. Take a mid night ride on the taxi boat from the piazzetta landing to the posh Hotel Cipriani (created by and named after the late Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of the original Harry's Bar), on the Isola della Giudecca. As you look back at Venice, it could just as well be Brigadoon.

The decidedly upscale hotel grounds are usually deserted after the witching hour. Wander past the Olympic pool to the lounge, where a pianist plays and sings a wide range of favorites. Have a cognac, then ask him to warble I Only Have Eyes for You while you dance cheek to cheek, lost in the reverberating tones of his smooth, accented English. You won't forget it.

If you're in the mood for something guaranteed to ignite your own Latin passions more quickly, try making the moves of love on the dance floor of EI Souk, one of Venice's two private discos. Then do the real think on the arching crest of one on the city's tiny canal bridges. Or you can save it until after you both pick up the room key at the hotel desk, bid the attendant a blushing "Buona sera" and slip between the-sheets.

I stood in Venice on the Bridge if Sighs, A palace and a prison on each hand:

I saw from out the wave her structures rise

As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:

A thousand years their cloudy wings expand.

Around me, and a dying Glory smiles

O'er the far times, when many a subject land

Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles.

Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isled! --Lord Byron

Venice once had a patron saint, Theodore, a Greek. But his prestige rating was wanting, so the city fathers decided to upgrade. They smuggled the body of the disciple Saint Mark out of Alexandria in a pork barrel, entombed him in Venice and built the Basilica and the Piazza San Marco to honor him. Today, the acquisitive spirit lives on and is passed to the city's visitors. Venice resurrects dormant desired to live life to the fullest in all ways imaginable. As Lewis Munford so aptly wrote, "For all its vanity and Villainy, life touched some of its highest moments in Venice."

And it still does.

"Venice holds the greatest adventure for couples, especially those who arrive with romance in mind."