Gelato

Ah, Venice, that quaint, quiet jewel of the Adriatic…well, folks, it’s proven to be a little more rowdy than previously thought.

Uni has been quite demanding of late, what with exams, research projects back home and upcoming assignments. My friends and I have found our favourite spot in the library, with a direct view of a canal, so when you’re absentmindedly chewing on a pencil and staring out the window, the passing gondolas remind you to get back to work.

After each day in the library, when I’m in study-mode, it’s nice to come home to a routine: cooking dinner, exercise, shower, reading in bed, etc. At least, it has been nice, up until the last week, as I seem to have recently acquired new neighbours.

Picture this: after a long day slogging through complicated literary theory, I come home and perform my evening routine as usual. I make dinner – tofu and vegetable stir fry, nothing fancy – I go for a run and do some yoga, I shower, and I climb into bed, settling in with my book.

About five pages in, I begin to hear a strange sound coming from the ether of the apartment complex. Now, I live in a converted flour mill from the 19th century; justifiably there are strange noises inside the building all the time, not to mention the revving boat engines or war-cries of overly large seagulls outside. So I don’t think much of it, and I return to reading.

But the sound continues, and increases, and by my tenth page, I’ve established that there is no conversational context so interesting in this world as to justify the overly emphatic agreement coming from the female on the other side of my wall.

So, dragging my duvet with me, I head to the couch with my book, and shut the door behind me. After half an hour, I deem it safe to return, and I crawl under the covers, staunchly ignoring the giggles I can still hear.

The next day, after another confounding eight-hour foray into the world of palimpsestic literature, I come home, and go about my usual activities. At the end of the night, I cautiously return to my book, my ears pricking up at each odd sound. As I’m drifting off at 12.30am, eyemask on, no doubt attractive strings of drool forming at the corners of my mouth, I begin to hear a faint vibrating noise, giggling, and a collection of sounds I do not really have any desire to describe to you. I sit bolt upright in bed, and, once again, grab the duvet and head for the couch.

The morning after, I am, somewhat understandably, a little cranky. Sleep, good, live sex show, bad. This particular Wednesday is Italy’s Festa del Lavoro, or Labour day, as it’s known to us Australians, and the library is closed. In fact, the library has been closed a day a week for the past three weeks – these Venetians sure do love a public holiday. So I’m working from home, and around 7.30pm I stop to make dinner. I’m lying on my bed replying to emails, waiting for my pasta water to boil, when I hear those bloody sounds coming through my wall again.

I roll my eyes and begin to get up from the bed, when I suddenly feel a modicum of outrage, and I think to myself, no, I am twenty fucking three years old and I will not be banished from my room by the overly embellished sounds of one woman faking an orgasm. I refuse. So, instead, I decide to have a little fun with the situation.

I connect my phone to my portable speaker, and out pour the lyrical sounds of Lily Allen’s ‘Not Fair’, blasting in my room, and, no doubt, into the apartment next door. If you’re not familiar with the song, look the lyrics up. The noises stop rather suddenly.

To make sure my point has gotten across, I queue up a variety of tasteful tunes to be played, including Trey Songz’ delightful ‘Neighbours Know My Name’, Big Sean’s calming ‘I Don’t Fuck With You’, Missy Elliott’s poignant ‘One Minute Man’ and, towards the end, Nicole Millar’s ‘Gimme a Break’. My fun lasts about forty minutes, and I turn my speaker off when I hear the front door of the neighbouring apartment slam. Win, win.

I plan on repeating this deterrent as often as needed – – song suggestions welcome.

My exams finally finished a few days later, and thus began the self-induced alcohol poisoning that the student lifestyle demands. Walking along the Zattere promenade at 3.30am in the pouring rain through a collection of outdoor modern art, having to have people drag me away from puddles I wanted to jump into may give you an indication of just how inebriated I was. I think there was prosecco? I know there was tequila.

A day later, once my friends and I had resurfaced from our collective hangover hell, it was time for some exploration.

It started out just like any other Friday adventure. J and I visited San Simeone Piccolo; your average Italian church.

We had a look around at your standard frescoes, shrines, etc:

Prayers and thanks written in all sorts of different languages, on scrap paper!

When, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an unassuming sign which read ‘crypts’. When in Rome, I thought. So J and I approached, and the caretaker gestured for us to hold out our hands. He lit some candles, placed them into little pots, handed them to us, and we were sent on our way.

The first indicator that we had made a grave error was this next sign:

As we walked through the doorway, we entered the pitch-black darkness of a 9th century cemetery. Frescoes lined the walls, showing various types of religious misery (Christ being crucified, women crying, etc). It didn’t help that J and I were alone, in the darkness, with the flagstones echoing through the crypt every time we stepped on a wobbly one.

If you look closely, you can see the blood smeared on the cross. Nice.

We got to the final chamber, and I made the mistake of rounding the corner, holding my candle up, and seeing this:

There may have been some shaking and/or muffled screams on our part.

When we came back up into the light, the ~~handsy~~ Italian caretaker asked us if we wanted to see something interesting. He ushered us into a private room with a shrine for the priests. We ooh-ed and ahh-ed for a few minutes, at which point he asked us if we would like to ring the bells.

We looked at each other incredulously and nodded, as he led us to the rickety wooden ladder. He sort of just disappeared after that, so J and I navigated the steep, splintering planks, which looked/felt like artifacts themselves. We got to the top, and in amongst the piles of carelessly stacked paintings with golden frames, marble crosses and dust, we pulled the ropes and listened to the bells ring out across the lagoon.

Once we ran out of the church, giggling at our luck, we headed to the Rialto markets, for a calming glass of wine and some cicchetti:

Soave, Prosciutto,Truffle, Tuna, Mortadella. I swear we were not double parked.

Afterwards, we journeyed to the Libreria Acqua Alta, a bookshop that has tackled Venice’s frequent flooding with an innovative idea:

This rather dapper proprietor was sitting at the register

We sat next to stacks of ruined books, reading whatever we could get our hands on, in whatever languages we could understand:

We only had time for a quick gelato in the Italian sunshine before the next bout of drinking began.

Salted hazelnut and pistachio crema — think Nutella but made from pistachios

It is a sad state of affairs when your alcohol consumption does not fit into one blog post. Nevertheless, it is a team effort — me and my hangover shall persevere.

Venetian winters have their charms – there is no doubt about that. The light begins to fade around 3.00pm and soon the whole sky is thickly swathed in ochre-orange twilight. The night captures Venice around 6.00pm and sprinkles it with stars, which makes late-night walking a pleasure.

However, the Antipodean in me had a longing for a return to nature, so when a few friends of mine asked me if I wanted to tag along with them for a weekend in Florence, I couldn’t resist. Florence promised to put on a good show for us; it was forecasted to be a perfect Spring weekend, full of sunny blue skies and temperate breezes.

We caught the train out of Venice, and within two hours, we had arrived. I played tour guide, as this was my third time in Firenze, and I tempted the tired and hungry travellers with lavish descriptions of creamy truffle dips, verdurous produce and more parmesan than you could poke a stick at.

We headed to the second floor of the market to sample the goods of the providers in an effort to appease our collective hunger.

Unfortunately we were so preoccupied with our very late breakfast, that we forgot that the stalls below closed at 3.00pm. Cue terse silence on my part. It was a dark moment for me. I’d rather not talk about it.

It was one of our party’s birthday, and it was mutually agreed that we should throw a little soirée in our Airbnb that night. Another had the bright idea of making pizza, so off we traipsed around Florence, in search of the essentials: cake, wine, olive oil and bread. All stations to carb central, thank you very much.

Pasqua (Easter) is just around the corner!

So off we went, traipsing and giggling among the backstreets of Florence on our quest for necessities. Along the way, we accumulated three bottles of excellent wine, two baguettes, a gorgeous vintage Burberry coat, two birthday cakes, pizza ingredients and Sicilian oranges. An odd mix, but it worked.

We returned to the Airbnb, pumped up the music, poured the wine, and began our pyjama-pizza-Prosecco party. Try saying that three times fast. I started on the dough, and taught the birthday girl how to knead, but it might have been better if the chef wasn’t four glasses deep. Whoops.

Several kilos of pizza, an inebriated fashion show and a few Venetian guests later, we retired in the early hours of the morning; full, happy and sloshed.

The next morning, half our party went to a Korean film lecture, and the other journeyed to the Uffizi. R and I spent 5 hours in amongst the exhibitions, which contain some of my favourite pieces of art ever.

My third time at the Uffizi was perhaps the worst – I’m not sure, if in the epoch of the smartphone, people have become more obnoxious and facile than ever, or if I was just particularly sensitive to it, but I was quite honestly ready to deck a few American tourists who thought that invading my personal space/sticking their phone an inch from my face in order to take a photo was appropriate.

And I know I’m coming off as a particularly insufferable cross between Miss Manners and a pedant, but I just cannot fathom the point of paying to enter a gallery like the Uffizi, in order to spend five seconds in front of the most well-known pictures, to take your own photo of them, so that you can torment your friends with photos/never look at it.

Aristotle said that ‘the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.’, and even though he was a relatively misogynistic classist (who wasn’t, or isn’t, I suppose), I couldn’t agree more with him. Art, in whatever form, in whatever school, exists to comment on our manner of living, exists to evoke or soothe human emotion. To wait to be attributed meaning, in whatever minutiae possible; to be seen — truly seen — to look at you from whatever pedestal it’s on and ask you, the consumer, how it connects to you and your plastic-filled, tech-obsessed, apathetic 21st century life.

It could be the worst thing you’ve ever seen, the best, or simply inconsequential. But if you don’t even consider it, if you look at a painted piece of canvas that has existed for 400 years through the camera lens of your phone and walk away with no connection, no opinion except the one written on the wall next to it, tell me, what was the point? Was it simply a bullet point on the to-do list of your life?

Rant over, in the interests of touristic safety, I spent most of my time away from the shoving and phone/face contact, sitting in the hallways and admiring the ceilings. Painted by Alessandro Allori in the Mannerist style in the 16th century – it’s essentially a big pagan party up above. Littered with mythological creatures, references to then contemporary Florentine finds and seriously weird demons – – it’s easy to get a kink in your neck from admiring the airy art up above.

Saturday night we indulged in the Florentine classic, bistecca alla fiorentina,which, as you can see, was practically served mooing.

Most tourists having absconded, we walked around the Duomo for a few hours, enjoying the peace and marvelling at the stonework in the warm evening.

Me, R, J and H after a few bottles of Chianti…

Sunday dawned bright and balmy; the perfect temperature for our adventure to come. I had booked a day’s riding through the olive groves and vineyards of Tuscany, and I couldn’t be more excited. We walked to the pickup point, met our guide Marco (of course), and were driven to the stables to meet our noble steeds. Soon, we were off!