Letter From Venezia

Talk long enough to anyone who has worked in the Venetian hospitality industry and he or she will inevitably get around to mentioning (with a roll of the eyes) the time a foreign tourist inquired by phone about on-site parking …

When part of the Biblioteca Marciana, across the piazzetta from the Doge’s Palace, collapsed during its construction in 1538 its architect, the eminent Jacopo Sansovino, was immediately thrown into jail. A group of Sansovino’s influential friends, including the great Titian, …

When I  made my first poorly-planned and short-lived attempt at the age of 26 to live in Venice in the early 1990s, I thought of it as the ultimate place of art and artifice. I imagined that by traveling to …

Venetians are angry lately, and in a city in which the number of tourists on any given day is greater than the number of residents, their anger is intensified by the suspicion that no one—not even their own elected city …

One of the first things my Venetian friend, whom I’ll call “A”, said to me when I met him two years ago in his father’s lace showroom near Piazza San Marco was, “ This place will be a museum soon, …

It was a brief throwaway exclamation that made me realize my 3 1/2-year-old son had become one of them. I’d left him alone in his room for less than a minute, where he was trying to build a gravity-defying skyscraper …

Pay even the briefest visit to Piazza San Marco around noon these days and you’ll instantly discover, or be reminded of, why seasoned travelers have long considered summer to be the absolute worst time to visit Venice. What Napoleon is …

That my pronunciation of Italian words often falls short of the mark, well, I’ll be the first one to admit that. Still, I was a little surprised when my son, Sandro, first started correcting it. “An-chee-o,” he instructed me—not that …

In spite of the fact that I was born and raised in Modesto, California, and that the furthest east I’d ever traveled was Reno, I grew up firmly believing that my “nationality” was Italian. I didn’t speak the language (though …

Since the end of its republic, Venice has been a favorite spot for both upper-case Romantics (such as Lord Byron and Percy Shelley) and lower-case romantics (the rest of us) to contemplate in its famously crumbling palazzi and churches the …