It is a city of art and architecture, ancient maritime power and home of Titian and Tintoretto, Bellini, and Vivaldi. Its Renaissance nickname was the Republic of Music. It is Constantinople’s medieval wartime foe, a curious haven for eighteenth-century Jews, and was left largely intact by World War II. An official Disney Store is now parked in one of its cavernous fifteenth-century storefronts.
This is Dan’s hometown, and he has given us a laundry list of Venice’s greatest hits off the beaten path. Wind whips through cramped alleyways, but sunrays splay past rooftops and bullet our faces. It is a beautiful day. Vaporettos are Venice’s buses, water ferries with service lines as detailed as London’s Tube and twice as expensive. The kids beg to ride one. We are back traveling with Ryan and Stephanie’s family, so that means there are eleven of us, which also means eleven tickets.
“We will eventually,” Kyle says. “But we’re gonna walk most of this city.” Venice is a floating city two and a half miles from dry land; during high tide pilgrims must walk on wooden platforms in St. Mark’s Square. There are miles of alleys in which to get lost. This is our plan for the weekend.
Dan’s directions guide us to the best gelato in town, and we patronize it twice a day. He leads us to a dock for a coveted gondola-riding photo for two euro per adult—a 175-foot ride across the Grand Canal, where four strokes of the oar commutes Venetians to their homes. Dan’s savviness saves our budget in this costly city.
He also hints how to find a glassblower happy to show loud foreign children a behind-the-scenes look at his talent on Murano, an island in the Venice lagoon. We ride a vaporetto to the islet and tuck past touristed streets of shops selling glass vases, jewelry, and statues to an unremarkable shop with a warehouse door in the back. We push the door and walk into a concrete room with stacks of cardboard boxes on storage shelves, and find a man blowing into a length of steel pipe, molten orange and red ballooning on the opposite end. A teenage girl with a fauxhawk opens a fireplace with burning embers, and he shoves the tip of his pipe into fire to reheat liquid glass. He spins as he shapes with heavy-duty pliers, blows, spins, bends melted glass to his will. He makes a miniature horse and we burst into applause.
We hop back on the vaporetto and head to Burano, a lesser-known island than its counterpart. A swath of grass reminds me I haven’t seen it since we’ve been in Venice, and its halcyon allure calls the kids to run wild. They’ve tiptoed through narrow concrete walkways and mildewed waterways for days. Finn climbs a statue of naked women, innocent and unaware.
Burano is humble fishermen’s houses and squinting lace makers, and shops beckon us with delicate lace wholly out of our budgets. Row houses are walls shared but separate with distinct hues: raspberry, lime, blueberry, and mango. Looking at them from a canal bridge is like peering through a glass case at a gelato shop. The kids call out their favorites and claim houses as theirs.
Late afternoon is macchiato time for adults, and we sit at a caffé alfresco on the piazza while the kids sit in a circle and play hand games. We wait for our return vaporetto, slurping seafood and pasta at a tiny corner café overlooking the water, and watch the sun dip into the Laguna Veneta.
The next day is our last in Venice and, therefore, Italy. We have work to do, but our hearts are heavy at departing Italy and so we leave work on our laptops for twenty-four more hours. The five of us play hide-and-seek in the dark bowels of Venice and we chase one another through three-foot-wide passageways. At one of its entryways, I snap a photo of an unidentified saint etched in stone, cracked and graffitied, barely noticed on the brick wall. It has stood guard over this alley for centuries and watched medieval and Renaissance children dart and dash through its shabby hallowed halls. I wonder how long it’s been there. I wonder how long the graffiti has been there.
Italy is art. Italians carve their farmland, their marble, and their dingy alleyways as artisans. I think of Rome a few days ago with Dan and Bethany, when he took us to a pub offering twenty kinds of beer.
“Does Italy have good beer?” Kyle asked, assuming the answer.
“Actually, they have fantastic beer,” Dan replied.
“Really? I thought it was all wine here,” I said.
“Because there are no expectations for beer,” he explained, “it’s excellent. Belgium has strict regulations as to what makes a beer Belgian. There are no cultural rules for Italian beer, and Italians look at everything as art. They’re free to take risks, and they know it will sell because Italians are curious and are usually willing to try something new. For the art of it.”
We all leave Venice the next morning, and we pass a piano parked in the train station, free for anyone to play. There is always someone there, tapping the keys as Beethoven, Busoni, or Porter vibrate through hollow train platforms. It’s empty this morning. Ryan sits down and plays while we bide time for our train. We are heading through Slovenia next and onward to our last country together.
The train arrives, we board, and I settle into my window seat. Tate sits next to me, and we work on fractions for a while, then stop to pay homage to the bucolic, earth-shattering scenery sprinting past our window. We blow kisses to Italy as we cross the border.
The sun blazes noon, and Tate rests her head on my shoulder, closes her eyes. I open the book I’m currently reading and find this:
He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.3
17
CROATIA
The bus pulls out onto country Croatian roads, and the driver starts playing Taylor Swift’s Red album. Reed begins singing along in the seat behind me, and I tell him to lower the volume.
“Are you American?” a girl asks from the seat across the aisle.
“Yep. You too?” I ask.
“Yeah, we both are,” she says, leaning back to show the guy next to her. I introduce myself and Tate sitting next to me.
“I’m Megan; this is Charlie,” she says. They look road weary.
“You backpacking around Europe?”
“Eastern Europe,” Charlie says. “We’re about to start grad school, so we thought we better travel while we can, get it out of our system.”
“So you’re heading to Split? Whereabouts after that?” I ask.
“Bucharest, then Budapest. After that, not sure. We might be out of money then, so we’ll just go back to Montana.”
I nod. Reed is still singing behind me, sitting next to Ryan and Stephanie’s oldest son, Caden, and Finn is asleep on Kyle’s lap a seat back. Tate’s listening to our conversation.
“You know,” I say, “you probably won’t ever get it out of your system.”
“I see that,” Megan says, looking at our collection of kids. “Are they all yours?”
I laugh. “Three of them are. The other four belong to those guys,” I say, pointing to Ryan and Stephanie.
“You’re all just traveling, then?” she asks. I explain our year around the world and our friends’ few months in Europe.