Conversations Amongthe CanalsMy relationship with the watery city changed when I was a teen. I wore
short skirts and went to bars with local Italians where I made out with the
boys and befriended the girls. I saw art and drank beer and wandered around
the darkened streets. Knowing your way around the labyrinth of Venice is a
superpower, especially at night when the lack of streetlights makes certain
crevices impossible to navigate.
In my early 20s I got married and had children, and I didn’t travel much. In
my 30s I returned to Venice with my dark-haired bookish daughter. She didn’t
have the kind of dramatic, exciting, lonely childhood I had, and perhaps she
was better for it.
We traveled with my mother, who had slowed with her writing and felt
lonely and disconnected the way writers who aren’t writing do. It was the
three of us traveling together, and it was deeply strange and very wonder-
ful. My mother, my daughter, and I—three women with three different hair
colors, three different eye colors, three different last names, but as connected
as three generations could be.
The city had changed from my youth. Now July and August were almost
unbearably hot. But its personality was still the same. Dense with crowds and
mosquitoes and people selling souvenirs, it remained a place where beauty
and sleaze coexist on every street corner. We came to Venice now as tour-
ists, not as residents—my mother, my daughter, and I. We weren’t there for
weeks or months; there was no time for days of lying on a boat staring at the
sky feeling the sun pierce my skin. All the people of my youth were dead—
Gore, Helmut, and everyone I had known in the ’80s. Even my Italian friends
had left, having grown up and moved to real cities where people have jobs.
I first went to Venice when I was 19 and studying
Italian in Florence. I took the train alone, as if I
somehow knew I had to see Venice by myself. My
parents had warned me of how seductive Italy is.
“Never drink grappa with an Italian man,” my
father said before I left.
So I walked the city experiencing that feeling of
semi-seasickness Venice promotes, the sensation
of traversing the air and water at once. For one
decade of my life, I rented houses in Venice and got
to know it in all its moods. It is a physical memory
of a time before airplanes connected the world
and places bore the imprints of their trading part-
ners. Cities don’t grow that way anymore. Perhaps
that is why we love it.
Recently I was there making a documentary about
my life, and I felt that I had fallen completely out of
love with Venice. It was cold and wet. Then, suddenly,
standing on a bridge in the ghetto in Cannaregio,
a woman who had read all my books stopped me to
rave and compliment. After that, I accidentally met
the only female gondolier in Venice. She explained
that she just wanted to be a gondolier, not a female
gondolier. She insisted that her male colleagues were
kind and supportive. Then I realized what makes
Venice so special: meeting people. Talking to people
who probably would not talk to you anywhere else.
That’s because we go everywhere on foot, if not by
boat. People feel they have time to talk. I think of
all the amazing conversations I’ve had there.
I remember a pianist who worked in one of the hotels
who took a break and sat with me and explained
that he had been a baker in Venice in a former life.
“How did you know that?” I asked.
“Because I woke up one night covered with flour.”
My daughter once said, “Mommy, we have the
best conversations in Venice.” So we go back again
and again. I see my daughter and granddaughter
more clearly in Venice. And myself. That’s why I love
it—and cease to love it when they’re not there.By Erica JongMolly Jong-Fast
as a child, with
her mother,
Erica Jong, and
dog PoochiniCondé Nast Traveler’s Women Who Travel is the leading authority for self-identifying women seeking to explore the world.
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My mother and I were adults now, married to men who worked, who needed
us to make them breakfast. We were no longer free agents who could stay in
crumbling old houses. Our Venice of the ’80s was long gone.
But the Venice we found in the 21st century is great in a different way: We
share meals together in elegant restaurants, swim in the enormous saltwater
pool, and eat breakfast with other Americans. There is something wonderful
about having a real life to go back to. So while Venice lives on—with its lime-
stone buildings, a sky that always looks like a Turner painting—I’m still sad
that Venice isn’t forever. But then, nothing is.