Venice Realized

In my Venice Imagined essay, I did not lay out any real expectations I had for Venice, but rather questions I wanted answered. Namely, I wondered about how the culture of a city changes when you take the cars out of it. The answer to that was, no surprisingly, everything slows down. Dinner takes two hours instead of fifteen minutes, and as we heard from our guide to the clock tower, time is significant only to the hour, not the minute. What most stuck out to me, however, was how normal the lack of cars felt. Walking around Venice for a week was a reminder of how natural it is for humans to move no faster than they can run and just how different our lives are from this natural state because of the vehicle.

            While walking around Venice, I noticed that I felt much calmer than I normally do. I thought that the cause of that might have been the sudden relief from the massive amount of homework that comes along with being an engineering student, but at the same time, I knew that it was still looming for next week and thus eliminated that as the cause. I realized that the particular calm I was feeling was not something I felt every day, but something I had felt before. Namely, it was similar to how I felt while hiking well into the backcountry of Yosemite or Rocky Mountain National Park. From that observation, I was able to identify the common thread that I think was the cause – in both cases, there are no cars.

            I think that cars cause us more stress than we realize, particularly when we’re walking near them. Consider running a race. If I was cruising along at whatever pace I’ve set and suddenly someone passed me, it would likely shake my nerves a bit. I’d likely think that my pace wasn’t fast enough, and I’d run a little faster. If it happened again, I’d try to run even faster. This would continue until I was running too fast for me to maintain the speed I was running at.

            Life is not a race per se, but I don’t believe we’re immune to the effects of cars constantly zooming past us. Unconsciously, we walk a little faster. We work a little longer. We spent a little less time relaxing. We are confronted with the fact that someone else is doing more with their time than us every time we are passed. Whether we realize it or not, simply being around cars quickens the pace of our lives and raises the amount of stress in them.

            Then there is Venice. No one is going anywhere in a hurry because no one can. There are still jobs that need to be done and places to be, but nothing is quite as urgent. Sitting down and having a three-hour long meal with friends no longer seems like a time drain, but rather something that is desirable, even necessary. I didn’t find myself constantly thinking of what needed to be done next. Rather, I focused on what was happening in the present.

            Additionally, Venice is much quieter than any other city I’ve ever been to because of the lack of cars. This struck me the most when we were walking back from dinner at Osteria alla Staffa around ten at night. I thought about how noisy Chicago is at the same time of night. The rumble of the “L” can be heard periodically, buses whoosh by, and cars honk. The background noise is virtually indistinguishable from that of the daytime. In Venice, however, there is near silence. Boat traffic seems to die down to nearly nothing, and it disappears once you’re far enough inland. All the noises of people out in the streets working during the day have died off. The only sound is of the footsteps of the group your walking with and perhaps of running water if you’re close enough to a canal. To think of Chicago ever being so quiet is unimaginable.

            In the “On the Exotic” chapter of The Art of Travel, Botton suggests that what we are attracted to abroad is “what we hunger for in vain at home.” In Venice, I found a slower pace of life that simply isn’t possible in any part of urban America along with all of the resources, such as museums and restaurants, which can be found only in cities. I am glad I was able to experience this beautiful lifestyle, if only for a week.