The Venetian Time Machine

Personal Notes from the Quiet Season in the Canal City

On a Saturday night last month, my friend Matthew was lost in the web of narrow bridges, canals, and alleyways that crisscross Venice. We had a table booked in a small and unpretentious osteria I like, and until we were all there, we couldn’t order.

The place only had five or six tables, and I didn’t want to be asked to give ours up on what must be the busiest night of the week. I apologized for the situation at least twice to the waitress. “No stà preocuparte¹,” she smiled each time -- “Don’t worry.”

It took a while, but Matthew eventually found the spot. We placed our order around 45 minutes later than originally planned. It was delicious.

Other diners came and went as we waited and, finally, as we ate. There were young Italians at the bar eating cicchetti and laughing. A well-dressed older couple at another table was there when I first walked in the door and they were still lingering when we left. The staff moved briskly and was attentive, but the mood in the place was unhurried and almost conspiratorial, like the evening was a secret and we were all in on it.

Keep in mind that this osteria is five minutes from the Rialto Bridge and the Grand Canal. Look at a map of Venice and we were right in the middle. But nobody tried to rush us. I think I even had to ask for the check multiple times.

Our footsteps and voices echoed against the high alley walls as we left. Someone was practicing piano in a nearby apartment. Seagulls cawed above.

Try having that kind of experience in that part of Venice during the canal city’s unforgiving high season, when empty seats are a contested resource.

This gondolier may or may not be reading The Italian Dispatch (EJL photo)

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What the summer people say

I usually try to zig when most people zag.

You won’t find me at the beach on Ferragosto or elbowing my way through museums on their free days. I stay home when the sales start and the crowds surge. And when another storied eatery becomes an Instagram darling complete with a queue stretching down the block, I’ll be seated a few blocks away chatting with a waiter about the best sauces to go with bucatini or where the restaurant’s porcini mushrooms come from.

Is it any wonder I also prefer traveling to popular places in the cool months?

There are reasons why the high season is seductive to so many. Take your pick: light clothing and sunglasses, beaches, days that stretch into the evening, school vacations, people watching in the piazza, outdoor concerts, festivals, open-air cinemas.

High season in Venice (ANSA photo)

Don’t risk the overcast weather, the summer people say. The days are too short. You have to pack too much. What if it rains? No cappuccino in the piazza? Where’s the energy?

My short reply is that I’ll choose packing a coat and a chance of rain over a guarantee of dense crowds, suffocating weather, high prices, and brusque service.

But my longer answer is much more interesting: I think off-season travel in Italy can be like traveling back in time.

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Looking in the mirror

The first time I traveled to Venice it was to interview artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, who had just received a lifetime achievement award from the Venice Art Biennale. Pistoletto, then in his 70s, told me about the use of mirrors in his creations. Often, he sets them in such a way that the person admiring the work for becomes part of it for a moment.

Pistoletto in front of one of his works in Venice (Venice Biennale photo)

I remember thinking at the time that his work was a metaphor for a common phenomenon. Most places were like that: people change them just by being present. Venice, more than any other city I know, proves this point.

On the busiest days of the high season, Venice can attract as many as 120,000 visitors, two and a half times more than the city’s full-time population. At a certain point, each extra visitor is like another dull smudge on the mirror.

Compare that 2.5-to-1 rate for Venice to 0.3 to 1 in Florence or 0.1 to 1 in Rome or Naples. Among popular tourist spots with a smaller population than Venice, the tiny Republic of San Marino occasionally reaches a 1-to-1 visitor-to-resident rate. In terms of per capita tourism, Venice stands almost alone.

In 2024, Venice began charging a day-tripper fee that next year will be levied on the 60 busiest days of the season (up from 54 this year and 29 in 2024). This year, the fee added nearly €6 million to the city’s coffers but it did little to reduce the number of tourists.

Venice is a city scaled to a medieval world. Footpaths are barely as wide as a person’s shoulders. Some canals seem narrow enough to jump across, and few bridges have space for entire tour groups at once. In the most crowded months, air in the lanes is thick and smelly, noise echoes off the walls, and people pass through like sheep in a chute.

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Inhale, exhale

But during the low season, it feels like I’m returning to the city I experienced during my first Biennale. That trip was in June or July, but the Venice lagoon back then still had a signature smell: briny, mossy, wet stone and waterlogged wood, maybe even a little sweet.

It can still smell like that, though it’s hard to notice amid enormous crowds and the exhaust from delivery boats. But in the winter, even today, the city seems to exhale.

Suddenly, people-watching is transformed: fewer confused tour groups and more kids kicking a soccer ball, or locals running errands or walking their dogs. Queues dwindle, and it’s possible to stop and reflect in a museum or to have an artisan’s shop to yourself.

Low season in Venice (EJL photo)

Staff in hotels and shops, restaurants and bars, are less harried. Hotel rates are lower, and the window seat in the restaurant you heard about is probably available.

Most importantly, the heartbeat of the city is no longer the hum of the crowd; it’s the sound of waves slapping against the city’s ancient foundations or echoing beneath bridges. In the low season, Venice allows you to slow down and it becomes a place a visitor can again experience rather than simply manage.

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📌And another thing

Back to my friend Matthew, who failed to show up on time because he was betrayed by his mobile phone.

There were two big factors working against him.

First, there are at least three separate streets in Venice called Calle de la Malvasia, which it turns out is a reference to wine from the Greek port city of Monemvasia. The name probably means these streets were all home to wine vendors in the 14th or 15th century.

Venice’s three Calle de la Malvasia (we ate at the middle one) (EJL image)

But the biggest problem is that the ancient city itself is a major challenge for modern technology.

Narrow alleys and high walls make a direct line of sight to satellites infrequent, and walls made of thick brick, steel, and stone don’t let phone signals pass through. Water reflects signals in unpredictable ways and zoning rules make erecting large mobile phone towers impossible.

In one of my earliest posts for The Italian Dispatch I lamented that more reliance on artificial intelligence would result in more kinds of human intelligence atrophying. I worry about that more now than I did when I wrote it (in my case, my sense of direction is among the first to waste away).

But in the case of Venice, I wonder if we should look at the unreliability of our ubiquitous mobile phones as a feature rather than a bug -- another aspect of the city that forces us to take a deep breath and be present.

1. I don’t remember if she spoke to me in Venetian dialect, but I wrote it as if she did