Travel Drinking In Venice

If there’s one thing the Italians are just plain weird at, it’s TV commercials. Obviously,

not speaking Italian doesn’t help a great deal, but let me describe a couple of adverts to

give you some idea of what I mean. In one that I saw, a guy pulls his motorbike up to a

pavement to say something to a little old lady. We soon discover that the old lady is

taking her pet bulldog for a walk, which promptly urinates on the guy’s motorbike.

Clearly, he’s annoyed at this... so he goes off to buy a llama. The next shot is of the old lady, this time getting

into a lift. As she’s about to press the button for her floor, the man approaches with his llama. And the llama

spits at the old lady.

End of commercial (?!?!)

In another advert, this one animated, a man is watching the boobs of three women jiggling around on an

underground train. He then pops a sweet into his mouth and, at that moment, the breasts of the lady in the

middle disappear. And she screams.

AND THAT’S THE WHOLE COMMERCIAL! What the fuck is being advertised with these?! A llama vengeance

service? (Actually, I quite like the sound of that.) Some breast-removing sweets? (Well, they’d never catch on, would they? Maybe for revenge purposes... but then why would you need them if you’d already got your llama?)

Okay, enough incisive cultural commentary – it’s an article about Venice, and you want to hear all about the canals, don’t you? All in good time. First, I have to get a criticism out of the way.

And yes, I know that criticising Venice is one of the things you’re just not supposed to do. It would be like

saying that kittens are ugly, or how John Cleese isn’t funny, or that women don’t enjoy giving blow jobs (well,

you live in hope don’t you?). But, on the first whole day I spent in Venice, I finished my daily quota of touristy

stuff and decided to wander into the central San Marco district, just to enjoy a drink and do some people

watching in the first bar I passed.

An hour later I was still looking. A fucking hour of walking up and down the narrow Venetian streets, trying to find any kind of watering hole. (It got to the stage where I would have settled for an actual watering hole, hippos and all.) Surely, what purports to be a major international city should be a little more liberally lubricated? The fact that it isn’t easy to keep your bearings in Venice’s random, higgledy-piggledy walkways doesn’t help. I swear, I passed exactly the same pizza joint four times.

And let me be specific here, as I quite emphatically pointed out to my psychiatrist, I don’t need a bar on every street! Much as I play the role of Mr Comedy Alcoholic, I can in fact go for five minutes without requiring intoxication. (Ironically, as I’m writing this, I actually am having a drink, which slightly knackers my credibility.) But an hour?!

Now that’s out of my system, I guess I should talk to you about the canals…

Pick any out-of-the-way corner of Venice, wait for a maximum of three minutes, and a gondola will glide

past, usually with a sickeningly lovey-dovey couple on board. Now I think about it, working as a gondolier

would be a really shite job if you’d just been dumped. Imagine feeling glum and dejected and then having

to spend your entire working day staring at self-involved, smug-looking men and women, merrily eating

each other’s faces. Although I guess the fact that people will cheerfully fork out the equivalent of 70 quid

for a 45-minute boat ride takes the edge off the bitterness to a certain extent.

In a break from the norm, a boatload of tourists who floated past me at one point were an inebriated bunch of Brits, singing a cacophonous version of O Sole Mio, with lyrics which largely degenerated into “Just one cornetto”. The gondolier did not look pleased. Obviously, my first reaction was irritation and slight embarrassment at originating from the same country as them, but my second, more powerful, reaction was: “Hang on, where did they get their booze from?” Sadly, when sober, I’m still too much of the reserved Englishman to shout across at them: “Oi! I notice that you’re all acting like a bunch of twats – could you tell me where I could go to get myself in the same condition?”

Finally, I hit on Harry’s Bar, a venue made famous thanks to the patronage of one Ernest Hemingway (no, I hadn’t heard of it either, but that’s what my guidebook says). This, I’d hoped, would be a proper waterside dive where one could clang back a few cold ones and scribble down some witticisms on Venetian life.

Not a fucking bit of it, matey! They won’t let you in if you’re wearing shorts, if you’re smoking, if you have a working class accent, and they certainly won’t be charging you anything less than 14 Euro (£10!!!) for a drink. Begrudgingly, I coughed up for a Manhattan on the rocks – which tasted of whisky and nothing else – and spent the next twenty minutes developing a seething Marxist hatred for the rich American clientele who seemed to favour the venue. And talk about over-staffing! At one particular instant, I counted a ratio of two waiters (waiters, mind you, not bartenders – that would be far too common) for every punter.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.” I wonder if he’d

think the same if he'd just paid a tenner for the privilege of having two uniformed penguins serve him a

glass of whisky in a soulless, commercialised bastardisation of what used to be a real bar.

I realise I’m ranting. In fact, I seem to have done a lot of that today. So here’s something to be

cheerful about: The Story Of How Dick Found The Decent Booze.

With a meal at a restaurant! Dammit, why didn’t I think of that earlier? Our Italian cousins are the ultimate gastronomes, and their attitude to drinking can be summarised in one word; wine! Or, if you prefer, five words; really stupidly hilariously cheap wine. That’s the advantage of residing in a country that has 1.3 vineyards per person*.

Quite quickly I got into the habit of having some meal with my wine. And, while in Venice, I beat my own personal best for Weirdest Species Ever Consumed – Angler Fish! You know those bizarre deep-sea dwellers with the gaping jaws which have a glowing appendage that dangles forward from the tops of their heads? (I was slightly disappointed that mine didn’t come with that still attached, maybe with a little LED lighting it up for effect. That I would have paid extra for.)

Rather than just bring you the bottle, one Italian restaurant practice that I heartily approve of is serving the wine in quarter- or half-litre jugs. If you’re a fan of the red, as I am, the greater surface area allows the grape to breathe a lot more, and makes for a much smoother taste.

Sorry, I went all serious on you there. I suppose I should try and make some kind of comment about having a penchant for big jugs. Oh, never mind. I think I’m all done.

Visit Venice. Unless you’re on a diet. Or don’t like wine. And steer clear of the llamas.

*I made this statistic up, but you get the idea.