Unlikely Words

Here’s how to have a perfect first day in Venice.

Do not go to the Piazza San Marco on your first day. All of Venice has more tourists than locals, but the area around San Marco is the most crowded and the most chintzy. If you want to fall in love with the city, you have to experience its good parts before holding your breath and wading into its downside.

Stay near the Ponte dell’ Academia. (Our friends Janie and Ken recommended an amazing hotel in Dorsoduro, on the Rio di San Vio.) Have a late breakfast at your hotel. Decide to take a leisurely walk around the neighborhood where you are staying.

Select a bright, sunny, warmday, with a light breeze coming off of the lagoon. Walk through the alternately narrow and broad streets, past the Peggy Gugenheim museum, and emerge from an underpass onto the Campo della Salute. Take in the grandeur of the church, the view of the hotels on the Grand Canal, and the glimpse of Palazzo Ducale in the near distance.

Feel your jaw drop: Venice really is this beautiful.

Spend an hour sitting on the steps of the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Salute, writing postcards home to your family and friends. Listen to the gondoliers paddling by, singing “Volare.” Then make yourself get up and see the rest. Walk down to the Fondamenta Zattere on the south side of the island. Make note of the gellaterias, even though you’ll later realize there’s one every 50 meters in the city. Stop every half block to point out some other amazing building on this side of the canal or the other.

End up back in the Campo San Vio and follow the trail of happy tourists with pizza to a little hole-in-the-wall shop selling slices for €2 out their window into the narrow lane. Buy two slices, and eat them while walking past jewelry stores, art galleries, printers, and, yes, tacky tourist kiosks.

Go back to your hotel for an afternoon nap in the air-conditioning.

At 7:30, head downstairs from the hotel to a little restaurant called Cantonine Storico that serves, according to Ken, the Best Risotto in the World. Order a bottle of wine. Start with a plate of schie e polenta, with tiny flavorful shrimp from the lagoon. Order the risotto con terra mare, risotto with shrimp and wild mushrooms, per due, and eat it slowly while marveling at the perfect weather and the city around you. (The risotto is, in fact, spectacular.) Do a double-take when, in the middle of your first course, a motorboat pulls up and moors along the canal next to your table and a family of three literally climbs out of the boat and over the wall behind you to go home.

After dinner, enjoy the complimentary scroppino — lemon sorbet, vodka, and little frothed milk — and then had back to your hotel to watch the end of the first half of the Italy vs Germany World Cup semi-final. (Oh, yeah, it helps to go during the World Cup.) Try not to laugh at the plight of the front desk clerk who wants to sit and watch the game with you but who has to jump up and sprint behind the desk with a “buona sera!” every time the front door opens.

At halftime, walk over to the Campo Santa Margherita. Worry that you won’t be able to find your way there through the winding streets, but realize you’ll be able to navigate by following the roar of the football fans once you get close.

Enjoy a private chuckle at how adorable it is that this open square, fronted by bars and restaurants, is the “nightlife center of Venice.” Stand at the back of a large spread of outdoor tables at Madigan’s Bar and watch the end of the game on a big TV with a seemingly bottomless crowd of Americans and Australians. Enjoy the good-natured cheering from the Brazilians a few tables over. Get caught up in the chants of “I-tal-ia! I-tal-ia!”

Cheer as loudly as anyone when Italy scores two goals in the second overtime.

Collapse exhausted into bed. Venice!

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