A Tale of Two Cities

or How Venice and Florence cope with too many tourists

La Serinissima (hardly serene with gobs of Tourists! and yet somehow Ginevra took a photo with not one of them in it! Skills people, skills)

Last year, Ginevra and I went to Venice. She hadn’t been out of San Francisco for three years. When travel restrictions eased, she was happy to pay her mom a visit. But Paris wasn’t enough. Ginevra wanted to go to Venice, too. I happily agreed.

After spending nearly all of her growing up years in the south of France, Ginevra was missing summers, so she came in July. We had read somewhere that Venice was agreeably warm in July, because of all that water. We should have confirmed that somewhere else because the 10 days we were in Venice were very, very hot.

This year, summer was no longer the draw it had been. This year our destination was Florence in May. Not as hot as Venice in July, but just as crowded.

When we got back from Florence, we began to compare our two trips. Herewith our ‘Tale of Two Cities’.

First of all, for those of us lucky enough to spend time in Paris, we are accustomed to finding a park whenever we need one, whether it’s a grand park (Luxembourg, Tuileries), a medium sized one (Place des Vosges) or a pocket sized one (Jardin Truillot, just across from St. Ambroise) that we’re after.

Here’s another, more pertinent example. Say you’ve spent the morning shopping at Le Bon Marché and you decide you want to have a picnic rather than eat lunch at a restaurant or bistro. So, you find something at Le Grand Épicerie, nod yes when you are asked if you want a napkin and plastic couverts (cutlery). And then you eat your lunch, in the shade, in the park just across the street from Le Bon Marché.

When we were in Venice last year, we saw lots of places selling food ‘to go’ but there was nowhere ‘to go’ to eat that food. We occasionally walked by a park, but signs warned that it was illegal to eat there. Not infrequently we found ourselves walking around or even over people, often entire families, eating their pizza slices sitting on the steps leading to a bridge. Until a police officer invited them to leave.

Maybe there’s nowhere convenient to eat take away food in Venice for the same reason water isn’t served at restaurants in Brussels. The city wants you to eat your food and pay for your drinks in a restaurant or a trattoria or a bar.

Or maybe it’s the rats. All the parks in Paris have signs reminding you to clean up after yourself, to leave nothing behind for the rats. But there are, nonetheless, a disconcertingly large number of very bold rats hanging out in Parisian parks waiting more or less impatiently to share your lunch.

For us, lunch wasn’t a problem. Most days, we ate at whatever museum we happened to be. Peggy Guggenheim’s café didn’t have especially noteworthy food but it is set in a beautiful sculpture garden. (Figure 1) A few times we found a bacaro for cicchetti, the Venetian version of tapas. (Figure 2) They were delicious and fun to eat but the bacari were mostly tiny and we often had to eat standing up. Not very relaxing after a morning in a museum to be followed by more of the same in the afternoon.

I hear you asking yourselves, in a city with no streets and therefore no cars and for this discussion, no trucks, how is garbage collected? Glad you asked! Garbage collecting in Venice reminded me of the petit ouvriers in France at the turn of the 20th century. Captured for posterity in photographs by Atget. Almost every morning, very early, a garbage person would make their way along the street, pushing a three wheeled garbage can, ringing doorbells as they walked. Residents would scamper out, garbage bag/s in hand. All very clever in an artisanal kind of way.

Chiffonier (rag man), photo by Eugène Atget

In Florence, as in Venice, there are parks. But they are either an uphill hike from the center (Piazzale Michelangelo) or require an entry fee (Boboli Gardens - where you can indeed picnic). But there were the same sandwiches and pizza slices. Somehow pizza eating people spread out on the steps of a church posed less of a navigational problem than those same people eating pizza on the steps of the bridges in Venice. For those of you wondering, Florence is now trying to get a handle on the city’s garbage with large unsightly metal bins on too narrow and too crowded sidewalks. Not artisanal at all!

But I have not brought you here to discuss pizza by the slice or garbage by the bag, but the differences we noticed between these two old, beautiful cities. Why Venice was so vibrant and Florence was so moribund. Both cities were grand and rich and ruled by wealthy oligarchs for a very long time. Both made money in trade. For Venice, it was silks and spices from the East. For Florence, it was wool woven locally (on looms operated by the girl orphans at the Ospedali degli Innocenti) and banking. Both cities flourished during the Renaissance. Indeed the Renaissance was invented in Florence. But by the early 18th century, both cities were mostly mandatory stops on an Englishman’s Grand Tour of Europe. Stendhal’s Syndrome started in Florence. People fainting from the sheer beauty of the place. And Venice, Queen of the Adriatic became just another beauty queen, a steadily sinking into the sea kind of beauty queen.

Ginevra, trying out for loom operator, Ospedali degli Innocente

Both cities are still magical stage sets, but their different trajectories since their decline is most revealing.

When we were in Venice, Ginevra kept saying that the tourists didn’t seem to know why they were there. She contended that they knew of Venice from Instagram, knew that it was a place to visit because of Instagram. They were all taking selfies at the same sites. The Piazza St Marco, for example, was a carpet of people.

The one thing the tourists didn’t seem interested in was art. Which is ironic because while its past is still very much on display, Venice is lively and vibrant today because of all the places you can see art - the museums, the palazzi, the churches and the scuole that fill every nook and cranny of the city. In nearly all of those places, interesting temporary exhibitions enliven first rate permanent collections.

And contemporary art is everywhere. François Pinault, the billionaire businessman and art collector whose Bourse de Commerce is an outpost of contemporary art in Paris, owns both the Palazzo Grassi where he exhibits contemporary art and the Punta della Dogana (Customs House),which is filled with pieces from his own collection and temporary exhibitions. The Anglo-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor has just opened the palazzo he spent four years renovating. It will house a permanent collection of his work as well as host temporary exhibitions.

We were there for the Biennale, the bi-annual international exhibition of modern and contemporary art. In one history of the Biennale I read, Peggy Guggenheim is credited as the first person to welcome people into her Venice palazzo to see her art collection. That’s modern art. A few months ago, I wrote about a wealthy businessman who bought a crumbling medieval marvel at the end of the 19th century, the Ca d’Oro. He spent the rest of his life restoring and renovating it as he continued to buy art, mostly paintings by Venetian Renaissance artists. He bequeathed his palazzo to the city, on the condition that the city display his art in the palazzo. I wrote about his collection which was on display in Paris earlier this year: Wealthy with Taste

Because there is so much to see, and because art is at so many venues, you don’t have to pre-order tickets for pre-determined visits. You can walk by a place and decide to go in. You can read about a place and then check it out.

Everything is different in Florence. People are there with a short check list of mandatory places to go. Yes, there were lots of people milling around the Ponte Vecchio, wandering around the Piazza della Signoria and standing in line to climb to the top of the Duomo. But huge crowds also filled the museums and churches. And virtually nothing was free, including churches I have been visiting for years. The Uffizi and the Academia were especially crowded of course. Botticelli’s Primavera and Birth of Venus, Michelangelo’s David are ‘must sees’ for anyone going to Florence.

Buying tickets in advance was mandatory. When tickets weren’t available, there were alway resellers. Of course, those tickets are more expensive. Just like a Taylor Swift concert. Pre-purchasing means that you will get into the museum you want to visit but pre-payment online doesn’t mean smooth sailing. Appearing on time was just the beginning of the obstacle course. It was followed by standing in one line and then in another, to finally get into a museum that was bursting at the seams anyhow.

Residents of Venice may be just as unhappy about tourists as their Florentine counterparts, but they don’t have cars or motorcycles to run them over. The speed at which cars flew down narrow streets often where there were no sidewalks for pedestrians to walk on, made getting around less of an adventure and more of a game of chicken. I have visited Florence more than a dozen times over the years. It used to be more fun, it used to be more whimsical. Because it it mostly just selling its past, it has become less of a place to linger and more of a place to just spend a few days.

Because Venice has such a lively art scene, there’s always a reason to return. We are making plans for next year's Biennale. We’ll go in April or October and visit the nearby Palladian villas that we missed last year because of the heat.

Final words: If you’ve never been to Florence, you must go. Just don’t forget to book the museums beforehand. And maybe choose a hotel in the calmer Oltrarno (other side of the Arno). If you’ve never been to Venice or if you haven’t been in a while, go. There’s so much to see and do! Just don’t go in the summer!

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