The City That Refuses to Update

The City That Refuses to Budge

I keep coming back to Venice. Five, maybe six times now, and I still can't fully explain why. It's not like I haven't seen it. I've tripped over the same uneven stones more times than I can count. But here I am... again.

Eight centuries of accumulated stubbornness. That's what Venice is. Nothing gets torn down and rebuilt. Nothing gets modernized. It all gets patched up, but just enough to barely keep going. The city simply keeps being itself, decade after decade. It doesn't budge, except maybe to sink a little deeper into the lagoon.

On every trip, I make a point of visiting Trattoria alla Madonna. Same location down a dark alley near the Rialto, same no-nonsense waiters, same spaghetti nero that tastes exactly like it did the first time I walked in not knowing what to order. The menu hasn't changed. The chairs haven't changed. I'm pretty sure some of the waiters haven't changed. In any other city, it would feel like stagnation. In Venice, it's the whole point. Alla Madonna is a restaurant that never saw a reason to be anything other than what it's always been.

What pulls me back most, though, is the rundown beauty. Not the Gucci, Balenciaga, Jimmy Choo or Disney Venice. The other one… with the cracked and fallen plaster exposing the brick substrate, the iron grates in the windows bleeding rusty streaks down the marble sills, and the wooden shutters that haven't closed properly since Katharine Hepburn fell into the canal at Campo San Barnaba. Venice wears its age the way certain people do. Not hiding it, not fighting it, just carrying it like it never occurred to them to do otherwise.

Speaking of carrying one's age with grace, I did have a somewhat unique experience this trip. Walking a quiet street one afternoon, I passed a woman and her husband and thought, “Huh, that's Emma Thompson.” I mentioned this to my friend Renee with what I thought was very laid back, casual cool. She reacted by dashing off, sprinting past them, executing a dramatic U-turn, then walking back toward the couple with the studied nonchalance of someone absolutely not chasing a celebrity. Dame Emma seemed entirely unaware as she pulled a wadded up Kleenex from beneath her red tartan poncho and blew her nose.

For the rest of the trip, Renee and I hatched a plan in case we ran into them again. The scheme was simple: we'd walk right up to her husband, the actor Greg Wise, and ask for his autograph. We'd fawn over him, gush about his work, tell him what huge fans we were, then barely acknowledge Emma by asking her if she'd mind taking our picture with him. Our hope was it'd get a laugh out of them. We never got the chance, which is probably for the best. But we did get our own chuckle out of our clever plot.

That's the thing. Even a brush with Hollywood royalty feels small here. The city absorbs everything: fame, floods, centuries, the occasional starstruck friend. And just keeps going. That's why I come back. Not because it surprises me. Because it doesn't.