Lost in Venice

It was my third week in Venice, and it was raining. But somehow it was still wiltingly hot. That’s the thing about Venice in summertime: it’s a good time to study abroad because the more comfort-minded tourists can’t take the heat. St. Mark’s is still packed, but some of the side streets quiet down during the middle of the day. You might cross a bridge deep in the city and find yourself entirely alone for a moment. And that’s when you really connect with the city, instead of just marveling at being inside what looks like a postcard. It doesn’t matter that your shirt is so drenched you might have just climbed out of one of the canals- the scant others braving the stone streets in the Mediterranean sun are all “in the same boat”, as it were, and you smile knowingly at each other.
On this particular evening it was raining- the way the incredible heat would sometimes open up the sky, not really cooling anything off, but at least making everything uniformly wet. We did our best to keep up with the Italian students, emulating them. We followed them to Campo Santa Margherita, the happening spot for young people on Wednesday nights, to mill about in the square chatting and drinking and eating and laughing. We tried everything, appreciated the economy of boxed wine, rooftop picnics, trips to Lido beach at any and all hours. I pretended to like Spritz, I’ll admit. All the tourbooks said, “to really discover Venice you need to get lost”, which made us all the more eager to look like we knew what we were doing. We didn’t want to be the Americans getting lost all the time.
On this particular night by midnight I was ready to head home from Campo. My friends wanted to ride it out, so I set off by myself. Cue torrential downpour. I huddled in an enclave, lost again, when a dark haired fellow student ran up and joined me in my little shelter. I had seen him before around our apartment complex on Giudecca, I knew his name was Constantine, but we hadn’t been introduced. Well we got to know each other pretty quick: I quickly discovered that he was Romanian and spoke no English. Laughing at the ridiculous situation, we stood in the pouring rain and parsed out a conversation. We didn’t speak any common languages, really, but he spoke Portuguese and Italian and I spoke Spanish and had taken a semester of Latin in eighth grade, and we worked it out. We managed to decipher the boat schedules and street names and find our way back. When we arrived it was late but we kept “talking” for a while, and I gathered that he was a painter(a good one, too). By the end of the summer he was a staple in our rapidly evolving group of American-Italian-multinational students. We found our ways into that group by getting lost over and over again.