This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.
Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!
When our plane touched down at the Marco Polo Airport just North of Venice, Italy, I could feel it coming. “There you are,” I thought. “God, how I’ve missed you!”
When I first arrive in a foreign country (the more exotic to me the better) there’s this feeling that courses through me that’s like nothing else I experience in life. It’s a warm pleasurable buzz of anticipation that must be similar to those few seconds before you bungee jump, if you could filter out the pure terror that’s mixed in with the bungee part of the experience.
But there’s no terror in this. Adventure, yes. Excitement, absolutely. Terror, no. Perhaps that’s because I’ve done my homework beforehand, I’m fairly certain I’ve eliminated all foreseeable mayhem, and I’m secure in the knowledge that nothing akin to plunging to my death is a statistically significant possibility for me.
There’s also this feeling of triumph. A sense of achievement x 100. I did it! I got here! This is going to be amazing! And it’s no mean feat. The budgeting, the delaying of all gratification, the homework, the planning and research and packing and carving out enough time… it isn’t like an afternoon picnic in a park.
Is this why addicts find it so hard to quit their drug of choice? Is this the feeling they get from it? If so, then I have renewed sympathy for their struggles, because I live for this feeling. The only things that would get me to give up my pursuit of it would be total and unsolvable destitution or permanent immobility. I hope I don’t realize that my last foreign trip is my last one while it’s happening, because if so, it’ll be intensely bittersweet.
The difference between my addiction and that of a crack addict, of course, is that I’m not causing myself harm or, by extension, hurting the ones I love. If anything, I’m prolonging my life, as it gives me something to look forward to, even in my darkest hours. Yeah, maybe it would be wiser to save the money for retirement, but where’s the fun in that? I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, but if not, I want to have happy memories to think about during that retirement.
So, here I was, in Italy, at the beginning of what I knew would be a two-week high. But I also knew I wouldn’t feel completely “there” until I was sure that we had made it safely to our room along with all of our luggage. And when you consider that from the Seattle airport to this one we had been traveling for 17 ½ hours, and we still had to take a bus, then a vaporetto (water bus), then walk a bewildering path to our room, and that while I had tried to sleep on the plane I had had very little success because my back was in agony and I was way too excited, we were definitely not “there” yet. But so close. So close!
I don’t think clearly on so little sleep, so I was relying heavily on Dear Husband at this point. Going from the airport to the bus seemed to go pretty smoothly. As we rode down the causeway and watched Venice get ever closer, I think we both got a bit of an adrenaline rush. Let the adventure begin!
The transportation hub is not the prettiest part of Venice, to be sure, and we had a bit of a struggle getting our vaporetto passes. Once we did, we almost got on the wrong vaporetto, and had to get back off that platform and move to another one. By the time we left Venice days later, we were relative experts. But at this point, just keeping track of our luggage, and being mindful of pickpockets while cramming ourselves into a vessel that was already groaning with travelers was praiseworthy.
We were getting our very first views of the Grand Canal, and I was looking forward to exploring the most beautiful city I had ever seen in my life, but right now my destination was our AirBnB. We arrived at our stop and were squeezed off the vaporetto like toothpaste from a tube. It was a good thing our host was waiting for us there because there is no GPS on earth that would have helped us find our way to this place the first time around. We were grateful to have a guide.
We wended our way through ever narrower allies, crossed a piazza where I made a mental note that postcards were available should we ever find our way back, made several lefts and rights, and then came to a dead end with a mysterious looking door that was clearly as old as my grandmother. I found this to be both exciting and daunting. But our room turned out to be exactly as advertised, right down to a window that opened out onto a side canal with turquoise waters. Omigod, we made it!
It felt good to know we could now neglect our luggage for a few days without worrying. Our host, Florence, was kind enough to stick around and answer questions and process paperwork. She showed us how everything worked, and then left.
We both fell into bed. DH was instantly asleep, which makes me hate him with the heat of a thousand suns, but only because I haven’t been able to instantly conk out since I was 12 years old. I stared at the ceiling for a bit, watching the sunshine reflecting off the canal, as it danced and waved hello to me.
The sound of men’s voices bounced down the canal from a nearby construction site. Since they weren’t speaking English, I was freed from the desire to eavesdrop, which is another nice liberty afforded by foreign travel. You don’t care about what’s being said because you can’t care. But the musical cadence of their banter was lulling me to sleep. And just like that, my heart opened wide, and I let my fix flow. Ah, That Freshly Foreign Feeling. I suspect I was smiling as I drifted off.
We woke up about an hour and a half later, feeling much better for having had the rest. I had made casual plans for the evening, knowing that due to the time change it would feel like mid-morning to us, but not knowing for sure if we wouldn’t just sleep right on through because it had been such a long travel day. So I imposed no pressure on our first night.
Since we did wake up, it was a good thing that I planned for our inevitable hunger. I knew just where to go. It would be nice to explore the neighborhood on this, DH’s first night in Europe. We wanted to pick up a few things at the grocery store as well.
DH has this uncanny sense of direction (more proof that opposites attract), and he had us back to the Grand Canal in no time. This was our first view of it from land. Could you get a more iconic first impression of Venice if you tried? I was pleased for him, and of course for me, too.
A few short yards from there was the even more iconic Rialto Bridge. As you can see, it was raining, but we couldn’t have cared less. We were in Venice!
We admired the view for a bit, but didn’t linger. All the shops on the bridge were already closed. A lot of things were closing up. Thank goodness I had done my homework so we knew our destinations were still up and running.
Our AirBnB was in the San Polo Neighborhood, but we would mainly be wandering the Castello neighborhood tonight. That already made us more familiar with Venice than the average tourist, who rarely ventures out of the San Marco neighborhood. I had no intention of sticking strictly to the tourist trail on any of this trip. That wouldn’t be authentic travel, in my opinion.
So we crossed the Rialto Bridge and headed to the nearby Supermercato Despar Rialto, where we picked up some supplies. Naturally, shopping feels foreign in other countries. They have their own way of doing things, bagging things, labeling things, and charging for things. But it’s fun figuring that out. Even a grocery run is more fun in other parts of the world.
And we were, indeed, hungry. I had found a nearby restaurant. It was right by the base of one of Venice’s many bridges. It’s a place where the locals like to eat called Trattoria Pizzeria Da Gioia. It was a cozy space on a side alley with a really welcoming atmosphere.
It turned out to be the perfect choice for our first official Italian meal. Based on an article I had read, I had the confidence to order something that wasn’t on the menu. Bigoli pasta with sauce. It was fantastic. It was a sort of anchovy sauce on spaghetti. It was a thousand times more delicious than my description. If you ever go to Venice and have the time, I suggest you seek out this restaurant and ask for this dish.
DH had a calzone with prosciutto and mushrooms that had the best, freshest mozzarella I’ve ever tasted in my life. (We could say that of all the mozzarella we had in Italy. The American equivalent is hardly equivalent. In fact, it’s a mere shadow of it. We should be ashamed of ourselves, calling our stuff mozzarella. My mouth waters just thinking of Italian Mozzarella.)
I would have been tempted to try one of the desserts at this delightful restaurant, but we were both dying to have some authentic Italian gelato. Again, I had done my homework and took us over many more romantic bridges to a legit place, not one of those shops with mounds of brightly colored tourist atrocities that most tourists are duped into thinking is the real thing.
Gelatoteca Suso did not disappoint. Revisiting their website is making me want to hop on the next plane. (We wound up having gelato almost every day on this trip, and yet we still lost weight. I don’t understand why it’s not more popular in the US. It tastes so much better than Ice Cream, and it has less fat.)
Walking back to our room, I was thinking how pleased I was about how our first evening had turned out. When we got back there, we unpacked and did a load of laundry. Italians see no point in driers, and after two weeks there, I kind of understood. As I hung our clothes on the rack, on the balcony beside the lapping waters of our quiet little side canal, I felt like I was having a real Italian experience.
One of the things I love the most about Venice is that there are no cars, and there’s very little boat traffic at night. The delicious quiet is like nothing you’ll ever experience in any other city. So even though it was still, technically, mid-afternoon back home, after our long and exciting day, we had no trouble sleeping through the night and acclimating ourselves to this time zone.
As we became more used to the unique rhythm and pace and culture of Italy, that Freshly Foreign Feeling became less intense, but the high will forever be accessible just by looking at the photographs we took and reminiscing about the time we had. I would love to retire in Venice, but a city that requires you to walk everywhere and climb over bridges is not a good fit for people who will become decreasingly ambulatory with age, unless they have an incredibly patient, responsive, and vast support system. Even lifelong Venetians tend to move to the mainland as they get older. That must be heartbreaking, indeed.
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