Lost in Venezia

My brother Manuel was taking what we call a year off from his major. It was not a gap year, like Americans would say, but an Erasmus scholarship program, which in terms of leisure is pretty much the same. This kind of option, that I never took, is the perfect excuse to party for two semesters in some European destinations and get your finals approved with barely any knowledge of the foreign language.

Since Manuel was in Italy and I had never been there… I took a Ryanair flight (sort of a bus with wings ride) and for 30 euros I landed in Firenze. Something funny was the fact that my other brother was also there in one of his casual long-lasting visits. Since Manuel’s roommates didn’t complain and the couch in that tiny flat was not that uncomfortable, Ignacio had broken his personal record: two months already as his guest when I visited... both of them.

 “Ignacio, since you seem to own this place, you take care of the girl. I have classes to take” and with that irrefutable line by Manuel, Ignacio was proclaimed my personal cicerone and the ultimate person responsible for my Italian adventure. “First thing you should do is to get a Mondadori travel guide,” Ignacio said, “and now, mi dispiace, but I have some ragazza waiting”. In that moment, I understood my Italian trip was going to be less familiar and more troublesome than what I had thought.

Asking for that specific guide from bookstore to bookstore, half of my days in Brunelleschi’s town were gone. “I told you bambina, you cannot sit on the train if you don’t pre-notare” the voice of Ignacio over the phone was boiling my blood after having been standing on the coffee wagon for the last two hours. But when I finally got to Venezia, I realized the back pain had been worth it: the most beautiful city in the world, full of narrow streets, thousands of tiny bridges, candle lights, and a purple sunset. I spent my first 5 hours there completely lost looking for my hostel thanks to that snobbish Mondadori guide till I finally got a call from my brother, “Ma quale problema! don’t tell me it isn’t lovely to get lost in Venezia”.