Losing My Dignity, Italian Style

Okay, time for a damage assessment.

Where are you?

In a bed. In Venice.

Good. What time is it?

I have no idea.

It’s 10:30. Do you have your wallet and passport?

Yes, thank God.

One last question: Why are you still wearing your shoes and coat?

Fuck.

Thus began the morning of my last full day in Venice, a day spent, primarily, nursing the third worst hangover of my life.

Yes, I rank them. I’m like the BCS, but with drinking (BCS? MORE LIKE BLOWS CHUNKS SYSTEM! LOL I KILL MYSELF SOMETIMES).

Where was I? Right. Remembering my night before. You know how, if you lose your keys, it's good to retrace your steps to figure out where you put them? I was applying the same method to discover why, exactly, I was still wearing a jacket and shoes. Let's take a trip back in time...

/"Wayne's World" dream sequence

The night began quite innocuously.

"Okay, we need to finish this wine so that John doesn't have to carry it home."

John was as close as our group had to a Venice native. Although he was not Italian, per se, he had lived in Venice for the last two years, and knew the city, at least to my knowledge, as well as any local would. He is a gregarious and generally affable man, which suited well for his one time side job: providing drinking tours of Venice for tourists. Sometimes he was actually paid for this, on other occasions he simply received free alcohol for the night. Through this work, he managed to become personally acquainted with, and I am completely sure of this, every single person in the city. This would come in handy later in the evening.

For the time being, John supplied us with wine. Lots of it. It needed finishing, and I wasn't about to let anyone down.

Let it be known that I am not, in the least bit, a wine drinker. It’s not that I’m trying to be some sort of reverse-snob; I just have never acquired a taste for the stuff. I don't sniff the glass, I don't (consciously) do the swishing motion, and I don't sip. Years of beer drinking have hardened my psyche so that I will drink pretty much anything at the pace I drink beer, which tends to be relatively fast. As always, I am an ass.

So roughly one hour and five glasses of wine later (WOO WINE POWER HOUR), the UNESCO office in Venice (bless the United Nations and their hospitality) closed up shop, and we were out on the street. And, like any street in Venice, it was exceedingly beautiful. When I first arrived in the city, I spent a few hours just walking around taking photographs. Eventually, I had to stop because I realized that literally everywhere was picture-worthy. You can't turn around without seeing some picturesque bridge arching over the canals or beautiful old buildings slowly, artfully crumbling back into the stone streets. This is all heightened by the fact that there are no cars (or motorcycles, mopeds, or even bicycles) to be seen in Venice. They are not allowed. Which is nice.

From the UNESCO office, we worked our way to the Ponte Rialto, which I’m sure is Italian for something (Rialto bridge, if you’re keeping score at home). To be honest, I always hate name-dropping places in other languages. I feel it makes me sound pompous. I always picture some snooty old lady dressed like a character in The Great Gatsby saying “Oh, the Cote de Azur is splendid this time of year. You simply must see it,” or a trustafarian condescendingly lecturing about his adventure to some far-flung destination where he/she was the only white person in sight. I’d much rather say something like “We met at Tim’s bridge”, but, then again, that sounds ignorant. It’s quite a sticky situation being neurotic, you see.

Anyway, there are several wine bars located within a block (or whatever the Venice version is) of the Rialto, all of which have the same basic character. Essentially, you walk up to the closet-sized bar, order a glass of wine, and drink it on the street. Almost all drinking and dining in the city seems to take place on the street. Even large restaurants appear to have the capacity for perhaps twenty people indoors. The plus side of this is that you get to enjoy the weather. The drawback is that it rained nearly every day I was there. Still, the wine will make you forget this.

We managed to take advantage of three bars in the area. All of them prominently featured Prosecco. Prosecco is a sparkling white wine, and can be thought of as the Venetian version of Champagne. It’s made from, well, Prosecco grapes, which only grow in the Veneto (the region surrounding Venice) due to the unique soil characteristics there (probably something to do with the minerals and pH, but geochemistry is boring). Other wines try to pass themselves off as Prosecco, but they are not. So if you’re inspired to go out and buy some, make sure to check the label and find out where the wine came from. Again, I am not a big wine drinker, but Prosecco is awesome. I’m sure someone who is knowledgeable in this area could tell you about the wine’s fruity or floral overtones or something like that, but I’ll leave you with this: It is delicious, and the bubbles tickle your nose.

One subject I do have some expertise in is beer, however, and following an earlier experience with it in the city, I made sure not to purchase any that night. Beer in Venice is bad. Very bad.

Let me explain.

One evening I strolled up to a restaurant, sat down, and asked for a beer. The waiter asked me if I wanted a small or large glass, to which I (obviously) responded “Large.” Seemingly half an hour later the man returned with a twelve-ounce (keep in mind this was the large option) glass of watery-tasting lager. Disappointed, I downed the beer and asked for the check, which came back to me with a charge of ten euro. Surely, I thought, there was some mistake, and I quickly scrolled through the drink menu for prices. I was wrong. Twelve ounces of crap beer cost seventeen dollars (at that time’s exchange rate). Let me put that in caps for you so it will sink in. SEVENTEEN DOLLARS. This is not because that restaurant was a tourist trap (all of Venice is, frankly). Beer was priced like this (generally from six to ten euro for 750 mL) at bars and restaurants across the city. Lesson learned, I made sure to stick to Prosecco from then on.

Moving forward, our group of sixteen (this number would dwindle down to four as the night progressed) managed to squeeze into one traghetto, a cheap gondola used to ferry passengers across the Grand Canal, en route to our next bar. By some miracle of science, the gondola did not sink. However, it sat perhaps two inches, at most, above the waterline. A wave would have swamped us and we would have drowned in a combination of lagoon water, garbage, and raw sewage (Venice has no sewage treatment; everything discharges to the canals). Luckily, we made it across, thanks to divine intervention and the skill of our two gondoliers. One, it seemed, had somewhere between little and no larynx. I, and the rest of our party, was also convinced he was drunk. By the way his voice sounded, he had possibly imbibed some sort of gravel-tar-liquor combination. He began to sing “O Solo Mio” (with all the intonation of Stephen Hawking, might I add) before changing his tune halfway through to a completely different song. I don’t remember what it was, but, for comedy’s sake, let’s say “Living on a Prayer.” Still, for a drunk robot he was good at his job and not one passenger ended up even the slightest bit wet (insert wildly inappropriate joke).

From here we continued through the Sestiere (think neighborhood) Dorsuduro, stopping at places where John was intimately familiar with the bartender. This equated to pretty much every bar in the land, and the night began to rapidly go downhill for yours truly. I had not eaten since lunch, and continued under the assumption that we would stop for pizza before we went to the next bar. That pizza never came. I was in trouble. Eventually, through some twisted logic, I convinced myself that, since wine had calories, it was like eating something, so I would be okay. That idea must be one of the stupidest things I have ever conceived, and it would come back to haunt me sooner than I anticipated.

For the time being, the evening followed followed a marching-like cadence. Walk to a bar. Order a drink. Drink said liquor. Urinate. Go to next bar. This rhythm would occasionally be interrupted by someone spilling a drink, or random singing, or John yelling “PROSECCIAMO!” (This is a made-up word. –iamo is an Italian suffix meaning “we will”. Thus, John, in his love for wine, tacked it onto “Prosecco” to make “We will Prosecco.” It was his battle cry.). You tend to not realize how much you have had to drink when you fall into a pattern like this. I certainly did not.

The wine caught up to me all at once, and Venice became a blur. I listed to the side like a crippled ship in a storm as we walked to each of John’s old haunts. I was in trouble. Luckily, some sort of reason managed to poke though my drunk haze, and I switched from booze to water at a few bars near the end of our adventure, saving me from further damage. I was still hopelessly intoxicated, however, and all the water in Venice wasn’t about to change that.

At my last stop of the night, I found a random Italian person and attempted to chat him up about soccer. I love to talk about sports to the point that it must annoy the crap out of anyone I speak to. Soccer, in particular, is one of my favorites. I was in the home of the reigning World Cup Champions, and, in my inebriated state, figured anyone here MUST want to talk about the sport. Luckily for me, the man I approached was as drunk as I and happened to be a fan, which worked out nicely, as he was not scared off by my enthusiasm. Unfortunately, he spoke between little and no English, and my Italian is basically limited to “Grazie”. So somehow it ended up that we just shouted names of soccer players and teams at each other, punctuated by nods and “Si, si”s when we agreed that said player/team was any good.

“LUCA TONI.”

“SI! SI! ROBBIE KEANE.”

“SI! SI!”

And so on.

After what felt like five solid minutes of shouting (which probably were ninety seconds) I broke for the bathroom. On my way back out, I walked square into a table and some chairs. It was time for me to call it a night. I slurred my goodbyes to my remaining compatriots and headed out into the night.

And I’m sure John soldiered on with the stamina, and liver, that only someone who once drank professionally could have. I, through the grace of God (and my compatriots Rick and Derek who, bless them, must have pointed me in the right direction at every intersection), managed to make it back to the hotel, successfully navigating through windy streets and steep bridges using a walking style that could essentially be boiled down to "lean forward and let your feet catch up".

Everything else from here should pretty much self-explanatory, as nights when you are extremely inebriated end the same way, regardless of where you are.

Eight hours later, I woke up on top of my bed, fully clothed.

I spent much of the next day aimlessly wandering around the city. Yet again, it was a gray and drizzly day. I walked for a solid three hours, enjoying the sights and sounds as long as they were not too loud and I did not have to move my eyes quickly. Although I eventually managed to shake the hangover, I couldn't escape the feeling that I had lost something the night before.

So if you happen to be in Venice and find my dignity anywhere, drop me a line and we can make some sort of arrangement.