Singular life
Tourists v.
me in Venice
Petronella Wyatt I was in Venice last week. It was an appalling scrum because of the Carnival. Sorry to sound like Wallace Arnold but the sort of tourist who goes to Venice becomes worse and worse. It is as if they all congre- gate on the same point on the mainland and are issued with custom-made black overalls and strap-on hairy knees. Then they are ferried over en masse and regurgi- tated in the middle of St Mark's Square like a huge box of slippery beetles. On average they spend 20 minutes in the Doge's Palace and the rest of the day look- ing for cheap pizza and beers. Their contri- bution to the Venetian economy is roughly 50 pence per head. Meanwhile, they wear thin the beautiful stones with their spiked boots and pollute the waters of the canals with their spiked detritus.
Just as many Florentines have moved out of that city because of the tourists, more and more Venetians stay locked in their houses or move south when the first tourist ferries come in after New Year. Venice started to suffer from this sort of McDon- ald's tourism only about ten years ago. No one knows what to do. There is a sugges- tion that the whole of Venice should be declared a museum. This way, all day-trip- pers would have to pay to go there. As there are only two entrances to the city by boat it would be quite operable.
I was there on business. My erotic choco- late empire is slowly growing. I am thinking of branching out into pottery and china, maybe even erotic watches. At certain hours of the day, etc. There is a recrudes- cence of pornography in Venice. Apparent- ly, though I haven't seen them, people are selling pornographic masks and calling it nasal sex.
There was a piece in the Venetian news- papers about the Dome. They say that a prophet is not without honour save in his own country. Not that modern Italians have very good taste in buildings. They have very good taste in clothes. The whole bella figura fixation is about walking down the street in knife-edge designer garments and then back to a hovel. The Venetians have made a dome of their own which they erected at one end of St Mark's Square. Admittedly it was half a dome — with a stadium and some microphones — but it made the most beautiful drawing-room in the world look rather like our own dear Greenwich. It is not the outside of the Dome that bothers Italians but what is in it. Or what isn't in it. There are no paintings, no naked women and no clothes. Just to amuse myself I wandered about St Mark's and asked Italians and foreign tourists what they thought of our Dome. Some Japanese suggested the government turn it upside down and use it as a giant wok. For one German woman it reminded her of a stormtrooper's helmet. But the Americans were the most derisory. They know the British are footling when it comes to any- thing 'modern'. What is supposed to look like New York ends up resembling a dis- carded fast-food container floating in the Hudson. They cannot understand, more- over, why we had to ask a Frenchman to run it. Which brings me back to my story last week: a tale of two gerbils. They are positively sulphurous down at the Dome after I revealed that EuroDisney had employed two men with the same surname of Gerbeau, only one had an 'x' on the end of it. An interview I asked for with Pierre- Yves, the Gerbeau we presently have, was thrown out of court with a lot of huffing and puffing. But if we have the wrong Ger- beau why not ask someone else altogether to run the thing? Such as an Italian? The thought crossed my mind. They did make the trains run on time.
So I asked a Signor Branca from Pisa if he would like the job. He had never even heard of the Dome. Astonishing how provincial these foreigners are. Then I realised he had misheard and thought I was referring to the cathedral in the middle of the Piazza del Miracolo. The duomo. The one next to the Leaning Tower. 'It needs more propping up,' he said. 'What, already? It was only built last year."Lady, you are very ignorant. The trouble with English tourists today is that they come to Italy to buy hamburgers and look at clothes.' Touche, or certo as they say here.
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