The Venice Sketchbook

by Rhys Bowen

Great-Aunt Lettie had not been the sort of person you hugged. She had been kind, caring, but she kept her distance, as if she were a remnant of a bygone age of propriety.

“I survived.” Her grandmother gave a sad little smile. “Most of us survive the hardest things. We are quite resilient.”

am the only teacher on the staff under fifty. The rest are spinsters who were at the right age for marriage around the time of the Great War, thus they had little chance of ever finding a husband after a whole generation of young men had been wiped out.

see the parallel in her own life, that a time of stress and tragedy takes away all but the will to survive.

“Let us hope there is no war,” she added. “We lived through the last one, did we not? How many men died needlessly, and for what? Nothing changed except we all became poorer and lost hope.”

After Signora Martinelli mentioned coal and rubbish being taken up and down by a pulley, I have noticed that this is the normal delivery method for many things. A basket comes down, and a newspaper and bottle of milk go up in the early morning. Bottles of mineral water, the grocery shopping. One has to be careful not to be hit by a descending basket!

It seems that meat is an expensive luxury in Italy, but fish is plentiful and cheap.

was learning for the first time that a calle was a street, but a fondamenta was a street that ran beside a canal.

tramezzini: little finger sandwiches containing interesting things like tuna and olives, ham and shrimp.

Venetian. By now I had come to realize that the local language was not just a dialect, a difference in pronunciation, but a language of its own. “Bondì” was a classic example. Nothing like “buon giorno,” the normal greeting for “good day.”

And Russia will side with him, you know. And France will side with England, and pretty soon it will spread. Hitler wants the world. Stalin wants the world, too, and Mussolini just wants the Mediterranean. But who will stop them?”

There is no chance of sleeping late on Sunday mornings in Venice. The first church bells start at six o’clock and are followed almost every half hour by the bells of various other churches. Sometimes there are four or five churches at once, so that the city echoes with the sound.

I made my way across the sestiere of Dorsoduro to the waterfront known as the Zattere.

The Zattere was a promenade that ran beside a wide waterway—too wide, really, to be called a canal.

“The German army was here?” Caroline asked. “I thought Italy was on the same side as the Germans.” “To start with. Then we changed sides. And the Germans were angry. They occupied the city. They were brutal, too. Lots of arrests and killing and people being shipped off to camps. They tried to starve us. Two long years they were here, until the Allies saved us. Your British army, you know.”

The weather has been bleak and gloomy with lashings of rain and several occasions of aqua alta, but this part of Dorsoduro does not flood easily, so I’ve been able to get around without wet feet.

“We in Venice do not let a small thing like a war get in the way of art.

Then today, April 9, there was a news bulletin on the radio. Germany had invaded Denmark and Norway. Britain had bombed a German naval base.

Today everything changed. Italy has announced it is joining Germany in the war against the Allies.

“This is how you get to Switzerland. Go now. Do not wait another second. As the Germans continue to become more desperate, they are also becoming more ruthless. If one of their number is killed, they will round up whole towns and machine gun the entire population. And you will be shot as an enemy spy.

We slept on wooden bunks, stacked three high. Our mattresses were stuffed with straw and crawling with fleas. After a few days I was covered in bites.

Every now and then, a German armoured car would drive up. Someone would be hauled off for questioning and either return with marks of brutality upon her or not return at all.

on the third morning I saw the sun gleaming on snowy peaks ahead of me. I had reached the head of Lake Maggiore. I was in Switzerland.