Pizza and ice cream are good for the soul

After spending a good few days in the mountains, I was ready for a change of scenery. And I’ve been wanting to go to Venice with my love for quite some time now. This was the perfect opportunity. 

The drive from the Tre Cime di Lavaredo to Venice was hot – at 10:30am it was 29 degrees, and by lunch time it had reached 40 degrees. It’s no wonder then that, after checking in at our campsite in Fusina, we jumped straight on to a “vaporetto” (a water bus – Venice’s method of transportation) to go to the Venice Lido. We figured a spot of sunbathing and a dip in the water would be both relaxing and cooling. The Lido, however, was not quite as nice as we imagined.

But all was not lost, I insisted. It was only early evening and we still had plenty of time to save the day. 

We made the speedy decision to get the next vaporetto to Venice, in search of our first gelato. Arriving in Venice was like discovering the promised land (if this promised land comes with swarms of tourists). The canals and bridges were quaint and picturesque, and the gondolas made everything look like a romantic postcard. We saw – much to our delight – gelatarias all over the place.

Already the day was saved.

And then there was our first gelato – Florian had yogurt and pineapple, and I had coconut and pineapple (over the next 2 days we also tried lemon, apple, melon, Malaga (rum and raisin) and crema catalana). It was beyond delicious, and today – before we start heading off towards Croatia – we are going to go on the vaporetto one last time to Venice and have one last gelato. 

During the long drive to Venice earlier in the day, I kept talking about my need for pizza and ice cream – I figured one out of two wasn’t bad for the first day. But then on our way to the Piazza San Marco we discovered a tiny, almost miss-able, hole in the wall selling pizza by the slice. For €8.30 we had two huge slices of delicious pizza, a beer and an iced tea.

Two out of two.

It was then, on that first day in Venice, that I reached the conclusion that pizza and ice cream are good for the soul. There we were, sitting in the Piazza San Marco and admiring the Basilica di San Marco, feeling content with life. 

The next day we did much the same – we walked around the labyrinthine streets of Venice, crossing the canals, admiring the boats, and eating gelato at every opportunity we got. Venice can be an extraordinarily expensive city, though we were able to navigate our way through the city’s charm and away from the obvious tourist traps without doing too much damage to our modest wallets.

And, as Ernest Hemingway said in A Moveable Feast, “We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other”. This is exactly what we intend to do for the next 3 months… and, of course, for the rest of our lives.