Surfing Venice

There is an art form to being Venetian, a chic, easy bearing that makes nearly everyone here seem like a cultured scholar, regardless of their job or schooling. When you grow up surrounded by this much beauty, you have no choice but to absorb it through osmosis. It alters not only the way you view the world, but the way you move through it.

Venetians have a certain swagger when they walk, a rhythm to their steps that lies somewhere between a float and a bounce, the amphibious result of a life shared between land and sea. And because this is a walking city, you cannot opt out of the weather. You meet the fog, the wind, and the acqua alta on nature’s terms, not your own. This changes your relationship with the natural world. It becomes less of a stranger and more like a colleague, even a member of the family.

Countless poets, painters, writers, musicians, photographers, and designers have tried to capture Venice, attempting to truthfully portray its essence and beauty. You can describe the light, the water, the silence, the particular way church bells resonate through the calles and over canals. At best, you may convey a fraction of a moment. But the feeling itself sits beneath all of that, carrying something immemorial, filtered through centuries of beauty and craft. It is palpable and grounded, somehow merged with the movements of the sea. You feel it beneath your skin and in your bones. The closest comparison may be surfing: the sense of being part of an ancient and eternal cosmic system, connected, moving with it rather than against it.

You can talk about Venice forever, but you can only really begin to understand it by being here. To know this city is to do more than see it. It is to marvel at the synergy between human ingenuity and the natural world, to stand in a fog so thick that only faith and memory provide evidence that the rest of the world still exists, to lose the thread of a street and revel in being lost in such a place, that such a place even exists. It is to be, for a while, slightly out of your depth, held inside something far greater and older than yourself, and content to move with it.

Venice does not ask to be understood. It asks only that you arrive and allow yourself to be absorbed, letting the rest unfold on its terms.