Bill Scheller
In All Directions
Thirty Years of Travel
I wrote this piece for the now-vanished Islands magazine, following a ten-day Venice sojourn in the late winter of 1995. The twenty-six years that have passed since that trip have made certain parts of my account seem quaint — I’m thinking, in particular, of my references to the city’s recently-achieved access to the Internet, and to the association of cell phones with Yuppies, as opposed to everyone on Earth over the age of three. There are fewer Venetians now than there were in 1995, and — at least in the year before the pandemic, when I last visited — far more tourists. But the spirit of the city remains, and I hope the artisans making mattresses by hand do, too. The Working World of Venice By Bill Scheller
Islands, December 1995 This afternoon Venice smells like laundry. Not like noisome summer canals or damp plaster in a tilting palazzo; not like fish sizzling in a trattoria or sea mist and doom. I am in a working-class neighborhood known as Santa Elena, and Venice smells like the garlands of laundry strung across the street. Of all the world's cities, Venice most enjoys -- or suffers -- the cachet of being a place where fantasy looms larger than reality, where work runs a 34
