A Postcard of a Postcard
Venice has become its own copy — beautiful, disorienting, and, in pockets, still real, still brackish.
Welcome back to Season 2 of One Lens, Too Many Stories. I took a little intermission over the summer, but we’re rolling again — starting in a brackish corner of the Adriatic, of all improbable places.
Venice is a place that shouldn’t even exist. It began as a swampy hideout for Roman refugees hammering logs into the muck. Against all odds, that desperate hack turned into a thousand-year maritime empire, Europe’s most prosperous city, until Napoleon walked in and switched off the lights. What’s left is the stage set – the republic long gone, the spectacle still running.
I came with my girlfriend, who was attending the film festival. While her days followed a rinse-and-repeat cycle — up at the crack of dawn, vaporetto (water bus) to the Lido, four or five premieres back-to-back, and home after sundown — I had ten days mostly to myself to wander and make sense of this peculiar city. I’d been there before, but only for a rushed 24 hours, which wasn't enough to form a coherent impression. This time, I had all the time in the world.
Perhaps it’s best to start with the obvious: Venice is a deeply weird place. Apart from a small corner near the train station, there are no cars. I often hear people insist that a city can’t work without them, but Venice proves otherwise. While 30 million people visit each year, this is still a functioning city of 50,000 people: groceries delivered by boat, rubbish collected by boat, people getting around on foot or vaporetto. No car fumes, no traffic lights, no honking horns. It’s all rather lovely. And whether they’ll admit it or not, people adore it. But the “idea” of Venice often eclipses the lived city.
You don’t come to discover Venice, you come to see a place you’ve seen in postcards, paintings, films, and Instagram shots. This is a city that embraces its own myth: gondoliers in striped shirts, masks in shop windows, faded palazzi slowly crumbling into the canals. The Venice most people experience is a copy of itself, the myth on repeat, rather than the working city.
I’d even argue the myth of Venice has become larger than the city itself; consider the fake Rialto Bridge in The Venetian in Las Vegas or gondoliers punting tourists through an indoor mall in Chongqing. Yes, these imitations are tacky paper-mâché Venices pitched as entertainment. Still, perhaps the real problem is when the logic of those imitations seeps back into the lagoon.
In its peak tourist spots, Venice is a parody of itself, a theme park, an ancient Disneyland. Piazza San Marco, Ponte Rialto, Bridge of Sighs, the Grand Canal, Doge’s Palace; these spots aren’t functioning parts of a city anymore, they’re more like branded experiences. This isn’t unique to Venice, but the concentration of tourists in these areas is extreme; it's cultural karaoke.
Aside from eating disgusting amounts of pizza, gelato and ciccheti, I spent most of my time in Venice, clocking 25,000+ steps a day wandering the alleyways and canals of San Marco, San Polo, Cannaregio, Dorsoduro, Castello and Santa Croce. My aim was to take lots of pictures. I didn’t really have a clear idea of the type of photos I’d take, other than the notion that Luigi Ghirri and Martin Parr might serve as a mental mood board as I walked around.
Ghirri’s It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It… treats postcards and tourist lookouts as material in themselves, questioning what it means to see a place through its own clichés. His Puglia goes further, dissecting the dense urban fabric of southern Italian towns with the eye of a chartered surveyor, mapping how everyday structures shape how we move and think. Parr, meanwhile, in Small World, turns mass tourism into global parody.
All of them felt like the right touchstones for Venice, a city that has become its own postcard and whose mental map has been warped by spectacle. My aim wasn’t to strip away the myth but to photograph through it, to accept the simulacrum, and see what reality still leaked through the cracks. Essentially, this meant capturing tourists taking photos in crowded spots, while leaning into liminal melancholia in the city's quieter corners.
One of the surprising things about Venice is how quickly you can step out of the spectacle. Ten minutes from the Rialto crush, parts of Cannaregio and Castello go quiet, almost too calm. With no cars, no shops, sometimes no people at all, they feel like stage sets waiting for the actors to return, streets suspended in a kind of liminal energy. It’s surreal, and maybe that’s the closest I got to the “real” Venice.
It’s almost unnerving to walk these areas during the day or at night. The nearest approximation is these places my mind creates during some of my weirder Lynchian dreamscapes, solitary environments, ones that feel low-key familiar yet oddly terrifying by their lack of human presence or activity: no shops, no restaurants or any other businesses.
I don’t know if Venice was always like this, but I’d be surprised if it was. Remove the tourist infrastructure, and it is laid bare in no uncertain terms that this is a dying city. I have no idea what the future holds for Venice. Still, with rising sea levels and an increasing number of visitors like me, the city as a civic and lived-in space will probably be hanging on for dear life.
So yes, there is a Venice outside of the myth, a Venice beyond the postcards. And maybe that, improbably, is the Venice that shouldn’t and might not exist, and yet does.
After 10 days in the city, I was ready to leave. Venice is beautiful, perhaps too much so for its good. But it’s also claustrophobic, disorientating and feels a bit closed off from the world. I feel very privileged to have spent as long as I did and have the time to come to this conclusion, as most people do a conveyor belt “best of Venice” to-do list of sightseeing spots.
You’ve made it to the end!
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This is nicely done, Ari, but at some very fundamental level I disagree with the framing, which I think is kinda old-fashioned. You keep circling back to real vs image, and somehow your images depict the real? The simulacrum is the simulacrum, really. :) Less flippantly, I just think the pomo take doesn't fly, not anymore, probably at some level dependent on a base/superstructure imaginary. Venice has been a tourist center for 200 years or so, cf Goethe. And its justification is culture, which is why the film festival, your girlfriend, you are there. Suddenly to seek out the real? (To be clear, it's the philosophy I'm quarreling with. Even on my screen your film colors are fantastic.). We could talk about real cities, all cities (thank you Calvino), say Hamburg, also based on elaborate myths, which is fine . . . and people routinely justify the difficulties of NYC or Berlin (just saying) by "culture." Usw.
Again, welcome back to posting, and keep up the great work.
Fantastic! Been waiting for the next post, really glad the new season has begun. Keep it up!