Venice as Muse: Travel with Intent in the Floating City

How beauty, resilience and taste collide in Venice to awaken the senses

There is so much to love about Venice.  Moving about its hallowed streets and labyrinths of canals, we feel more like we’re confronting a cosmic force than a city barely afloat above the tides of the swelling Adriatic Sea.  It’s a fantastical example of how beauty and progress can endure together at the insistence of man’s relentless will, adaptability and creative ingenuity.  For nearly two millennia, Venice has prevailed both because of and in spite of the changing world around it. This fabled city tucked away just within reach, but just out-of-easy-access is an obvious and natural seductive, catalytic stage for literature, design and art.  From Shakespeare to Henry James to Monet, Hemmingway, and Vivaldi, Venice has always been a storyteller’s rich, opulent playground laden with romance and intrigue. 

And it takes but a single, intentional trip to understand exactly why.  

Upon my arrival in Venice first in 2004 and then again in 2021, I found without fail or prejudice, Venice cast a commanding but liberating spell across each one of my five senses blurring their boundaries while granting them magical, transient powers.  Taste, sight, hearing, smell and touch seemed to animate with limitless dimension and capacity.  Suddenly, I could taste color, texture and tone.  I could smell the sun set over the canals and feel the shades and hues shift as they came to rest over the horizon. This unexpected seizure and trickery of my senses, this ignition of a deeper, more resolute curiosity for art and beauty, this unearthing of raw, pure intensity in feeling and meaning – all of this – is exactly why I love Venice. It is tempestuously confrontational, monumentally hyper-sensorial and exceptionally revelatory.   It’s but one of a handful of places I’ve been on this earth, where every part of my creative being stands erect at full attention, activated and leaned-in, simply and fully on fire and alive.  Dramatic? But of course, we’re talking about Venice.

With my senses magnified, I found the contents of my heart – the good, the bad and the ugly – spilled out bare, unfiltered and uncontextualized in front of me.  As I maneuvered around untended-to emotion, neglected hope and unfilled potential, I found I struggled to keep my balance.  With nothing but the arresting eloquence of Venice holding me upright, I sensed the only way I would regain any composure again was to follow my gut and oblige the not-so-petulant-after-all nudgings of my inner child.  Coincidentally both essential undertakings and outcomes to meet mindfulness, clarity and peace when traveling.

I think Venice softly assaults us with our own baggage and truth so we look beyond its hard-to-miss beauty into our own flawed but exquisite reflections.  Acting righteously and fastidiously as creativity’s eternal advocate and muse, Venice provokes confrontation, disrupts inertia and stirs epiphany so we can create and imagine through disappointment, distress and disillusion not without it, not around it but in it because of it.  As daunting as that sounds, it’s anything but in the long run. While it is necessarily imperfect and uncomfortable at times, it is honest, fruitful and fulfilling work. And when we do it from a place as divine and aspirational as this dazzling floating city, there is not only a sense of tremendous freedom that comes from sifting through our truths, but also great joy.

And so as I turn to think about what it means to travel with intent in Venice, I purposefully navigate past rabbit holes like climate change and overtourism. I steer instead toward a more soothing supposition that Venice is but a beautiful time and trial tested metaphor for creative resilience, adaptability and survival. I can’t help but wonder if this is why some of the world’s most prolific artists and writers felt so compelled to ruminate, dream and create here.  Is it possible, they too were drawn in by the tension Venice has long embodied and cultivated between its massive, magnificent beauty and our humble human struggle?  Arguably, this bewitching creative tension has helped to preserve Venice as an irresistible refuge and oasis of inspiration for 1,600 scaling and tumultuous years.

Now, as I relive my time under its spell, I make note of the ways I surrendered to regain my composure and center there.  It doesn’t surprise me that I did what I always do. I followed my gut and inner voice unapologetically through my own familiar, trademark gateway of self-discovery - Taste.  Following that compass led me to an almost spiritual, and most definitely extra-sensorial experience with food and drink.  It’s one thing to say I ate very well in Venice and I did.  It was perhaps the best lineup of restaurants in flavor, range and experience I’ve ever planned, but it’s a more significant thing to realize how what I ate changed what I came to crave and expect when I sit down in front of a dish. And I’m not obnoxiously or boorishly going on about doting pretense, gastronomic wizardry or plated perfection.  Rather, I’m reveling in memories of how utterly transfixed I became by the story, color and connection each dish served up through mind-bending and meticulous thoughtfulness, beauty and crystal-clear purpose.  When we get it right, whatever our “it” might be – our senses and soul – go into an overdrive that simply cannot be denied, overlooked or sufficiently described using mere mortal words.

A masterpiece of a meal at Glam in Venice, Italy.

Sitting in front of dishes of all kinds and at tables of all sorts, I found inspiration, joy and inner peace I didn’t even know I was looking for – tucked about in nudges, pauses and bites that slowed life down just enough so I could simply just be.  I fell madly in love with fresh figs at Al Covo sitting at the most perfect window table, cozy and warm on a quiet, chilly evening.  I fell in love with Venice’s Italian hospitality and charm through the kindness of one waiter at Ristorante da Ivo, where this kindred spirit prepared three sample portions of the three dishes I couldn’t decide from. A foodie’s dream and a first for me!  At two-star Michelin Glam, I fell love in love with the taste Venice’s spell seemed to be made for – the kind that mesmerizes all at once, wholly and flawlessly about all our senses. And finally, I fell in love with what can best be described as that air that hangs about us in Venice during two sunny lunches that inspired long deep, soul cleansing breaths.  One lunch was my first meal upon arriving in Venice, at the end of a quiet passageway at Antiche Carampane and the other on a busier fondamenta at La Zucca.

Never wanting to limit taste to bites and sips, I also enjoyed many rewarding collisions with artisans off the beaten path, the ones I found after finally letting myself get lost in the rhythm of my own discovery.  I bought some of my favorite treasures to this day at Danghyra, a workshop off the Campiello Loredon and Niky’s Jewelry Store, a female-owned gift shop,

While I found no shortage of eye-opening, soul-stirring taste in Venice, I brought something greater and more unexpected home with me beyond a suitcase full of handcrafted treasures and a more expansive, enlightened palate.  I unlocked an all but unknown, insatiably curious, complex part of myself, opening up this very portal from where I would later write these very words.  What I love about this discovery, is it is happening right here, right now.  It would take four years and a train ride across Poland for me to realize I wasn’t in Venice to discover her hidden gems and taste, I was there to uncover my own.