Hello Adventure

Chapter 22 - Venice, Italy

Venice was a different world from Lake Como, from Marrakesh, from anywhere else I'd ever been.

The guys went ahead to prep for the next shoot, so it was just Brooke and I arriving together in the sinking city that evening. I hadn't seen Dale since our dinner because he was working with Nils, learning the new Doux menus.

Once we landed, Brooke and I jounced along in the private water taxi from the airport, the skinny boat dodging the red-and-white-stripped mooring poles spiked out of the ink-blue waters.

I made a mental note to ask Cai who he thought Venice was as a person. To me, Venice came off like a dignified older gentleman draped in pompous fabric with zany, outdated facial hair. He was once rich—filthily so—and was set in his old-world ways, but time had passed and he couldn't stop it. Still, he retained his romance, his exquisiteness—he was just no longer at his peak.

The boat pulled right up to the world famous Gritti Palace, a 15th-century palazzo that was now an expensive hotel in the Spade collection. Venice already felt worlds colder after coming from the dry heat of Marrakech. Now the world was rainy and foggy, seeped in wintery shadows and uncertainty. Off-season has arrived and autumn is here, I thought as we checked into the quiet and sumptuous-but-cozy hotel bedecked in brocades and filled with gold antiques, crumbling books, and thick, luscious oil paintings.

After checking in, Brooke and I parted ways and I found myself alone that first night, walking the spooky and otherworldly city by myself. I got lost, detoured. There was something about Venice's slender pathways and step bridges that reminded me of one of those brain-teasing, confounding M.C. Escher ink drawings: stairs leading upwards, paths that looped back in on itself. Before you knew it your whole world was upside-down, reversed, overlapped.

The rain-washed windows, strung with ghostly carnival masks and handcrafted marionettes, flushed yellow in the damp October night. The streets were empty. The city—however disorientating—belonged to me and only me that night. That was my first impression of the famed city of Venice, however irrational: It's all mine.

*

The next day was our first shoot in Venice, in the Somerset Suite and it hadn't gone well because we weren't well prepared. In front of everyone, Samuel claimed I hadn't told him about the new shooting schedule.

"But I told you this last week before you left," I had insisted. Everyone was out of patience.

"You heard about this last week and the team is only finding out now?!" He was gasping dramatically and didn't have time to talk him down from the ledge so I didn't even try. Leo was quiet with frustration.

Why is Samuel lying like this and getting everyone riled up for no reason? It was like he was trying to get everyone to hate me.

Instead of fighting, I called a 30-minute break to recalibrate and set up for some shots in the hotel's lobby instead.

Since the rain finally stopped, I opted to head downstairs with the intention of taking a moment to myself on the hotel's beautiful terrace cafe: I couldn't wait to mainline a few of those face-slappingly strong Italian espressos to wake myself up a bit. I was feeling groggy and unfocused today. You're okay, I told myself as I jogged down the lushly carpeted stairs and made my way outside.

You'll drink a coffee out of the Gritti's charming blue-and-white-striped china cups. You'll listen to the opera-singing gondoliers glide down the Grand Canal with their black lacquered boats. You'll look out at on the wedding-cake-white domes of the Baroque basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, and you'll feel right again. All grateful and happy and well on your way, I promised myself.