between his feet and shoots, like a pea popping from its pod, towards the canal. Roland, who is lithe and quick, is after it in a moment, but the board is faster than he is and it tips over the edge, elegantly, like an acrobat executing a back flip. Roland vaults down from the
fondamenta
into a small, wooden boat moored there, but he lands just a second too late, in time only to see the skateboard slide silently to the muddy bottom of the canal.
Roland, however, is not silent; he has fallen badly and is crying with the pain. Alberto pulls the sobbing child on to his shoulders and we head for the hospital.
Venice’s hospital – L’Ospedale Civico di Santi Giovanni e Paolo – is the most eccentrically beautiful building I know. The top of themarble façade is like a lopsided crown of delicately descending scallops , beneath which are grand but curiously squashed trompe l’oeuil columns, and lions set in bizarre perspectives, all of which gives the impression of many things going on, but mostly out of sight, just around the corner.
The great entrance courtyard is a sea of ancient and perilously undulating pavement, punctuated by stone pillars. For centuries, people have been coming here for the same continuous purpose. But putting history and aesthetics aside, it strikes me how very difficult it must be for the halt and the lame to navigate a safe passage across this space: it would be hard to imagine anything much further from the ideal image of a modern hospital.
Now, with Roland hanging on to Alberto’s back in grimly stoical silence, we follow a surreal route of impersonal hospital corridors that morph unexpectedly into renaissance courtyards or arcades and then back again into hospital corridors, until we eventually arrive in casualty. We present ourselves at the reception desk and finally take our place on plastic chairs, along with all the other minor medical flotsam and jetsam cast up by this particular Venetian afternoon. We settle down to wait.
After an hour, I revise my opinion of the Ospedale Civico. Casualty, whether it is housed in a stupendous renaissance building in the middle of the Venetian Lagoon or in a jerry-built cottage hospital in the Midlands, is the same the world over: a place of infinite general boredom, punctuated by the odd high-octane drama, set off either by mental imbalance, pain or frustration. It is the
Divine Comedy
rewritten for the twenty-first century: the circles of Hell and Heaven have merged, for the most part, into a single zone: medical purgatory, with its rows of chairs and endlessly waiting people. Death and Mercy make their incursions, of course, but casualty is, at its heart, the no man’s land of a world that prefers to ignore the existence of both.
When eventually Roland’s ankle is x-rayed, it is found to be broken. We wait for another long time to have it plastered up. When we emerge from the hospital, it is 8 p.m. and dark. There is an ambulance boat that does the rounds of the city every few hours, droppingpeople near to their homes, but we have just missed the last one and the next will not leave until after midnight. We decide, just this once, to take a water taxi, and approach one waiting near to the hospital entrance.
‘Calle del Vin,’ says Alberto, to the handsome, tanned young man in pressed white jeans, a leather jacket and designer stubble standing at the wheel. ‘How much?’
‘A hundred and twenty.’
We are speechless. We could walk there in ten minutes. If we could walk.
‘But it takes five minutes to get there by boat! And our son has broken his ankle.’
Skinny little Roland on his crutches looks like something out of Dickens, shivering forlornly in the chill night. The taxi driver shrugs.
‘All right then. A hundred.’
We are over a barrel. After much haggling, we get it down to eighty euros. It is, metre for metre, without doubt the most expensive trip we have ever made. The Venetian taxi driver, pouting all the way to the bank, has
fondamenta
into a small, wooden boat moored there, but he lands just a second too late, in time only to see the skateboard slide silently to the muddy bottom of the canal.
Roland, however, is not silent; he has fallen badly and is crying with the pain. Alberto pulls the sobbing child on to his shoulders and we head for the hospital.
Venice’s hospital – L’Ospedale Civico di Santi Giovanni e Paolo – is the most eccentrically beautiful building I know. The top of themarble façade is like a lopsided crown of delicately descending scallops , beneath which are grand but curiously squashed trompe l’oeuil columns, and lions set in bizarre perspectives, all of which gives the impression of many things going on, but mostly out of sight, just around the corner.
The great entrance courtyard is a sea of ancient and perilously undulating pavement, punctuated by stone pillars. For centuries, people have been coming here for the same continuous purpose. But putting history and aesthetics aside, it strikes me how very difficult it must be for the halt and the lame to navigate a safe passage across this space: it would be hard to imagine anything much further from the ideal image of a modern hospital.
Now, with Roland hanging on to Alberto’s back in grimly stoical silence, we follow a surreal route of impersonal hospital corridors that morph unexpectedly into renaissance courtyards or arcades and then back again into hospital corridors, until we eventually arrive in casualty. We present ourselves at the reception desk and finally take our place on plastic chairs, along with all the other minor medical flotsam and jetsam cast up by this particular Venetian afternoon. We settle down to wait.
After an hour, I revise my opinion of the Ospedale Civico. Casualty, whether it is housed in a stupendous renaissance building in the middle of the Venetian Lagoon or in a jerry-built cottage hospital in the Midlands, is the same the world over: a place of infinite general boredom, punctuated by the odd high-octane drama, set off either by mental imbalance, pain or frustration. It is the
Divine Comedy
rewritten for the twenty-first century: the circles of Hell and Heaven have merged, for the most part, into a single zone: medical purgatory, with its rows of chairs and endlessly waiting people. Death and Mercy make their incursions, of course, but casualty is, at its heart, the no man’s land of a world that prefers to ignore the existence of both.
When eventually Roland’s ankle is x-rayed, it is found to be broken. We wait for another long time to have it plastered up. When we emerge from the hospital, it is 8 p.m. and dark. There is an ambulance boat that does the rounds of the city every few hours, droppingpeople near to their homes, but we have just missed the last one and the next will not leave until after midnight. We decide, just this once, to take a water taxi, and approach one waiting near to the hospital entrance.
‘Calle del Vin,’ says Alberto, to the handsome, tanned young man in pressed white jeans, a leather jacket and designer stubble standing at the wheel. ‘How much?’
‘A hundred and twenty.’
We are speechless. We could walk there in ten minutes. If we could walk.
‘But it takes five minutes to get there by boat! And our son has broken his ankle.’
Skinny little Roland on his crutches looks like something out of Dickens, shivering forlornly in the chill night. The taxi driver shrugs.
‘All right then. A hundred.’
We are over a barrel. After much haggling, we get it down to eighty euros. It is, metre for metre, without doubt the most expensive trip we have ever made. The Venetian taxi driver, pouting all the way to the bank, has
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