taken his pound of the foreigner’s flesh.
Unlearning IKEA
I T IS A drear autumn day soon after our arrival and I am hurrying across a small, grey
campo
in the rain. An old woman is leaning against the stone portal of a building, a carrier bag of shopping slumped at her feet. She is tightly wrapped in a wool coat; her legs are so terribly thin that her thick beige nylon tights sag at her ankles; she has the gaunt fragility of extreme age, but her voice is strong when she calls out to me.
‘Signora, excuse me, but could I ask you to take my bag up the stairs and leave it outside my door?’
In twenty brief seconds I run up the short flight to the first floor and leave the shopping propped against the wall.
‘Thank you, Signora, thank you so much.’
Very, very slowly, she turns and begins to mount the first step, grasping the stair rail with both hands. Her face is strained with the effort, but she pauses to smile back at me over her shoulder.
‘I can get up if I hold on like this, but I can’t manage the bag at the same time. Thank you again. Some days I have to wait for half an hour for somebody to go by.’
Measured against modern ideas of convenience, Venice can be wildly impractical and often uncomfortable. If you have no access to a private boat or are hampered physically in any way (age, disability, luggage, babies), or simply do not have a lift in your building, the logistics of daily life can range from the tricky to the nightmarish. But there is another side to this: physical restrictions that might at first seem limiting, even to the able-bodied, enforce a speed and rhythm of living that is on an entirely human scale. The 4x4 that I park outside the supermarket is a sagging blue shopping trolley; the ‘supermarket’, as often as not, is the greengrocer’s stall on the corner of the street, the sweet-smelling cubby hole of a bakery, the butcher or the fishmonger. The £200 bumper shop at the out-of-town Megastore, complete with desert wastes of car park, clattery, disobedient metal trolleys, bulging excrescences of plastic bags, aisle after neon aisle of hammering choice, choice, choice, has shrunk to five minutes on the way home: a brief, friendly transaction with someone you see every day and the purchasing of ingredients for one meal – or perhaps two.
During my first months in the city I unfailingly buy too much food and end up hauling splitting bag-loads of groceries up the four flights of stairs to our apartment. Finally, though, I get it and begin to purchase just enough and no more. That is when I stop even noticing the shopping. It becomes an organic, practically invisible part of the walk back from school. Everything is scaled down: individual serves individual; bread and fruit and vegetables are mostly sold in paper bags and a plastic carrier doubles as tomorrow’s rubbish container. The physical constraints imposed by the city mean that daily life unfolds in a sustainable, human dimension. I am beginning to understand that in Venice, you can, quite simply, go no further than it is possible towalk (with a little help from the plodding
vaporetti
) and you can never transport more than you can carry.
This is why IKEA in Padua represents a kind of consumer nemesis for inhabitants of Venice. Back on the mainland, I revert immediately to being a citizen of the modern world of hyper mobility. Once the car has been parked and I am inside that great corrugated-iron box of a selling machine, ambling obediently along the yellow brick road of tape, through the forests of sofas and shelves, chairs and tables, lampshades and glasses and cushion covers, all memory of the necessary minimalism of life in Venice magically disappears.
This is why, some hours later, I find myself back at Piazzale Roma with a vast and weighty flat pack balanced on my trolley, which I must now get home by heaving it up and down bridges and manouvring it around corners, with the strain on my lower back proving quite
Unlearning IKEA
I T IS A drear autumn day soon after our arrival and I am hurrying across a small, grey
campo
in the rain. An old woman is leaning against the stone portal of a building, a carrier bag of shopping slumped at her feet. She is tightly wrapped in a wool coat; her legs are so terribly thin that her thick beige nylon tights sag at her ankles; she has the gaunt fragility of extreme age, but her voice is strong when she calls out to me.
‘Signora, excuse me, but could I ask you to take my bag up the stairs and leave it outside my door?’
In twenty brief seconds I run up the short flight to the first floor and leave the shopping propped against the wall.
‘Thank you, Signora, thank you so much.’
Very, very slowly, she turns and begins to mount the first step, grasping the stair rail with both hands. Her face is strained with the effort, but she pauses to smile back at me over her shoulder.
‘I can get up if I hold on like this, but I can’t manage the bag at the same time. Thank you again. Some days I have to wait for half an hour for somebody to go by.’
Measured against modern ideas of convenience, Venice can be wildly impractical and often uncomfortable. If you have no access to a private boat or are hampered physically in any way (age, disability, luggage, babies), or simply do not have a lift in your building, the logistics of daily life can range from the tricky to the nightmarish. But there is another side to this: physical restrictions that might at first seem limiting, even to the able-bodied, enforce a speed and rhythm of living that is on an entirely human scale. The 4x4 that I park outside the supermarket is a sagging blue shopping trolley; the ‘supermarket’, as often as not, is the greengrocer’s stall on the corner of the street, the sweet-smelling cubby hole of a bakery, the butcher or the fishmonger. The £200 bumper shop at the out-of-town Megastore, complete with desert wastes of car park, clattery, disobedient metal trolleys, bulging excrescences of plastic bags, aisle after neon aisle of hammering choice, choice, choice, has shrunk to five minutes on the way home: a brief, friendly transaction with someone you see every day and the purchasing of ingredients for one meal – or perhaps two.
During my first months in the city I unfailingly buy too much food and end up hauling splitting bag-loads of groceries up the four flights of stairs to our apartment. Finally, though, I get it and begin to purchase just enough and no more. That is when I stop even noticing the shopping. It becomes an organic, practically invisible part of the walk back from school. Everything is scaled down: individual serves individual; bread and fruit and vegetables are mostly sold in paper bags and a plastic carrier doubles as tomorrow’s rubbish container. The physical constraints imposed by the city mean that daily life unfolds in a sustainable, human dimension. I am beginning to understand that in Venice, you can, quite simply, go no further than it is possible towalk (with a little help from the plodding
vaporetti
) and you can never transport more than you can carry.
This is why IKEA in Padua represents a kind of consumer nemesis for inhabitants of Venice. Back on the mainland, I revert immediately to being a citizen of the modern world of hyper mobility. Once the car has been parked and I am inside that great corrugated-iron box of a selling machine, ambling obediently along the yellow brick road of tape, through the forests of sofas and shelves, chairs and tables, lampshades and glasses and cushion covers, all memory of the necessary minimalism of life in Venice magically disappears.
This is why, some hours later, I find myself back at Piazzale Roma with a vast and weighty flat pack balanced on my trolley, which I must now get home by heaving it up and down bridges and manouvring it around corners, with the strain on my lower back proving quite
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