Venice is one of my favourite cities in the world. It is the perfect pedestrian city. Even if a car wanted to bulldoze its way on the islands, it wouldn’t make it far before it’s sardined in some alleyway. Quite honestly, I would love to know how the Venetian branch of the Ferrari store got its floor models down those little streets.

I also love Venice for the beautiful old buildings - I want to sneak into them and look about. I snuck into one museum, the Palazzo Correr, overlooking the Piazza San Marco. I was 20, just before my 21st birthday, and the museum, damn it, was closed the day I wanted to visit it. So I visited anyhow, in the dark, forgetting that there were probably security cameras around the place. Yet there are so many other buildings in Venice and I am not as daring as I once was.

Venice’s thoroughfares also make the city into a great labyrinth. The signs pointing, in two different directions, toward the Rialto, simply add to the fun of getting lost. Garden mazes always disappointed me because they weren’t challenging enough. Not so with Venice. When we stayed there last year for a few days, we could never retrace our path back to the hotel each night on the morning route.

When Matt and I took our honeymoon in Italy, I couldn’t wait for him to see one of the great cities of the world. Maybe I was overly excited as our train crossed the big bridge from Mestre across the lagoon, or maybe he really didn’t like our 18th century villa and its fading rococo wallpaper. Whatever it was, Matt, within hours of our arrival, developed an enduring hate for Venice.

We eventually cut our trip there short and went back to his beloved Rome.

Venice was also partly to blame. The tourists swarmed the place (us as bad as the rest). Every second store sold glass baubles; there were none of the wine shops I told him about. A thunderstorm trapped us in the Salute church. The front door of the Basilica San Marco had a long line across planks swimming over water. The Basilica itself was too gaudily ornate for Matt’s more austere American tastes.

Worst of all, Venetian food sucked. Having no kitchen access, we were trapped at the mercy of the restaurants. All of them staffed and managed by Turks, mainland Chinese and Romanians, the food was a dismal disappointment after the epicure’s dream in Rome. We had starved in Padova, where Matt refused to condescend to the Italian buffet I remembered from my first wonderful afternoon in Padova in 1996, and none of the restaurants served food except at awkward times.

Unfortunately, I came to understand, Venice no longer has any Venetians. The Italians who still work in the city’s tourist industry all live across the lagoon on the mainland. Because the restaurants don’t cater to locals, they can serve whatever dead pigeon washed up in the canal that morning. It’s not like the tourists will take their business elsewhere.

I flipped through my book on the city’s history, trying to find some redeeming snippet of Venetian lore that would make Matt fall in love with the city I liked so much. Then I came across some bad news.

Venetians, apparently even in the time of Casanova, were notorious for hosting very poor parties. Guests would chat politely. Their stomachs would begin grumbling. The hosts would eventually wise up and bring out a plate of watermelons.

The excuse was that Venetians just didn’t do dinner parties. Or that sumptuary laws prevented shows of gastronomic exaggeration. Whatever.

Now Matt always shudders at the mention of Venetian food. He’s come up with some allergy excuse just so he’ll never have to go back.

A Telegraph review of a recent Casanova book has this quote hidden in it:

He was born into the ‘last great age of Venetian cooking’, he liked his macaroni sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar…..

So there was a great age of Venetian cooking.

Most likely destroyed by that bastard, Napoleon.

Now Matt and I have to make a make-up honeymoon to Venice and hunt down this elusive good Venetian cuisine.

A planned hi-tech driverless underground railway line set to bring desperately needed transport links to the historic heart of Rome has run into a minefield of Roman remains.

(From the May 14 online edition of the Guardian.)

There’s a scene in Fellini’s Roma where a subway crew finds Roman ruins and calls in the film crew. The delighted visitors crawl through holes to see a fresco with colours as fresh as if they had just been daubed on the walls. Yet, within seconds, the fresco disintegrates into dust and floats off the wall.

Matt didn’t care much for this movie, but after riding the Roman Metro, he changed his mind and wants to watch it again.

What we didn’t know while we were there, is that we stood above the proposed Largo Torre Argentina stop.

This area, near tourist hot spots like Piazza Navona and the Pantheon, is to be one of the stops on Rome’s third subway route, Line C. City planners estimated that 30 metres deep should just about miss the pesky ruins. But they’ve found amphorae that could be part of an villa’s garden and, just as annoying, some imperial era building. The nerve of those ancient Romans!

Instead of pondering all this, we admired the cats:

The ruins are also home to the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary.

Soon after the ruins were discovered in 1929, the cats moved. Roman cat lovers, derisively called gattare, began feeding leftover pasta to the homeless cats. Though the current batch of felines are (mostly) fixed, irresponsible pet owners still dump cats in the area, resulting in a population of around 250 cats. We counted about 18 from the fences high above the remains of the four temples.