debt in venice

And suddenly, for the third weekend in a row, I find myself in Venice. It's an obscenely expensive, sickeningly beautiful city. These two factors are a winning combination for the local tourist industry due to the well-known economic equation beauty+money=romance. People throw away their money in a conscious display of gay abandon, hence the 15 euros you can pay for a coffee in Piazza San Marco, the 55 euros I paid for my dingy hotel room, and the frankly absurd cost of this internet cafe, which ker-chings in at seven euros per hour (although you'd be hard-pressed to associate the place with romance in any way). Now I am bracing myself for the cost of tonight's meal. Nevertheless, it is worth it, because it's impossible to get bored of the Romeo and Juliet scenery, and the sounds of the gondolieri crooning and melancholy strings which seem to be triggered by your mood like a cliched soundtrack. Fede always says, in her enchantingly Italian way, that the colour of the lagoon in the morning is a sort of harbinger for the day to come - a reflection of your psyche - and I'm inclined to agree with her. It's sometimes electric blue, sometimes pea green, or white, brown or a sharky grey. In the same way, the natural resonance of Venice means it can be romantic, threatening, confusing or sad, depending on how you look at it and what's going through your mind at the time. Whichever it is, though, it is always quite intense.