Rio Terá dei Nomboli

20 September 2020

Lost and Found and Lost, or, Good-bye to Venice's "Secret Routes"

Will we remember simply the map on our screen and notice little beyond it? (17 July 2024)

It used to be that most maps of Venice, both the old paper ones and the early ones offered on screens, left much of the city uncharted or inaccurately depicted. And if you were a resident of Venice, as I was for nearly 11 years, this was a very good thing.

For the limitations of those maps left inviolate the obscure alternate routes used by residents to avoid the tourist throngs on the city's main thoroughfares, allowing a resident to zip from, say, Piazza San Marco to the Rialto Bridge, or from the Rialto Market to Campo San Polo, along a series of narrow calli rarely penetrated by either the sun or, thankfully, tourists. The only people I used to see on such routes were other residents hurrying along on their errands.

Last summer, however, I discovered that this is no longer the case.

The "secret" resident routes that played no small part in assuring that a certain minimal quality of life persisted just beyond the reaches of mass tourism have now been mapped and the days of breezing through those once obscure calli are over. Time and again I'd turn and corner and find myself completely blocked by tourists no less lost than they ever were, but now being directed by a computer voice, their eyes glued to their screens, in places I'd never seen them before. 

No need to go into how happy it made me to find that every last millimeter of the city has now been made accessible to tourists--the vast majority of whom are just in town for a few hours and contribute almost nothing to local businesses. After all, this has always been the city's non-resident mayor's chief aim--and it doesn't stop in the city itself. His goal is to turn the entire lagoon into one vast amusement park, constantly traversed by a variety of "rides"--one for every possible taste.

But what about those using the apps to get around the historic center? I wondered about what would be the effect on their experience of Venice, and on their memories of it. 

Tourists have long been advised by those who offer advice on such matters that the best way to enjoy Venice is to "Get lost!" Forget about maps and just see where you end up. 

This was probably helpful advice in the days of paper maps and I suspect it might be even better advice in our new age of apps. For I doubt that many people used to use paper maps as a daily part of their regular lives back home, so to do so in Venice already set the experience apart from the ordinary, might even have given it a bit of a treasure hunt feel. 

But cell phones have become a constant presence in most people's lives. A widely-reported study back in 2016 claimed the average cell phone user touched their phones 2,600 times per day(!) and there's no reason to think that number has declined in the past 8 years as more and more aspects of daily life, work, school, health care, etc demand one use a cell phone to receive/access information. 

So what do we lose when we depend once more on our all-too-familiar little device to literally direct us around Venice? What do we actually see, how much can we take in, what will we remember? 

The experience of Venice (of anyplace, really, but especially Venice) is a full body one: it offers unfamiliar experiences to all of one's five senses, not just one's eyes. (Which, if you'll allow me to plug my children's picture book published by Abrams, is one of the main themes of Ciao, Sandro!) 

You don't, for example, get the feel of the city just through your hands but through your feet (eg, while walking the uneven, I'm tempted to say gently billowing floor of the Basilica of San Marco). 

The map apps, like so many if not all apps, reduce us largely however to a disembodied brain. 

I doubt that this is a good thing in ordinary life, but I can assure you this is a very bad thing in Venice.