Canals, Canalettos, carnival - and crowds

©AFP A couple dressed in traditional Venetian costumes walks on the Piazza San Marco in Venice

It is late morning in Venice during carnival and after a lazy breakfast of coffee and sugared frittole – a small Venetian doughnut and carnival speciality – I throw open the French windows and step on to the balcony of the private palace I have been lucky enough to have for the last weekend of the festival.

To my left the Grand Canal opens up into St Mark’s Basin, where the sun turns the water a milky turquoise. In front is the 17th-century Church of Santa Maria della Salute, painted by Turner, Sargent and Canaletto among others. Wide, empty steps lead down towards the water. I can hear it lapping. The moment feels as if it belongs only to me and a single gondolier who is smoking in the cold.

I love this palace, which is available to rent just four weeks in each year and which speaks of a real Venetian family. I love the paintings by Carlevarijs, the 18th-century Venetian chairs, and how the patina of age shows in the family photographs and silk-covered walls. But mostly I love it because, in the thick of Venice carnival, I can be entirely alone. For the first time during the five occasions I’ve visited this city, I don’t feel as if I’m part of some giant tourist cliché. I can’t see the vast cruise ships that sully the water in front of St Mark’s Square; I’m not part of one of the unwieldy groups looking not for signs of Tintoretto but for their guide’s yellow flag held above the throng.

To my right, round a bend in the canal, tourists flock to the Rialto Bridge, turning its wide arch into a wave of bobbing heads. The six sestieri, or neighbourhoods, of historical Venice have a population of 60,000. On the last Sunday of carnival, an 11-day annual festival that finishes with the start of Lent, numbers swell to 150,000. All 55,000 hotel and B&B beds are booked, with many establishments raising their weekend prices to high season rates normally reserved for May through to October.

As I turn my back to the canal, I hear shouting. On the steps of San Salute a group of people are wearing outsized versions of the helmets normally worn by speed cyclists, the white shape tapering into a tail behind their heads. I peer closer and there’s no mistaking it: I’m looking at five grown men dressed as spermatozoa. In Prague, you would assume it was a stag weekend. In Venice it’s just another carnival costume among the Napoleons and superheroes wandering the city’s alleys.

I step back inside, the spell broken. Like many of the world’s great tourist destinations, Venice is both a dream and nightmare, and carnival time is perhaps the greatest example of this. The carnival originated in the 12th century and became a six-month-long party in its 18th-century heyday. But the festival in its current incarnation only began in 1978, since when it has been commandeered by savvy hoteliers who hike up their prices, by dressmakers charging thousands of euros for a single night’s costume hire, and by charities putting on balls in order to generate revenue for the city’s restoration projects. “On the first Saturday of carnival, there are more photographers in Piazza San Marco than there are people in masks,” says my guide, Franca Zanchi.

Venice is not the only place where it can seem impossible to get a cliché-free travel experience. Angkor Wat, ancient Egypt, Machu Picchu and the Forbidden City are so well-trodden, over-photographed and, more recently, widely blogged about that even witnessing these great monuments up close can somehow seem anticlimactic.

Ultimately, this feeling could apply even in the world’s most remote locations. Ten years ago I visited Antarctica on a cruise ship with a group of about 100. We saw no one else during our two-week trip and, on finally reaching land, one American passenger asked me to take a photograph of her. She stood on the ice and held aloft a pre-made sign, carried all the way from the Midwest, which read: “I made it to the seven continents”. After that, she barely got off the ship again. The purpose of her visit had been achieved, the extraordinary privilege of stepping on to one of the world’s last remaining wildernesses turned into nothing more than a photograph, as obvious as standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or beside a centurion in the Colosseum.

How did such clichés develop? From about 1680 until the late 18th century Venice was, for milords inglesi , among the highlights of their European Grand Tour, the gap year of its time. It was then, in the accounts published by rich young men with Oxbridge educations and an enthusiasm for Canaletto townscapes, the tourist myths of Venice began. But there was another reason for the city’s appeal. With the Turks gaining control to the east and the rise of the new world in the west, Venice was, according to John Julius Norwich, a historian of the city, “not getting a look-in and that’s when it transformed itself into the Las Vegas of Europe – gambling, courtesans, music. They reinvented carnival and this gave Venice a new occupation, which brought in some lovely lolly from the Grand Tourists on their journeys to and from Rome.”

In the 19th century, another dimension was added – of a city falling into slime – and in the 20th century, the myth morphed again. “Now it is about canals and gondoliers, elements which aren’t even mentioned in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice,” says Norwich. “Yet these are what most of the daytrippers will come to see, pouring into St Mark’s to spend a large amount on birdseed and coffee before returning to Prague or Munich in the same 24 hours. The vast majority don’t even go into the Basilica.”

Consequently, the city’s lagoon views and Palladian churches have calcified in the popular imagination. This is not, says the philosopher and travel author Alain de Botton, something we should punish ourselves for. “We expect that great cities will transfix us,” he says. “I am supposedly an educated person but I candidly admit that all the treasures of the Graeco-Roman galleries of the Louvre are less interesting than the idea of lunch at Café Marly in the east wing of the museum.”

De Botton argues that “what began as a hobby for a few determined enthusiasts has been raised into a general occupation”. Like the girl in Antarctica with her sign, travel is something to boast about. It’s a status symbol, part of a liberal, inquisitive education, even a basic democratic freedom. Sentimentality plays a part too; we’re drawn by the clichéd romanticism of travel, of how it was for travellers who were seeing these sites for the first time. We don’t stop to think that what was exotic then isn’t necessarily exotic in 2010.

Then there’s the problem of trying, amid the cacophony of the crowd, to respond in an authentic, personal way. De Botton believes that “a crowd in itself never puts anyone off – think of football stadiums. There’s nothing wrong with sharing a precious experience with others”. Still, on national holidays in China you must savour your view of the Forbidden City in the company of more than 110,000 fellow tourists. Amid the throng sometimes it is difficult to breathe let alone appreciate beauty.

People will go to great lengths to get their own private slice of travel nirvana – I know because I have done it myself. Last November I visited Angkor Wat in Cambodia. It was high season and, like most of those who visit this great 12th-century monument, I stayed in the town of Siem Reap, full of heaving bars, pulsing music and tacky shops.

Very early one morning I thundered towards the temples in a rickshaw. After a local tip-off, I took a back entrance then found myself parting with $60 to a local guard to get on top of one of the main temples before the sun came up. It was in every way bizarre, from the haunting blackness of the ruins to the echo of my own footsteps. For 15 minutes I and two other foreigners had Angkor Wat almost all to ourselves. Then I heard agitated voices. Somebody was getting nervous and I had to come down. I felt ashamed at the way in which I had attempted to take some of the wonder of Angkor for myself. What gave me such a right? Nothing except that I was short of time and I’d wanted my two-day visit to be memorable.

The next day I returned to the complex in a more orthodox fashion, with a guide set up through luxury tour operator Cazenove+Loyd. It was about 6am and he led me to the peripheral temples the crowds wouldn’t drown at sunrise – Ta Prohm, where banyan trees spread across the structure like molten wax, and the faces of Bayon. “Quick, quick,” he repeated. “By 8am, this is a supermarket. A zoo.” He was right.

Christopher Wilmot-Sitwell, co-owner of Cazenove+Loyd, whose territory includes Latin America, India, Africa and south-east Asia, explains the company’s approach: “Our role as a tour operator is all about understanding what the mass tourists are doing and finding a way around it. It is about practicality, thinking on your feet and being flexible, which is something not available to mass tourists on pre-packaged itineraries.”

This can include travelling out of season, avoiding shops and restaurants where tour drivers benefit from commissions, visiting at different times of the day, or seeing sites “back to front”. It can also involve switching to a different location – a smaller temple complex, perhaps. According to Wilmot-Sitwell, 99 per cent of trekkers to Machu Picchu use the Inca Trail. There are, however, alternative trekking routes that enjoy the same scenery and avoid the shared campsites. But specialist knowledge doesn’t come cheap. Ten-day Peru itineraries including the Sacred Valley and flights from London cost from £3,500 a person.

Emily FitzRoy is founder of British-based Italian travel company Bellini Travel. She concedes that to beat the big Venice clichés, it is sometimes necessary to pay handsomely for the privilege. One night, at 7pm, FitzRoy and her guide take me into the Basilica of St Mark’s, already closed up for the day. Last time I came here the only thing that overwhelmed me was the crowds. The gatekeeper unlocks the doors and myself and two friends have this remarkable cathedral to ourselves. I can see the detail of the mosaics, the way the water rises into the crypt. I’m not a religious person, yet the spectacle of this empty golden church moves me. To experience this moment, however, a small group pays €1,450 (£1,320) an hour.

Wilmot-Sitwell says this approach “isn’t just about snobbery”, though by its nature it’s pretty exclusive. Guy Rubin at Imperial Tours offers an incomparable view of the tomb figures of the Emperor Qin in Xi’an for $2,200 (£1,475). Rubin can also lay on private dinners for two inside the wall of the Forbidden City for an eye-watering $40,000.

Alain de Botton doesn’t believe money is the only way to find an authentic travel experience. “Stepping away from the obvious path has to be a good idea,” he says. “But this has nothing to do simply with paying thousands extra. It has to do with following your own curiosity, admitting to yourself the consequences of your taste, having the courage to say that what really interests you in Rome is the supermarkets and the old ladies, not St Peter’s or frescoes.”

Today, one of the things that interests many tourists is watching other tourists. In Courchevel I’d far rather watch the Russians mix Pétrus and Coke than admire the Alps that so struck the Romantic poets. In Venice on the last Saturday of carnival, the queues to enter the Caffè Florian on St Mark’s Square are similarly tantalising, for only those dressed in full historical costume are granted access. The crowd includes a number of rich Europeans masquerading as Sun Kings and their wives as Marie Antoinettes, some of whom I come across in the atelier of the city’s principal costume designer, Antonia Sautter.

Some also attend Sautter’s annual carnival event that night – Il Ballo del Doge – where the women wriggle self-consciously in their corsets, the men in buckled shoes, tights and close-fitting breeches.

But those I speak to appear oblivious to any feelings of discomfort. All say they feel that to be part of a Venice carnival is something special. As she talks, one woman fans her showy, powdered décolletage: “Like a dream,” she says simply.

Cliché, it’s clear, has long been an intrinsic part of tourism. Maybe it’s simply time we embraced it.

Sophy Roberts writes the FT’s Hotel Insider column

www.cazenoveandloyd.com
www.bellinitravel.com
www.imperialtours.net

..................................................

Cultural philanthropy: The new merchants of Venice

The despoliation of Venice by tourism is well-documented. But, hopes Christopher Wilmot-Sitwell of Cazenove+Loyd, in future the way for tourists to give something back to places such as Venice will lie in cultural philanthropy – in travellers who seek exclusive access giving to people of influence who care about a place passionately. “That’s the expensive but ethically sound alternative to bribing the gatekeeper,” he says. “Track down the world authority and identify the foundation closest to his or her heart.”

In Guatemala, this might mean calling upon archaeologist Dr Richard Hansen to act as a guide to the ruins of El Mirador; in return, the client is asked to donate ($2,000 per small group) to the El Mirador archaeological programme. For those with deeper pockets, Cazenove+Loyd can arrange helicopter access to hard-to-reach Mayan sites – again on the promise of a donation to the relevant foundation.

In this context, some of what happens in Venice during the carnival makes sense. In my time there, I attended two private parties involving the Comité Français pour la Sauvegarde de Venise (the French equivalent to Britain’s Venice in Peril Fund). It had brought in 200 wealthy French and Genevans with the purpose of raising funds to renovate the Royal Palace at a cost of €3m. The Comité also supports the big charity ball known as Cavalchina, held on the final Saturday night. This costumed event began four years ago in an attempt to raise money for the city’s opera house, La Fenice. Fortunato Ortombina, artistic director of La Fenice, says: “Cavalchina now has the status of an institution.”

The guests, who pay €600-€650 a person to attend, are turned out in astonishing costumes, from birds and beasts to beautiful men in frock coats. Grace Jones is present, and a handful of Americans, with proceeds from the ticket sales given over to an opera house that, as a tick-box on every tourist’s itinerary, deserves to be protected.

“Everyone, rich or poor, has a right to see Venice,” says Jérôme-François Zieseniss, the Comité’s president. “The Cavalchina is something we feel we must do to show wealthy donors how Venice remains elegant and privileged and to inspire them to keep coming.”

For tickets, events and private palace stays, contact Paul-Maxime Koskas at maxime@exclusive-concierge.com