Guest Post: A Perfect Romance in Venice

I sat on the steps of a Venice canal, watching as happy lovers in gondolas slowly drifted past. In the most romantic city in the world, I was alone, and crying, in the rain.

My honeymoon was not going as planned.

After our wedding – after Dan and I promised to love each other in good times and bad, after we danced and ate cake and drank champagne – we sat on our hotel bed, ate leftover cake, drank more champagne, and talked about our honeymoon.

We had big plans for our time in Italy. We would take afternoon naps and watch the sunset every night, wake up whenever we felt like it and eat whatever we wanted. We’d have wine with lunch and dessert with every meal.

“Dessert will be the meal,” I declared, with the bravado of a woman no longer worried about fitting into her perfectly tailored wedding dress, “I’m going to gain five pounds and not even care.”

It would be our first big trip as a couple and what I saw as the first test of our marriage. That led to a singular, all-consuming mission: the trip must be perfect.

To ensure the trip’s perfection, I spent hours comparing hotels in Venice. I sent no fewer than 34 emails to create the perfect schedule of wine tours and cooking classes in Tuscany. I had a binder of maps, restaurant recommendations, and train schedules. I had done all I could to make sure the trip would go exactly as I’d dreamed, and the first several days did just that.

Our first stop was the town of Manarola in the Cinque Terre, a collection of five seaside villages in northwest Italy. Our room was a simple one 121 steps above the main street. It had cool stone floors and wooden shutters that opened to a view of the sparkling Ligurian sea. It was everything I’d wanted.

We spent our days searching for hidden swimming coves along the coast, wandering narrow stone streets, and hiking between the colorful towns. We stuffed ourselves with pesto focaccia, seafood we saw hauled ashore each morning, and crisp white wine from grapes grown in the hills above town. We slept late, took afternoon naps, and ate dessert every night.

One afternoon, we walked the only flat, paved section of the Cinque Terre path, which hugged the coast between the towns of Manarola and Riomaggiore. We found ourselves stuck behind a tour group of two dozen people. The leader, her yellow flag bobbing above the crowd, was being questioned by a rotund, scowling woman who seemed a bit worse for the walk.

“How much longer will this take?” the woman asked in a thick German accent. She gestured at the cliffs between labored breaths, “I did not pay all this money to walk around looking at rocks!”

Dan and I hurried past, laughing once we were out of earshot.

“I did not pay all dis mah-ney,” he mimicked, “to valk around looking at rawks!”

Variations on the complaint became a running joke throughout the trip. It was our humorous way of reminding ourselves to appreciate every moment.

After watching the sunset from our balcony in Manarola, we sat under the stars and as the moon’s reflection ripple in the waves, I mock-sneered, “I did not pay all dis mah-ney to drink vine in ze dark!”

Later, at farmhouse inn in Tuscany, Dan rolled his eyes at the lavish breakfast. He turned up his nose and waved a piece of Swiss cheese in the air, saying, “I did not pay all dis mah-ney to eat cheese vith holes in it!”

The rest of the trip progressed as perfectly as I’d hoped. The hours passed slowly as we picnicked under olive trees in Tuscany, gawked at the masterpieces of Florence, and lingered in cafés in the backstreets of Venice.

On the last night of our trip, we found what seemed like the perfect place for our perfect final meal – a six-table restaurant tucked off a tiny alley in Venice. There was no English menu and only one table left available. We took it as a sign that this was where we should end what had been the perfect honeymoon.

We started with a plate of delicate squash blossoms stuffed with ricotta, but when my swordfish entrée arrived, the night took a turn for the worse. The fish was decidedly not perfect. It was inedible, half raw and half burnt. Its distinctly fishy smell was overpowered only by the foul taste and mushy texture. After choking down two bites, I pushed the plate away.

When the waiter returned, I tried, in a clumsy mix of English and faltering Italian, to explain the problem and order something else. Finally, I told him that it just didn’t taste fresh.

I’d hoped this would end the conversation so we could move on with our romantic dinner, but as soon as the words left my lips, I knew I’d said something terribly wrong. Silently, he grabbed my plate from the table and headed for the kitchen. I heard a yelp come from behind the door and then the waiter re-emerged, looking like a dog that had just been kicked.

He was followed by a squat, red-faced woman in a white apron who came barreling towards our table. She was carrying a large platter bearing what looked like almost an entire raw fish.

The woman set the platter on the table with a thud and began gesturing wildly between me and the fish, shouting rapid-fire Italian I couldn’t hope to understand. As I tried to squeak out a response, she hefted the platter up with both hands, waving it back and forth under my nose as she ranted.

The only word I caught was “fresco,” which the chef sprinkled throughout her tirade, slamming the platter on the table as punctuation each time.

“Fresco!” Bam! Another string of what I assumed were Italian expletives and then, “Fresco!” Bam! Again and again. With each impact of the heavy platter smacking the table, the fish jumped, the chef’s face grew redder, and more eyes in the restaurant turned towards me.

Finally the chef spat out what I guessed was one last insult, picked up the platter, and disappeared back to the kitchen. The restaurant was silent.

I watched the waiter’s hands dart around our table, removing the plates, silverware, glasses, and wine bottle and leaving in their place a small slip of paper: the bill. I looked at Dan, who appeared only mildly bemused while I was on the verge of panic.

I’d just been screamed at by a deranged chef, and we were being kicked out of a romantic restaurant in Venice on the last night of our honeymoon as all the other customers watched. My perfect night had unraveled.

Dan, ever unflappable, reached for his wallet. “Why don’t you wait outside,” he suggested. “’I’ve got this.”

I stared straight ahead as I hurried towards the door, too embarrassed to meet the eyes of the other diners. Outside, a light rain was falling, so I headed for the nearby canal steps under the cover of a bridge. I could feel tears of anger and frustration flooding my eyes.

My emotions bubbled over, spilling out in big gasping sobs. My tears only made everything worse; our honeymoon was not supposed to end with me sobbing, alone, in the rain.

Then, adding insult to injury, my stomach growled loudly. I was still hungry.

I heard Dan calling my name, so I peeked out from under the bridge. “I’ll be right back,” he said as he handed me a bowl and retreated around a corner. The bowl held three heaping scoops of gelato on top of a warm crepe with gooey nutella oozing from the corners. Small rivers of gelato melted into the crepe as I tried to stop my tears.

I was now a full-on cliché – the sad woman crying into her ice cream – in Venice, of all places.

When I heard the sound of Dan’s footsteps returning, I quieted my sniffles and tried to compose myself. No matter how frustrated and annoyed I was, I was determined to salvage our night. But Dan was two steps ahead of me.

This time when he appeared, he was carrying a bottle of prosecco and two plastic glasses.

We sat on the canal steps, and Dan opened the bottle and poured us each a glass as I wiped away the last of my tears. Dan dug his spoon into the melted mess in the bowl and with a mischievous smile said, “Well, I think we learned a very valuable lesson tonight.”

“And what’s that?” I asked. Dan raised his glass of prosseco in a toast. “You should never, ever insult an Italian chef.”

As we laughed and clinked glasses, my feelings of disappointment began to melt as fast as the gelato.

“I did not pay all this money…” I began, but Dan interrupted. “…to be attacked with a fish?” he asked, “or to eat gelato for dinner?”

I just laughed again. I had nothing to complain about. We were in Venice, sitting by a canal, drinking prosecco and eating dessert for dinner.

We sat on the steps long into the evening, after the sounds of the last gondoliers had echoed down the narrow canals, after the last lovers had wandered back to their hotels. As the city slept, we giggled at the absurdity of the evening and savored our final moments in Venice. The last night of our honeymoon may not have looked like I envisioned, but it turned out to be perfectly lovely in its own very imperfect way.

Katie Hammel is a writer and editor from San Francisco. She does not like fruit.