The streets were empty, our footsteps were the only sound and the canals were so still they looked almost painted. It was the middle of March, just before the city woke up for its busiest season and we had landed a few hours before, close to midnight. Walking out into Venice for the first time felt less like arriving somewhere and more like stepping into a place that wasn’t entirely sure it wanted to be seen. No voices. No movement. Just stone and water and the kind of dark that sits on a city when it stops performing for the day. For years, I had imagined Venice through familiar images: soft light, crowded bridges, all of it cinematic and warm, consistent with its reputation. Yet, standing there in the profound quiet, I felt those expectations dissolving; rather than the lively city I had idealized, I encountered a more intimate and enigmatic reality that reshaped my sense of the place.
I was there with Rose, one of my closest friends, who is French, grew up between Paris and Monaco, speaks the way people do when they’ve thought carefully about most things and is genuinely one of the funniest people I know. She has this quality of being completely unimpressed by the surface of something and then suddenly, unexpectedly, completely undone by the real version of it. She loves to shop and explore and will walk into any door that looks interesting and figure out what it is later. We are similar enough that we rarely have to explain ourselves to each other, which makes traveling together feel less like coordination and more like simply being somewhere together. This was our first time in Venice and neither of us had any idea what we were actually walking into.
That first night, we were starving. We crossed a small bridge over water so dark it looked solid, found the only bar still open two minutes from the hotel and sat down under low light while Italian music played quietly from somewhere in the back. Two other people in the whole room. Pizza, Italian signs on the walls, workers who were warm and completely unbothered that we had shown up close to midnight, not knowing where anything was. We ate and barely talked and I remember thinking, without really meaning to say it out loud, that I was glad it was like this. Empty. Quiet. Before the season arrived and filled everything back up. It felt like the city was showing us something it didn’t show everyone and I wanted to stay inside that feeling for as long as it would let us.
We were staying at the RH Collection Venezia, which sits in a quieter stretch of Dorsoduro, away from the madness near San Marco Square. The hotel itself felt like someone had taken a historic Venetian palazzo and made it livable without becoming predictable; high ceilings, original paintings hung at eye level, a water view from the room that made waking up feel like a specific kind of gift. Right outside, every morning, we would pass by the Pescheria Dorsoduro seafood stand, tucked along the canal, the air filled with the sharp scent of brine and the sound of locals chatting as they picked out their fish for the day. Close by, the Pasticceria Toletta would open early, the smell of fresh pastries drifting out onto the street and mixing with the sea air, the whole city arriving through the nose before we’d even decided where to go. We woke up around nine every day, went down for breakfast; eggs and a cappuccino for me, a hot latte for Rose; and then left without a plan, which turned out to be the only plan that made sense there.
Venice is both the easiest and most disorienting city I have ever tried to navigate. There is a logic to it that feels like it should be readable, the sestieri laid out across a cluster of islands, the Grand Canal cutting through the center like a spine — and then you are standing at a dead end in front of a canal that is not on the map you were looking at and you have no idea how you got there or which direction puts you back. We got lost constantly. We took wrong turns down alleys that narrowed until there was barely room for both of us and opened onto something we hadn’t been looking for and were glad to find. The distance that felt like 40 minutes on the way turned out to be 15. Every day, we made it to San Marco eventually and felt like we had earned it.
Along the way, we stopped at everything that looked interesting, which in Venice is a significant time commitment. There is a small shop near the Frari, Bottega d’Arte San Stae, run by students from the local arts academy, selling original works: paintings, prints and objects, and I bought a small canvas there, something abstract and unique that I almost walked past. Rose found a cashmere shop called Lanerie Artigiane on Calle de le Botteghe, with prices that made no sense for the quality, and we both made decisions we did not regret. We went thrifting at Armadio di Coco on Calle de Mezo, which I had not expected Venice to be good at, and which turned out to be excellent. I found an olive-green leather jacket with silver studs that I have worn almost every day since. And then there was the glass. Venice has been making it since the thirteenth century, when the Republic moved all the furnaces to Murano to stop the city from burning down, and the craft has not loosened its grip on the place. In a small shop just off a canal, Gioia di Vetro on Fondamenta Ormesini, I found a handmade necklace, a gold chain with a circular glass pendant with black accents running through it, made in front of me. There is nothing else like it, in a quite literal sense.
We ate well without planning. One afternoon, at Trattoria al Ponte del Megio, a small restaurant so close to the water it felt like the canal was part of the seating arrangement, we ordered penne alla vodka and sat there above the dark, slow water while the city went about itself around us. It was creamy and sharp and exactly right. We still talk about it the way you talk about something that exceeded what food is supposed to do. The stracciatella gelato from Gelateria da Nico, a market stall near the Rialto, became the standard against which every other gelato was measured for the rest of the trip. We had Aperol spritzes in the afternoon light in San Marco. Surrounded by pigeons and tourists and the Byzantine facade of the Basilica, it felt equally absurd and perfect to be sitting there.
The night we ate at Harry’s Bar is one I will always hold dear. Harry’s Bar, Cipriani’s original institution on the Calle Vallaresso, the place where Giuseppe Cipriani invented the Bellini in 1948, where Hemingway sat at the counter, and the room has not changed its mind about itself since, is everything it is supposed to be. We ordered the Bellini, the meringue cake, pasta, all of it, in a room that felt like it had been this exact version of itself forever. Nevertheless, the boat ride home was the most memorable part. A private water taxi back through the Grand Canal, late, the city lit up, moving slowly past us while we played music, sat at the back and didn’t say much. The Rialto Bridge appears ahead and then slides past. The Ca’ d’Oro. The Palazzo Grassi. The Santa Maria della Salute at the mouth of the canal, its white dome catching the light in a way that made it look like something from a different century, which it is. The buildings all reach down into their own reflections in the water and at night, the whole thing doubles, the real city and the canal city moving together. I stopped trying to photograph it. I stopped trying to hold onto it. I just let it happen, which was the right decision.
The next day, inside the Basilica di San Marco, I stood for a long time looking at the ceiling. The mosaics cover more than 8,000 square meters of surface, gold tesserae and colored glass pressed into the vaulted arches, depicting scenes from the Old Testament and the life of the saint, the whole interior glittering in a way that takes several minutes to fully register. I kept thinking about the hands that laid each piece, the centuries of people who stood in exactly this spot looking up at exactly this ceiling and about the fact that we stopped building things with this kind of patience and what that says about us. The ceiling did something new every time the light shifted and I lost every thought I started.
People often misunderstand Venice when they arrive, expecting only its romantic side. The gondolas, the golden hour and the couples; this version of Venice exists, and it is beautiful, but it is merely the surface of a city with a much stranger character beneath. At night, particularly in March before the city fills with visitors, Venice becomes something that defies the label of romantic altogether. The streets fall silent, the water is motionless and footsteps echo against stone that has absorbed sound since the ninth century. There is something genuinely eerie in this atmosphere, occupying the space between a love story and a dream yet to define itself. It never felt unsafe; it simply felt like something different, an experience for which I kept searching for the right word but could never quite find.
You can say there is nothing like any city. There is nothing like New York, nothing like Los Angeles. Every place is singular if you let it be. But Venice has a specific quality that I have not found anywhere else, something ancient and indifferent and fully present all at once, like it has been here since long before you and will be here long after and is simply allowing you to pass through. If you arrive when it is full of people and noise and the version of itself that everyone already knows, you will have a good time. But if you get there at midnight, when the streets are empty, and the canals are dark and the only sound is your footsteps echoing back to you, you will find the real thing. And the real thing will haunt you, in the best way, long after you leave.
