A Season of Change and Hibernation

Moves, rituals and the quiet beauty of Venice in winter

Today, I am writing from my tiny second-floor flat in Castello as a bright winter day makes its way through the living room windows. The robot vacuum cleaner I named Gigio is moving back and forth following a precise pattern, its quiet buzzing a familiar background noise to my typing. Looking at its assured movements, I am reminded that I have been living in this house for a little over a year now: We are both becoming acquainted with the crooked terrazzo floor, except I still can’t find anything I drop on it––chickpeas, earrings, buttons. The floor eats them up and returns them whenever it pleases. It also has a passion for freezing my ankles.

Around this time last year, I was moving Gigio and my other belongings here via numerous journeys aboard the 5.1 vaporetto, two suitcases and a trolley at the time. Friends had offered to help, but I wanted it to be a solitary endeavour, a rite of passage that I could use for pondering, creating space, and nursing the excruciating heartbreak I was going through.

I had taken time off from work and I was eager to numb my brain and body through physical rather than emotional exhaustion. I wanted time to think, but also not think, so I began to listen to a true-crime podcast that was gruesome enough to hold my drifting attention and long enough to keep me busy throughout the entire process. I listened as I navigated the zinc-coloured waters of the lagoon around Sant’Alvise and along the Fondamente Nove, covering my ears to hear the details of a trial or a crime scene over the infernal noise of the vaporetto engine. I listened as I walked from the pier to the house across the deserted columns of San Francesco della Vigna, spooked by the plot twists in the story. I listened as I climbed two flights of crumbly stairs, inserted the keys, turned it four times inside the keyhole, and sprung the door open onto the narrow corridor that would become the gateway to precious moments of alonement. 

Pause.

40 square meteres in Venice. A long-term residential contract after a year of housing uncertainty, a failed attempt to buy a flat, and four moves across the city with my stuff on full display aboard a barchino whose owner, Lele, had a passion for crossing the Grand Canal at peak time. If unlucky, one might have caught sight of my pillows and lamp shades from the windows of the Gritti Palace or the Mezzanine floor of Palazzo Grassi.

Not this time. This time, I thought, is going to be my last for a while. I put down the suitcases and started unpacking with the urgency of someone who is eager to take space, occupy it, like a person who holds seats for friends at a busy show with her coat and bags and stretched limbs. “Is this taken?” “Yes. Yes, it is.”

The move and settling took two weeks to complete. I often think that those two weeks––weeping, drilling holes and hanging framed pictures, finding new arrangements for books and paraphernalia, scrubbing the bathroom tiles, buying small bits of furniture, eating bread and cheese from the corner shop, exploring the nooks of the new neighbourhood, weeping some more in the shower with a curtain an inch too short––saved me from falling apart. 

My therapist: ”Think of this flat as a fresh start, a solid new start after a very hard year. Try to preserve it as your sanctuary, your safe space, for as long as you can.” 

I said: “My father wants to come and help me hang a new dummy desk.”

She said: “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

So I took care of the dummy desk and the house remained a sanctuary until early March. I was the only one transpassing that treshold. In the vastness of those silent winter days, I let the pain turn to haze, envelop me and make me blind, and then I watched it lift with bewilderment and relief.

Friends saw me before and after the move, never in between. “How’s the new home?” They asked. “It’s perfect,” I said, thinking with indulgence about the leaning kitchen cabinets. They could tell something had changed, but they couldn’t put their finger on what had changed exactly, except I could follow their train of thought again without getting lost mid-sentence. I returned to work. Carnival season had kicked off. I threw myself at it with conscious abandon. The stitches were holding. 

What unfolds after the fog lifts is twice as sharp. The eye adjusts, the vision follows. 

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Present.

A year in this house, three years in Venice.

January is hardly anyone’s favourite month, but it has become a meaningful one for me, or at least as meaningful as an arbitraty measure of time can be. I came to accept that I need it in my life. January keeps me sane. I never thought I’d ever say anything like that, and yet here I am, mourning the fact that it’s finished and that there’s still so much left to read, think, do, before the business of the world and daylight hunt us down––us, the introverts, the solitary vampires.

A month of expansion.

A month of change.

A month in which everything is frozen for an instant, even the city itself. 

A necessary hibernation. 

Change took on a different shape this year, but it happened nonetheless. This time, I was the igniter of it. At times it felt as if I were a pyromaniac who couldn’t help setting things on fire. I could feel the burn and still, I kept going. I quit my day job and I am now adjusting to a new routine, a new way to be productive, negotiate time, attention, projects, rest.

A friend told me: “Picture a trapezist. One moment they are holding onto a trapeze, and the next they are holding onto another. But it’s only as they leap and let go of the first to catch the second––the moment in between––that they are actually flying.”

“I can see what you mean.”

“This is something I heard in one of those bullshit HR classes, but it seemed fitting.”

“The thing is, I like flying, but I equally like feeling safe. I am tired, and yet I can’t help but pushing myself forward in violent ways. In a way or another, my comfort zone is always kicked in the pants. ”

“You need to cut yourself some serious slack.”

“The vase is empty. I have been missing all my deadlines.”

“It’ll come back when you least expect it.”

I work from home on most days now. A new neighbour moved into the flat on the first floor. He is an oboist enrolled in the conservatory at Palazzo Pisani. He practices in the early afternoon and, with Venetian houses being so poorly insulated, I hear every note he plays––pieces from Rossini’s Italiana in Algeri and Mozart’s The Magic Flute. He often practices the same piece over and over again until the sound becomes a spell. Without him knowing, he is teaching me about the value of practice. The music enchants me, leads me to my desk, sits me down, and encourages my fingers to move on the keyboard. 

I met him on the stairs for the first time last week and I told him I love his playing. 

“I hope I don’t bother you.”

“You are very disciplined. Instead, my style of work can be described as short spurts of productivity surrounded by blind procrastination.”

“The more you do it, the more it becomes like a trance-like exercise you can’t go without.”

“Let me know if you’re playing any concerts. I’d love to come.”

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Some things change and some stay the same. 

A yearly ritual I have created for myself: A visit to the cemetery of San Michele––the quietest place in the quietest of times. I get there on a short vaporetto ride, which, on a good day, comes with a view of the snowy Dolomites. I walk along the cloister and inside the church, then head to the Recinto Evangelico to say hello to Iosif Brodskij, the original watermarked, a fellow lover of Venetian winters. I read the messages people have left him. There are always many shells on the grave, though I don’t know what they mean.

Another ritual: The fun fair of Riva Sette Martiri. A ride on the aeroplanes at sunset, a privileged view of San Giorgio tinted orange, the water glistening in warm colours, red noses and frozen hands, childish laughter, a catharsis that is a prelude to the busy days of Carnival. Many photographs. And then, a walk through the Giardini and a ricotta-stuffed frittella from Majer on the way home.

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Daily rituals in making a meal, setting the table, pausing, cleaning. Cooking for oneself is, in a way, a form of discipline, a practice that requires a sense of purpose. More than self love, what keeps me at it is the soothing feeling of order it carries. Shopping, planning, cooking, storing. A rhythm. Like music.

The neighbourhood I live in has everything I need. It’s a microcosm that affords a sense of community, of being a living part of a city that is struggling with its humanity. A bakery, a fruit and veg shop, a grocer, a wine shop, a couple of bars, a hardware store, a harberdasher. Because they cater to the locals, they don’t close in January like many other businesses in town do. The grocer is chatty and oblivious of time. He tells me ways in which I can use the cheese I’m buying. ”This is perfect for a cacio e pepe,” he says while wrapping a wedge of Formadi Frant. 

At the greengrocer, I fill my bags with leafy radicchio and firm pears that will be a base for a bittersweet salads with walnuts and balsamic, and with two delica pumpkins that will be roasted in fat, skin-on slices and then showered in grated ricotta and pumpkin seeds. Back home, lentils are braised in water, olive oil and white wine, then added to a bowl of chopped herbs and sprinkled with feta. More lentils are simmered with barley and become soup. Squatty fennel bulbs are sliced thinkly and tossed with blood orange wedges and fat green olives, their fronds saved for an evening pasta with sardines and breadcrumbs. 

I take pleasure in the process. I cook, I sit down, I eat. Winter flavours and familiar gestures––anchors in the midst of change while, outside, the city keeps still, observes, awaits.