A souvenir of Venice

Whenever I go on holiday for more than a day or two I like to seek out a special object, delicacy or suchlike to bring back home with me. If I go up to Lancashire, for example, there’s a very good chance I’ll come back with a black pudding. On one occasion, having been seduced by the intoxicating delights of Stockport covered market, I brought some tripe back, in the belief that some deep Lancashire part of me would instinctively know how to go about eating it .... it didn’t

Thinking further afield - each destination offers its own unique and fascinating souvenirs.

In Hong Kong you can buy a bottle of wine with a dead snake coiled up inside it. At first it might seem an ideal souvenir — at least until you  have the presence of mind to realise that, in some desperate or tormented state, you might be driven to drink it. 

Venice presents its own peculiar difficulties in the souvenir department. To kick-off,  there are those carnival masks, ranging from a number of variations on the pale courtesan theme to that other slightly sinister one with a long, drooping proboscis - or is a beak? But then what would you honestly want to do with a carnival mask?

“I could wear it at parties” you find yourself thinking. But then you know for sure that, when it comes to it, it would never feel quite right. And what else is there to do with a pair of carnival masks other than to mount them at a jaunty tilt on either side of the chimney breast ?

No - the carnival masks won’t do.

Glass, maybe. Since the thirteenth century Venice has produced a steady stream of exquisite glassware - most of which has since been accidentally broken. Today the descendents of those early glassmakers churn out a dazzling variety of objects  — mainly ghastly, except for the chandeliers which — you may confidently have it from me —  are gorgeous. I briefly tormented myself with the thought that I really owed it to myself to buy a chandelier, despite the fact that they can cost as much as a decent secondhand car. This is in Venice, of course. I have since seen the selfsame items on-line for a fraction of the Venice price. But hey, hang on: this is beginning to sound like one of those conversations overheard whilst in the queue for passport control. I’m meant to be thinking about souvenirs and whether glass might do … and no, it won’t.

There are nice paper-style goods in Venice. There’s that lovely wrapping paper printed with Rococo designs and if I were to buy some, I would take it home and I would squirrel it away carefully; and later, after my death, my children would discover it and recount to others: “There were drawers and drawers full of exquisite Venetian wrapping paper. I don’t know whether he planned to do anything with it or whether he just enjoyed it for its beauty. It broke our hearts to take it to the recycling.”

So that’s the  paper out as well.   

In the end it was a hat.

Right from the start of our holiday, on the waterbus that carries you across the lagoon from the airport, I had noted that our driver was wearing an interesting woolly hat that would have been a perfect fit had his head been the shape of a rugby ball. As it was a normal head, the empty, surplus bit of hat was left to droop backwards in a manner that invoked images of generations of lagoon-dwellers, netting wildfowl on damp, misty mornings; of renaissance merchants and even Bellini's famous portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan (except in his case the spare bit is sticking up, suggesting there's a bit of cardboard inside it )

So the hat it had to be.

Finding it proved to be harder than I first imagined - the problem being, it wasn’t a tourist item. But then, having to track it down, scouring the outdoor markets and department stores that somehow manage to cling on to the less fashionable fringes of the city, lent the whole quest an extra level of romance. I found one at last, hanging outside a hardware store and costing a couple of euros and for the rest of our holiday enjoyed swaggering around the decks of vaporetti in the hope of being mistaken for a deckhand who had just finished his shift and was on his way home.

I still have it. It’s a nice hat.