Menace in Venice

This is Emma, guesting on Paul's blog, (so Paul's mum – you can skip this one). I thought I'd steal a bit of space to deliver some first impressions of Venice as a newbie to the city. It's not all lagoons and gondolas, you know.

Venice is every bit as beautiful as you imagine, crumbling and gorgeous. The water that laps around it is blue-green, clear and luminous. The architecture is a unique mixture of Gothic, Moorish and Baroque. The Venetians are kindly to those who can only manage four words of Italian, three of which turn out to be Spanish. But the city has its oddities, which I will enumerate below:

1. Masks – Every third shop sells painted masks of the kind favoured by Masquerade Ball attendees during the Venice Carnival. Bird-face masks (which were apparently worn by doctors at the time of the plague, proving that their bedside manner left a lot to be desired – imagine being in a fevered state and seeing that hovering over you), Pierrot masks, other masks too hideous to be named. Ye gods, these things are creepy. Clown creepy. Pervert-on-the-tube creepy. Hollow, sightless eyes follow you from shop windows as you wander, completely lost, having taken a wrong turn during the 2-minute walk between the vaporetto and the flat. It induces panic. Not an excellent thing when there is always a canal handy for you to fall into.

2. Accordions – Fact: in Venice you are only ever three feet away from an accordion. Okay, it's not a fact, I just made that up. But it may well be true. As you are escaping the sinister masks (see point 1), grimacing accordion players will forcibly attempt to serenade you. From passing boats, from dark alleys, in roaming packs that bear down on the unsuspecting café patron, accordion players are the secret menace of the city. In five days, I have spent a total of £25 bribing accordion players to go away. The key is not to make eye contact. Once you have done so, you are toast. They lock their gaze onto yours while entertaining you with unending musical medleys, in spite of the fact your appreciative smile is hardening into a rictus of agony and that all tunes appear identical. It's a form of musical assault and it should be banned. Also, accordions do not sound good. Now that is a fact.

3. Tourists – Okay, I am one of these, so it's probably a bit cheeky to mention it. But Venice is crowded at this time of year. We spend 90% of our time in screening rooms, in the flat writing, or running away from masks and accordion players. We do not spend our days walking in a trance-like state then suddenly stopping to rummage through our bags for photographic equipment, causing a domino-like pile-up that crosses Venice and sends the very last person off the edge and into the lagoon. Like pigeons, tourists congregate in squares. Unlike pigeons, you cannot fob them off with a bit of bread. Stay in the back streets if you want to stay on dry land.

4. Dustcatchers – The ornateness of Venice does not stop at the front door. No, indeedy. Interiors are festooned with a nightmare (the proper collective noun for it) of bric-a-brac. Call them duscatchers, tchotchkes, geegaws or tat but please, please make this crap disappear. A horizontal surface is not a challenge to see how many vases, ornamental goblets and bowls, bits of blown glass and statuettes you can cram onto it. On the other hand, if it is a challenge, this city wins. Our rental flat is a most egregious example of this but others I have peeked into (and there are several; I am extremely nosy – but not as nosy as a Venetian plague doctor) are similarly disturbing.

5. Dwarves – As yet, we have not had cause to chase any mac-wearing dwarves around the city, although there is still time for that. But this was lurking in our flat when we arrived. Hello, little man! What's your name?

My name is Satan, and I have risen from the pits of hell to manifest myself in plastic. Please rest a drink or an accordion on me.

More on IndieMovies:
Read the latest movie news and movie reviews. Keep up-to-date with the latest from the Venice Film Festival 2010. Watch free movies on the site now.