LETTER FROM VENICE
579
her shoes are better and she knows how to
walk.
If
you are a parent
with a teen-age daughter you will know what is on her mind. With
her hairdo, her uplift bra, her album of rock and roll records, she is
as much a tourist in this city as we are. Perhaps more. Our dreams are
here. Hers are elsewhere. Almost
anywhere
else. She reads magazines.
What Liz Taylor knows, she knows.
If
that is not much, it is what goes
and has done pretty well for Liz Taylor. My neighbor's daughter, who
plays and sings a version of the twist as I sit here typing, will prove to
be not much different from her mother-but her husband won't think
so. Not one bit.
The young men of Venice-the young we see on Festa days, when
the houses empty-appear to need a good sensible girl to look after
them. Not that they are wild. They're just nice boys who need a
sensible girl to look after them. A nice boy we know has such a
girl, and we are waiting for her
to
take over his shop. It is a good
one. For several months we have been buying his supply of
our
wine.
Last week he ran out. To order, or go get more, is an idea that seems
alien to him. He prefers to try and sell us the wine we do not want.
There is, and he has, a lot of it. We feel that his girl will grasp this
problem, and' boldly convey the idea to him, but this
vita nova
is still
many months away. We shall
be
gone, and we hope she can sell the
wine he now has.
The sirocco brings to Venice what I would describe as good
Philadelphia weather, plus a reminder that there is more than water
in the canals. The tide that flushes the city exposes a ripe, odorous
surface, as well as the freight of garbage that tends to float. Bottles,
cartons, paper bags, orange and grapefruit skins, filter tip cigarette
butts. The city has an admirable garbage collection system- when we
forget to put it out our garbage man politely knocks-but the habits
of the ancient regime die hard. It is still convenient, if you live near
a canal,
to
open the window and let fly in the general direction of the
water. This practice is favored by those who live higher up. Those who
live lower down, like us, look upon it with mixed blessings, since the
casement is sometimes littered with the dryer sort of garbage. On
rare occasions there are dividends. We recently found four filter tip
cigarettes in a cellophane pack with a peel of apple, but even as I
sniffed them the phone rang, and the higher-up owner identified them.
STOP, American type cigarettes. He put down a fishpole with a hook
on the end, and that was that.
Some of the garbage makes the canal, where it falls with the
