Venice diary, entry 5 of 5 Venice, a last morning, mid-August. The heat was already in the stones by eight, and I left the room with the shutters half-open behind me, the way you do when you mean to come…
victoria van der berg
Venice – The Most Serene
Venice diary, entry 4 of 5 I practised early again, before the light had found its way down into the canal, playing quietly by the open window until the first delivery boats began to move below and the city cleared…
Venice – The Painted Islands
Venice diary, entry 3 of 5 I practised the violin again before the city was properly awake, this time on a small wooden altana above the rooftops, one of those improbable platforms the Venetians built centuries ago so their women…
Venice – City of Lovers
Venice diary, entry 2 of 5 I practise the violin before I do anything else, wherever I happen to wake, and this morning I played at a window thrown open over a canal so narrow I could almost have passed…
Venice – A Candle On The Water
I came into the light rather than out of it, which somehow seems the right way to arrive at an evening in Venice. It was late afternoon, that hour when the sun stops climbing and simply leans, and the whole…
Victoria’s Complete Guide to Venice
There are cities you visit and cities you surrender to, and Venice has only ever belonged to the second kind. It sits on the water as if it had been dreamed rather than built, a hundred and more small islands…
A Candle, and Then the Music – Verona
I had not meant to cry at the opera, and I am fairly sure I was not the only one caught out. We came into Piazza Bra in the last of the evening, when the sky had gone the colour…
Victoria’s Complete Guide to Verona
There are cities that ask you to admire them and cities that simply take you in, and Verona has always belonged, for me, to the second and rarer kind. It sits in a slow bend of the River Adige on…
Victoria’s Complete Guide to Lake Garda
I have lost count of the times I have promised myself a quiet week on Lake Garda and ended up rearranging my whole itinerary by the second morning, simply because Garda refuses to be one thing. Italy’s largest lake stretches…
Bellagio – the First Day
There is a particular quiet that comes off a lake. It is not the quiet of the sea, which is really only distance. It is closer than that, held in by the mountains, the way a room holds a conversation…
Victoria’s Complete Guide to Maiori and Minori
The Eastern Shore: Where the Amalfi Coast Stops Performing The road east from Amalfi tells you immediately that something is about to change. The cliff face loosens its grip on the sea. The terraced lemon groves flatten into something more…
Positively, Positano
The boats were already out when I got down to the water. Not fishing, not yet, just sitting there in the pink light with their ropes slack, Carpielene and Coilaboha and the others, names painted on hulls that had clearly…
