Are Those Real Bullet Holes?
When I think about Venice, the first thing that comes up to my mind is those canals straddled by breautiful palazzos and the famous basilica in St Mark’s Square. If you approach closer, you’ll get a different sensation, at least if visitors are to be believed: it’s overcrowded and it stinks. Italy in general might be one large tourist theme park, but rarely so like in Venice which attracts gargantuan cruise ships and celebrities alike. On top of it all is Venier dei Leoni, Peggy Guggenheim’s palatial refuge she enjoyed when not at the Canal Grande with her own private gondoliere in tow. Over time it turned into a gallery displaying her priceless collection of modern art.
In big tourist hubs like Venice, living a regular daily life outside the simularum created for tourists can border on mission impossible. There may be other industries as well but they’re all hidden behind the scenes flooding social media with countless photos of the one and the same thing with different filters. As a result, you’re robbed of a genuine surprise and astonishment when it’s within breathing distance. You’re finally able to touch it in person and that’s a very different sensation. Yet we’re so obsessed with memory that instead of focusing on this real-life experience, we first take photos which absurdly, might be an even bigger rush.
Paris attracts more than 30 million people per year and that’s a serious strain on the quality of one’s life. If you work in tourism like myself, you’re constantly faced with a species called the Tourist. They enable cultural stereotypes because their expectations tell a lot about the outside perception of a destination and their own background. In Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, Marco Polo describes 55 cities with almost surrealist characteristics. But by his own admission, every time he talks about one, it’s actually Venice he refers to. This might be at the root of every traveler’s DNA: persistently looking for something that’s probably already there.
It took something as severe as the Covid epidemic to return Venice to its inhabitants, so much so that even the fish returned into the Canal Grande. This dream-like situation is something straight out of Calvino’s own imagination: a larger-than-life quarantine dressed up as a floating palace, finally to those primarily related to it. Venetians that for once don’t have to change bedsheets for tourists in their own homes and enjoy the city as if it were their own living room which it essentially is, after all. We tend to overlook it, the curse of beauty that constantly attracts people who invade your own personal space to cut off a slice of this cake for themselves.
And the cake is indeed fit for a king, or at least the pricetag. Depending on where you are, the money you pay far outweighs the value you get for it. They can afford to do it since there’s an infinite number of visitors in need of croissants or espressos in a location with a good view. Tourist traps are a little bit like a virus. If you can escape them and find an unspoilt corner, it’s a question of time when it’s going to end up on Tripadvisor too. The fact you’re there means it’s no longer a secret. Unless you look for details even locals are unfamiliar with in which case you got a nose for the right stuff.
This is the time of the year when the Mediterranean is bursting with buzz that leaves hardly any room for breathing. In Palma de Mallorca, the Statue of Liberty would be carrying a Mojito instead of her torch. I’ll always prefer hotels over hostels. The benefit of meeting new people easier in a place like a hostel is undermined by the impression that guests don’t mind sharing a room with a complete stranger in the middle of a quickie. Which I did experience once. You could hear their matress squeaking in approval. Naturally, I couldn’t wait to check out because I wasn’t going to get any.
Once, a Korean tourist I had the displeasure to meet asked me if the bulletholes on a wall in my hometown were real. Well, what else would they be? Hardly an ornament. There are demanding and overbearing people where you can’t catch a break and try to get through the whole thing by focusing on the upsides since you’re getting paid for this. Sometimes you get to know individuals that make it special. I met a friend of William S. Burroughs that told me stories of life on the Beatnik mount Olympus known as Height Ashbury. But that’s usually an exception, not the rule.
The internet has made it easy for us to experience places that we could never reach on foot. There’s no better way to build a sane personality and an open mind than setting foot into a place you’ve never been to before. At the same time, it created a comfort zone where you don’t need to get off your sofa to see the summit of Kilimanjaro. A whole world inside a digital device. Unavailable, yet palpable. A mockup, a parallel potemkin reality. Our world is shrinking, unfortunately so do our minds, because in the ocean of information online, we get stuck in dry water.
There’s a precious little wine shop close to the Old Bridge in Mostar, selling a great selection of local wines, spirits, spreads, desserts and jewelry. You won’t find fake designer bags or Turkish coffee pots here. The location couldn’t possibly be more touristy but the place isn’t tacky, you could easily mistake it for a chic wine tasting room in the outskirts. The time this area really shines through is in the night, when the day visitors go back and the crowds are reduced to people actually staying in the city a little bit longer.
Tourism may turn your culture into a marketable product, but it emphasizes something that we tend to ignore: the world is in need of beauty because it gives us hope that all is not lost and there’s still pleasure to be found. When those camera-clutching masses stream out from cruisers and aircrafts like rabid bees from a beehive run for cover and sanity, unless you earn a living in the business. Some earn enough to spend off-season chilling out and counting the cash. While they do it, it’s easy to lose count of curses. It’s not just blessings we need to keep track of. Tourists come and go, but the bullet holes are still there. And they’re real.
