Venice & its toilet tickets

My first full day in Venezia and an opportunity to use the public bathroom pass that I paid for with my VeneziaUnica City Pass. I've tried to be a smart traveler, purchasing ahead of time transportation and cultural passes here and in Padova (Padua to English speakers like me), but the process wasn't always easy. I can read Italian pretty well, but even using the English language version of the sites was a challenge. I'm still not sure when my pass in Padova takes effect. But planning ahead helped. When I arrived at Venezia's Santa Lucia train station, my vaporetto tickets were waiting and after a few minutes of watching the traffic speeding along the Grand Canal, I was on the water bus, headed for Fondemente Nove landing, the jumping off place for the cemetery island, and, literally, about 50 feet from where I am staying. No problem catching the vaporetto, no problem using the public bathrooms, I thought.

So today, meandering the maze of streets and campos (piazzas or "squares"), map in hand, I headed off for Rialto, where there are markets, old churches and museums. The VeneziaUnica pass got me into two churches and the Ca'Pesaro, Venice's modern art museum, no problem. By the end of this trip, I may never want to step foot in a historic church again, but Venice's churches, like many of those in Rome and Florence, are wonderful settings for experiencing Italian art history in situ (Santa Croce, San Lorenzo and Santa Maria Novella were highlights of my stay in Florence, in some ways a lot more satisfying than the Uffizi, which felt like the Ikea of art history -- folks jammed shoulder-to-shoulder, trying to be good art consumers, kind of sad and tacky, really). Ca'Pesaro was a treat, some recognizable names, like Kurt Schwitters and Emil Nolde, and lots of good Italian artists no one has ever heard of outside of Italy. The temporary exhibit featured four artists producing post-Arte Povera installations, ranging from the mid-1960s to maybe a few years ago, lots of smashed, crushed glass and wood and steel, scrunched together in curious combinations, very physical and elegant, sort of bel figura with a limp. I didn't take notes and I don't have the museum's site in front of me, so you'll have to forgive my sketchiness and just trust that this was a really nice show.

But along the way, I needed to use the bathroom. Italian cities seem pretty user friendly when it comes to providing public bathrooms. You look for the WC sign, you drop your Euro, or, in Venice, your Euro and a half, into the coin slot and push through the turnstile and there you go. Only when I pulled out my Unica pass papers and showed them to the woman attending the turnstiles, she waved her finger at me and said, "You must have your toilet tickets." The print out isn't good enough? "No, you must have your toilet tickets. You can get them at the vaporetto ticket office." So I trudged back across the Rialto bridge, avoiding the students eating ice cream and the tourists hauling their bags up and down the steps, and went to the VeniceUnica desk at the vaporetto ticket office. There were four sportellos, or service windows. The woman at the first one was pretty busy talking to her coworkers and didn't seem to notice me; perhaps she was talking through her lunch break. One of the other windows opened up and a young woman took my papers, keyed in my account number and gave me a puzzled luck. "Do you have another number?" Hm, I'm thinking, there's number one and number two, and of course she has my account number right in front of her. No, that's the only number I was given, I told her. I picked up my vaporetto tickets and got into the churches without a problem. "Yes, but the computer doesn't show that you have toilet tickets." Huh? My print out clearly showed I paid for a weekly toilet pass, good for 7 visits. She called over another coworker who got on her cell phone and I could see from her expression that my toilet tickets weren't going to materialize easily. Luckily, no emergency here, I just knew I was going to need those toilet tickets pretty soon. So the first woman hands over some of my papers off to guy sitting at yet another window and suddenly I realize each page represents access to a unique service and I don't know who has what. For whatever reason, the third ticket agent had the touch and he printed out my toilet pass and now he's photo copying my pages and then handing them back to me. But how many pages did I start with? Did you give me all of my pages back? The three of them look confused and start checking their desks. "Yes, yes, you have them all." Now I'm reading through the pages, to make sure that I haven't lost something. Then I'm feeling really clever and I say something in Italian like, "Well, I know I'm in Italy because it took three people to get me into the bathroom." I don't think that's what they heard. They looked at me with mystified expressions and I'm thinking, good Lord, what do they think I just said? I stuffed the toilet pass into my wallet, laughing to myself. What an adventure!