Florence Day Four - The Gondola That Waits for Us

Mestre woke beneath a hard summer light, but inside our room the morning began softly, in the language that had become uniquely ours. A whispered buongiorno. Sleepy kisses. His face close to mine before either of us had fully returned to the world. Then love, unhurried and familiar without ever becoming ordinary. There was something almost sacred in the way we woke beside each other during those days, as though every night briefly carried us away and every morning gave us back. Before the city, before the heat, before the plans and the kilometres, there was always this first reunion. I would look at him and feel the same astonishment I had felt at the beginning: he was here, beside me, and for another day the world would be something we entered together.

We dressed quickly and left for Venice once more. The motorcycle carried us through Mestre towards the long passage over the lagoon, along the road that seemed suspended between land and water. By then we knew the garage well. We knew where to leave the bike, how to make our way towards the station and how to avoid the expensive boats waiting to take advantage of uncertain visitors. Venice was no longer entirely unknown to us. After only one day, we already possessed the beginnings of a private familiarity with it, the small confidence of returning somewhere rather than arriving for the first time.

We took the train into the city, watching the lagoon open beyond the windows. The morning sun lay brightly over the water, and for a few minutes Venice seemed to float ahead of us, distant yet already ours in the peculiar way a place can become part of a love story almost immediately. I looked outside knowing what waited at the end of those tracks: the canals, the palazzi, the bridges, the black gondolas resting against weathered stone. Yet the excitement was different from the day before. The first astonishment had passed, but in its place came something perhaps even more beautiful. We were returning.

The air was already hot when we stepped into Venice. The water looked almost indecently inviting, green and blue beneath the sun, moving gently between buildings that seemed to have grown directly from it. Our day began simply, with coffee and cookies for breakfast. There was nothing ceremonial about the table or the food, but I remember the happiness of sitting there with him in Venice, preparing for another day as though this extraordinary city were briefly part of our ordinary life. That was one of the deepest pleasures of the journey. Places I had once imagined only from afar became settings for small acts of intimacy: drinking coffee, sharing something sweet, deciding where to walk next, looking across a table and finding the same beloved face waiting there.

We had given ourselves two quests for the day. The first was to enter the Basilica of San Marco or climb the Campanile. The second was to find souvenirs, tangible pieces of Venice that could return home with us after the city itself had disappeared behind the road.

The tickets for the Basilica were already sold out, and the prospect of waiting beneath the fierce sun did not tempt us for long. So we chose the Campanile. An old-fashioned lift carried us upwards through the great brick tower, rising above the square, the domes and the crowded streets. When the doors opened at the top, Venice unfolded beneath us.

From the ground, Venice had seemed labyrinthine and secretive, a city discovered one canal and one narrow street at a time. From above, it became something entirely different. The confusion of alleys resolved itself into a vast composition of terracotta roofs, domes, bell towers and water. The silvery domes of the Basilica rose almost beneath our feet. The Doge’s Palace stretched beside the lagoon, its pale patterned walls suddenly fragile when seen from such a height. Beyond it, the water opened in every direction, scattered with boats leaving white lines behind them as they crossed the blue-green surface.

San Giorgio Maggiore rested across the lagoon like a perfectly placed thought. The white majesty of Santa Maria della Salute rose among the roofs and waterways, while the islands beyond appeared to hover between sea and sky. Venice had no clear edge from up there. It seemed to dissolve gradually into the lagoon, as if the city had never been built at all but had emerged from the water and might, at any moment, return to it.

I moved from one opening to another, trying to take everything in. I photographed the domes, the rooftops, the islands, the moving boats and the great sweep of water. Through a viewing lens, Venice became a small circle of warm colours surrounded by darkness, a secret world held briefly in the eye. Nearby, the enormous bells hung in their metal frames, silent for the moment but carrying the weight of centuries above the city.

The view was spectacular. It was everything a panoramic view of Venice should have been, vast, luminous and almost impossible to comprehend. Yet even as I stood there, I wondered whether it was truly the view that made the moment so complete.

Perhaps it was him.

Perhaps beauty becomes more beautiful when the person we love is standing beside us.

I could have climbed the Campanile alone and seen the same rooftops, the same domes, the same lagoon stretching towards the horizon. The city would not have changed. The sky would have been just as blue. But the memory would have been entirely different. What transformed that view into something belonging to my life was the knowledge that he was there, seeing what I saw, moving beside me as we looked across Venice together.

There are places whose beauty can leave us lonely because they awaken the wish to share them with someone. That morning, I felt no such absence. Every time I turned away from the city, there he was. I did not have to imagine the man I loved beside me. I did not have to take a photograph to send him later or try to describe the sight in words when we spoke again. He was already inside the moment. The same light fell upon us. The same wind moved around us. The same city extended beneath our eyes.

Venice was spectacular from the Campanile, but what moved me most was not seeing it from above. It was knowing that this, too, had become something we would remember together.

When we descended, our second quest began in earnest. We entered shops filled with glass, masks, jewellery, ornaments, postcards and objects claiming to contain some part of Venice. Yet choosing a souvenir proved unexpectedly difficult. I wanted something that would make me fall in love with it at once, something that would carry the feeling of the city rather than merely its name. But how could any object compete with what I already felt? I was already in love with Venice. More than that, I was walking through Venice beside the man I loved. Everything I looked at seemed too small to represent such abundance.

He helped me search. He understood that I did not want to buy something merely because it was available. It had to speak to me. Eventually, he suggested something blue, and the moment he showed it to me, we both knew. The colour held something of the lagoon, the sky above the Campanile and the reflections shifting through the canals. It was chosen by him and accepted by both of us, which immediately gave it a value no price could measure. It was no longer simply a souvenir from Venice. It had become another object marked by our shared decision, something I would later look at and remember not only where I bought it, but who had stood beside me while I chose it.

I also found small gifts for him connected to Pinocchio, little tokens from a story woven into Italian childhood and imagination. Then, unexpectedly, in a beautiful shop, I came across the coin from the story. It felt like the kind of discovery that cannot be planned, an object appearing precisely because I was not looking for it. I bought gifts for my mother and my friends too, carrying them briefly with me through the objects I chose, thinking of their faces when I would return home and place a little part of Venice into their hands.

The gondolas remained everywhere.

They waited beneath bridges, gathered beside hotels and floated in rows against red poles. Some were simple and dark, others richly decorated with red seats, gold details and soft cushions. Gondoliers stood nearby in striped shirts, calling to visitors or balancing easily at the stern as their boats moved through the narrow waterways.

I had loved the gondolas from the moment I first saw them. I loved their strange elegance, the way they seemed too theatrical to be real and yet belonged to Venice more naturally than any car belongs to a road. I watched them appear around corners and glide through the green water, passing beneath balconies and worn brick façades. Every time one entered a canal, the city seemed to become more itself.

Of course I wanted to ride in one.

But not like that. Not yet.

This became our argument, although beneath it there was something more tender. He knew I wanted the experience and could not understand why I resisted it when the gondolas were there, waiting for us. I struggled to explain that I did not want merely to purchase a ride and sit among the ordinary movement of the afternoon because it was one of the things visitors were expected to do.

I wanted our gondola.

I wanted a moment that would belong completely to us.

There are experiences we can repeat without diminishing them. We can visit the same square, cross the same bridge and eat at the same restaurant many times. But there are other moments that seem to ask us to wait until life itself is ready for them. Somewhere inside me, I knew that my first gondola ride with him should not happen simply because we had time to do it that afternoon.

I wanted it to carry a meaning neither of us would ever forget.

I could already imagine the water, the narrow canals, the sound of the oar, Venice slipping slowly around us and he sitting beside me. I could imagine our hands joined, a kiss beneath a bridge, perhaps one of our songs spoken softly or sung badly enough to make us laugh. Yet the image contained something else too, something I could feel but did not want to force into existence before its time.

So I said no.

Not because I did not want the gondola, but because I wanted it too much.

I wanted to preserve it for the day when the ride would become more than an attraction. I believed then, as I believe now, that he would know how to make that moment extraordinary. Perhaps somewhere in Venice, one particular gondola is still waiting for us, resting against a wooden post, unaware that it already belongs to a chapter we have not yet lived.

We left it there for the future.

The heat followed us through the streets, settling against the stone and rising from the crowded squares. By lunchtime, we found refuge in a small restaurant in the centre of Venice. The cool air inside wrapped itself around us as soon as we entered, bringing relief after hours beneath the sun. We ordered wonderful gnocchi and sat facing each other while the city continued beyond the walls.

I remember looking into his eyes.

I had looked into them countless times before, but love does not always make the familiar easier to bear. Sometimes the face we know best can still overwhelm us. His eyes held me there, and suddenly tears came again, quieter than those in Piazza San Marco but born from something even deeper.

The day before, I had cried because Venice was beautiful.

This time, I cried because I loved him.

I looked at him and felt the unbearable tenderness of knowing that this man existed, that he was sitting across from me, that we had crossed Italy together and were now sharing lunch in Venice as though life had always intended to lead us to that table. I wondered whether he truly knew. Can another person ever fully understand the love we carry for them? Can they feel its size, its weight, the way it inhabits the body and transforms every place they enter?

Perhaps love is always partly untranslatable. We say ti amo. We touch. We travel. We make promises. We cry across a table over gnocchi in an air-conditioned Venetian restaurant. Yet beneath all those gestures remains an ocean of feeling that no language can hold.

I wondered whether he knew that when I looked at him, I did not see only the man sitting before me. I saw every morning we had shared, every road, every reunion, every departure and every future moment I still hoped would come. I saw the person whose happiness had become inseparable from mine.

There are things we understand without asking. There are emotions that pass from one person to another through silence, through the pause before a smile or the way a hand reaches across a table. Perhaps the greatest proof of shared love is not that two people describe it in identical words. It is that each recognises the feeling in the other before anything is said.

After lunch, we returned to our search, moving through more shops and carrying more small bags as the afternoon progressed. Eventually, tired from the heat and the endless choices, we sat down for margaritas. The glasses were cold in our hands, and for a while we watched Venice pass around us. People came and went. Voices rose and faded. Somewhere nearby, water moved against stone.

Eventually, it was time to leave.

We walked back towards the station as the sun descended into the golden hour. Venice softened around us. The façades grew warmer, the shadows lengthened and the canals began gathering the late light. The city appeared less dazzling than it had beneath the midday sun, but perhaps more intimate, as though it were already turning towards evening and asking us to remember it this way.

The train returned us to the garage, where the motorcycle waited. Soon we were crossing the lagoon once more. The road had turned gold beneath the lowering sun. From behind him, I turned for another look at Venice.

I did not feel that I was leaving it forever.

I knew we would return.

The certainty arrived without proof, but some promises do not require evidence when they are made. I looked towards the city and silently promised that one day we would walk those streets again. We would stand once more in Piazza San Marco. We would find the canals and bridges that had already begun to belong to us. We would return to the water.

And we would take the gondola.

Not as tourists trying to complete a list, but as two people returning to a promise they had left waiting in Venice.

Perhaps we would kiss as the gondola passed beneath a bridge. Perhaps we would sing one of our songs and make the gondolier smile. Perhaps the city would look exactly as it had that day, or perhaps time would have changed us enough that everything would seem new again.

It did not matter.

The important thing was that I could see him inside that future.

Even as Venice receded behind us, he remained part of every image I imagined ahead.

The evening found us back in Mestre, inside the hotel room that had sheltered our mornings and nights. We packed our things for the following day, folding clothes, gathering souvenirs and preparing once again for the road. Around us lay evidence of the journey: bags, helmets, receipts, small gifts and objects that would soon travel home carrying the memory of Venice inside them.

It was our last night near Venice in 2026.

Yet it did not feel like an ending.

There are goodbyes that close a door, and there are goodbyes that leave it open. Ours belonged to the second kind. We had not finished with Venice. Somewhere inside the city, our gondola still waited. Somewhere beneath a bridge remained a kiss we had not yet given. Somewhere in the future, another room waited for us, another whispered buongiorno, another day of walking hand in hand beside the canals.

That night, we returned once more to the language with which our mornings had begun. We held each other, made love and allowed the world to disappear beyond the closed door. The city of water remained only a short distance away, but what I loved most was already inside the room with me.

One day, we will return to Venice.

We will walk its streets again, older perhaps, but still recognising the same wonder in each other. We will make love in that city again. We will hold hands beside the lagoon, stop on bridges and watch the gondolas pass beneath us. And when the right moment finally comes, we will step into the one that has been waiting.

The gondolier will push away from the shore.

Venice will begin moving slowly around us.

I will look into those beautiful eyes that once brought tears to mine over a plate of gnocchi, and he will understand why I had asked him to wait.

Because I never wanted only a ride through Venice.

I wanted a memory worthy of our love.

And when the gondola carries us beneath the first bridge, I will lean towards him and say the words that have followed every road, every city and every moment we have shared:

Quanto ti amo, Ammore mio.