Page 10 of Gelato at the Villa (Suitcase Sisters #2)

Chi fa sbaglia.

He who does , makes mistakes.

Italian saying

Before we started climbing the grand staircase inside the palace and pioneering our way along, Claire pulled up a list she had made of the highlights to look for since we had opted not to pay for a tour. We entered the cavernous room I’d been so eager to see.

“This is one of the largest rooms in Europe,” Claire read from her notes. “The painting at the end of the room is considered the largest painting on canvas in the world. It’s by Tintoretto and is called The Paradise .”

The greatness of the painting was in the immense amount of details.

It felt like too much to take in from where we stood, so I turned my gaze toward the ceiling.

Painted scenes covered every inch of open space.

Ornate gold moldings separated each scene like frames.

It would take hours and a comprehensive key to decipher the stories being told in each section.

“It’s over the top,” Claire said. “Literally.”

I tried to figure out why I wasn’t having the strong emotional reaction I’d expected.

This was the Great Council Chamber. In the novel, twelve hundred members of the Venetian parliament filled this space, and decisions were made that affected the course of history.

Today, the space felt hollow. The aura of power had vacated long ago, leaving an enormous, gilded shell where visitors trampled across the ancient floors and paused to take pictures of the glory that once influenced the known world. The room felt sad to me.

“It says here that Venice was a republic for more than a thousand years until Napoleon conquered it in 1797,” Claire said.

“Can you imagine a political system lasting for a thousand years? And for more than five hundred years, with all the trade that came through here, Venice was among the wealthiest societies in the world. No wonder they covered everything in gold, the way our generation used to cover everything in shiplap.”

I was too caught up in my emotional letdown to comment on Claire’s shiplap statement.

We continued our self-guided tour through more rooms that were equally ornate.

Each had been used for hundreds of years for some branch of the government.

I tried to picture what it must have been like when Marco Polo returned from his travels to China seven hundred years ago.

Did he walk on these same tile floors? I wished we had signed up for a paid tour so I could ask the guide my questions and hear new stories that would revive my long-held image of the Doge’s Palace.

“This is what I was looking forward to seeing,” Claire said as we moved from the palace onto the covered bridge that led into the adjacent prison.

We stopped midway and waited our turn to get closer to the small window carved in the sandstone wall of the bridge.

Tourists with a different sense of personal space than what I preferred leaned in behind us.

Below us was a canal and in front of us were people walking over a low footbridge.

Beyond that was the lagoon and the nearby island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

“This view is what the prisoners saw,” Claire said. “Their final glimpse of Venice from the Bridge of Sighs.”

“No wonder they sighed,” I said.

“Exactly. Casanova was one of those prisoners,” Claire said. “But he escaped.”

I wanted to escape as well, so I picked up the pace as we moved quickly into the narrow hallway of the prison and only glanced into the small, dark cells where prisoners were once kept. I didn’t want to linger and gaze inside, trying to imagine what incarceration would be like in such a place.

We wound our way along to the exit and came back out into the open main square. “What did you think?” I asked.

“Would I be revealing how uncultured I am if I said I liked our visit to the bookstore more?” Claire asked. “I mean, I want to see these main places of interest, but I’m glad we didn’t take a tour. This place has an ominous vibe, doesn’t it? What did you think?”

“It wasn’t what I expected.”

I wasn’t sure what else to say. Our time inside Paulina’s church had felt more awe-inspiring.

We walked through the crowds and instinctively headed for the water, where we stood by a gondola dock and gazed at the lagoon. It was such a pretty day. Chilly, but the sky was clear and the air felt crisp. Our view had a different sort of magnificence, and I felt a sense of calm returning.

“Grace, I like the way you and I go at about the same pace and our level of interest is pretty equal. I appreciate that,” Claire said. “I’m guessing the pace was different when you went on your mother-daughter trips with your mom.”

“Quite different. She always hired a personal guide to lead us around for the whole day. Every tour would be long, and she would be curious about every historical detail. Her mind holds dates and facts like no one I’ve ever met.

I don’t have the same curiosity, I guess.

I like the ambience of a place, and I love the stories. ”

“Me too. I’m curious about how Casanova managed to escape.”

A pigeon fluttered up from where we were walking, and Claire waved her hand to shoo it away. No need. The bird was already flying across the water.

“I wish we could feed the pigeons,” I said. “I know there’s a law against it now, but Sue said that when she was here they bought packets of corn from vendors here on the square, and the pigeons came and ate out of her hand.”

“No thank you,” Claire said. “I would not want to be here among thousands of disease-carrying, aggressive, land-on-your-head-and-peck-out-your-brain pigeons.” She gave a shiver. “There is no way I would want to encourage a bird to come near me.”

I chuckled at her dramatics. “I never knew you carried such animosity toward birds.”

“It’s because of the Bird Lady,” Claire said.

“When I was in elementary school we had a neighbor who was bird crazy. She had feeders everywhere in her yard. I thought of her this morning because this lady had a statue of a monk with birds eating out of his hands and she called him St. Francis. I never wanted to leave the house because I was afraid I would get dive-bombed by one of her overfed birds.”

“I hope you never saw Alfred Hitchcock’s movie about birds.”

“I did! I saw it when I was eleven and had nightmares for a month.”

“Your childhood was more traumatic than I realized,” I teased.

Claire caught my eye. Her expression sobered. “It was.”

I couldn’t tell if she was still being playfully dramatic or not.

“Let’s not talk about this anymore,” Claire said decisively. “I think we should go get some lunch.”

“Lunch instead of gelato?”

“Yes. Lunch, please. I can live with being an underachiever on the gelato splurge-o-meter,” Claire said. “Come on.”

We headed for one of the nearby restaurants on her list. The crowded deli-style eatery had only a few small tables and all of them were occupied.

We stood at the counter, observing what the people in front of us did.

When it was our turn we pointed to what we wanted from the assortment of small, open-faced sandwiches in the closed display case.

“Six cicchetti?” the woman asked before taking my credit card.

I gave her a puzzled look because I hadn’t heard of a money system that had the word “cicchetti” in it. “Do you mean six euros?” I asked.

The man behind us said, “She’s not talking about money.” He appeared exasperated but was gracious enough to explain. “She means you are getting a total of six cicchetti. These small bites. They’re called cicchetti. And don’t ever call them tapas.”

“Oh. Thank you. Grazie.”

Once again, I was embarrassed for drawing attention to myself and being culturally clueless. A weakly offered “grazie” wasn’t going to help, but that was the best I could come up with for the gentleman at the moment.

A table opened up and Claire scooted over to it, welcoming the chance to sit. At the same moment we realized we had forgotten to buy something to drink.

“I’ll be right back,” Claire offered.

I waited for her to return before I started eating. Again, my manners were showing. I wondered what it would feel like if I slouched and took a big bite before she came back. Funny how in my mind that was about the rudest and most irresponsible thing I could think of doing.

Looking around at the other people in the café, I thought about how I’d tried to emulate the way Paulina sat and ate her cornetto that morning and how I felt like I couldn’t speak English in public on the vaporetto.

I remembered how warm my face felt when the man explained that cicchetti referred to food and not a monetary system.

Why was I so worried about what people thought of me? I was surrounded by strangers. They would never see me again. Why did it matter how I drank my cappuccino or that I didn’t know the proper name for Venetian tapas? Who cared?

Apparently, I did.

Claire was grinning as if she had a secret when she returned to the table with two bottles of water in the crook of her arm and two small glasses of red wine. “You are going to love this.”

I felt a nervous twinge. Should I feel guilty about drinking wine again? In the middle of the day?

“I think I have a problem,” I said.

Claire stopped, holding both glasses of wine in mid-delivery position. “What’s wrong? Did you lose your phone? Please don’t tell me you lost your passport.”

“No, I didn’t lose anything.” I reached for the water bottles and placed them on the table. “It would help if I could lose something, though.”

“Don’t say ‘lose weight,’ because we agreed we were going to enjoy everything we eat on this trip and not count carbs or calories.”

I lowered my voice. “It’s not weight. It’s the way I become self-conscious so easily.”

“Oh, that.” She looked relieved and sat down across from me, placing the wine glasses on the table.

“What do you mean, ‘Oh, that’?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes you get embarrassed about things that aren’t a big deal.”