Floating world ... Venice peak hour.Credit: Getty Images
Helen Anderson sets out from the splendid Hotel Cipriani by kayak for an afternoon of exploring Venice's waterways.
'Wonderful!" exclaims a Japanese tourist. He jumps to his feet, causing the gondola to rock and the sour-faced gondolier to curse, then aims his long lens and starts taking photographs. Of me. A little later, an American family of four stops on a bridge, slack-jawed, then points and giggles. At me.
Soon a vaporetto swings around a corner, full of tourists. It bristles with cameras. Again, many appear to be pointing my way.
This must be a fairly common experience for some guests of the Hotel Cipriani, the legendary Venice hotel favoured by A-list celebrities, European aristos and holidaying heads of state. But not me. I am unaccustomed to being pointed at or photographed by strangers.
My day as a Venice tourist attraction begins incognito, with luggage on a train that pulls into grubby San Lucia Station at noon on a steamy summer's day. Only two desks outside are selling tickets for the vaporetti, so we join a long line of new arrivals and wait. In the sun. We're nearly there, but then the man in front won't buy his ticket until the cashier has answered a string of questions - and the next boat to Piazza San Marco speeds off.
We disembark with difficulty at San Marco and join a heaving, sunburnt mass of humanity and melted gelati. An irritated buzz rises from the crowd, akin to a nest of hornets preparing for attack. The lagoon is an evil green and frothy with plastic bottles - and at that rather low moment I spy my ride out of here: an empty jetty and a little cabin bearing the words Hotel Cipriani. I pick up the courtesy phone, murmur my name and a tall man wearing a deep tan and a white uniform pulls up in a fast boat.
The circus of San Marco can be seen but not heard from the island of Giudecca. In five breezy minutes we cross the lagoon, round a corner and I'm stepping off the launch and into a garden of espaliered lemon and trailing jasmine - and meeting Roberto, who must have greeted a constellation of European royals and Hollywood stars right here. Yet Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron and several generations of Academy Award-winners (the hotel doesn't mind name-dropping at all) cannot have been welcomed more sincerely than I am. There's an art, I'm sure, to making every woman feel like a princess, and every princess feel as though she's on holiday.
The Hotel Cipriani itself isn't so much royal as aristocratically relaxed. There's an air of old-money elegance and Venetian opulence: travertine marble, Murano glass, Fortuny textiles, beds dressed in pressed Italian linen. Alfresco dinner at the Cip's Club, on the waterfront facing the Doge's Palace and San Marco, is a perfect spot for seduction; intriguingly, the large and lovely garden linking the hotel and restaurant was a favourite trysting site of the legendary rake Giacomo Casanova.
I spy only one well-known face during my stay (Paul Hogan). I can't find his name on the Cipriani's celebrity guest list: more than 200 names evoking half a century of glamour (Elizabeth Taylor, Faye Dunaway), power (Nixon, Kissinger, Chirac, Reagan, Clinton), music (Henry Mancini, Madonna) and movies (Sir Laurence Olivier and at least three James Bonds). The question is, who hasn't spread their towel beside the Cipriani pool. It's not just any pool - a sparkling Olympic-size expanse filled with heated, filtered seawater, the biggest in central Venice and the focus of intense preening and fascinating people-watching.
But here I'm an observer only. My 15 minutes of fame come in the late afternoon as a stiff breeze whips the lagoon. Where other guests will step into a sleek, wood-panelled cruiser to depart the Cip, I'm wearing a lifejacket and a plastic apron and stepping into the front of a two-man kayak, one of several new excursions arranged by the hotel for guests. "Stay close, look around, follow me when we get to the canals," says Rene Seindal, a Danish-born resident of Venice and co-founder of Venice Kayak. "But for now, paddle hard as we cross the lagoon - there's traffic."
Indeed, the steady parade of vaporetti, flat-bottom cargo boats, water taxis, boxy car ferries, and 100 other vessels is more intimidating than interesting when you're the smallest flotsam. We paddle hard, avoid collision and soon have slipped under a bridge and into a quiet labyrinth of canals.
It's said that the only way to approach La Serenissima is by water, and I can still remember the excitement of arriving at dawn on the deck of a ferry from Greece. Paddling a kayak along the city's canals, however, is an entirely different experience - low, slow and intimate. In places, laundry flaps above us and windows are flung open to catch una brezza. We catch snatches of conversation. From modest to magnificent, we approach the splendid rococo entrances of palazzi as generations of counts and courtesans would have come calling.
Tour with Helen
It's at this pace and proximity that the precarious condition of Venice is revealed: uneven, cancerous stone foundations; white scribbling left by saltwater levels; submarine doorways; carved lion's head buttresses, which once would have sat a foot above the waterline, now lapped by water.
A few bars of a Mozart violin concerto settle on us and we know we're floating past the conservatorium. We glide past the white columns of La Fenice, the canal entrance to the city's opera house, and past a church not so much leaning as bending over.
And we pass gondolas. Gondoliers are territorial at the best of times, in my experience; they're positively surly towards kayakers attempting to share canals no wider than two vessels. "We're not their favourite people," Seindal admits, though we try our best to stay well clear of them, in some places clinging to stone walls bristling with oysters so the gondolas can pass without hindrance. The gondola passengers, however, are fascinated by the novelty of kayakers; one boat of tourists is so distracted by our sudden appearance that they ignore their crooning gondolier as he hits his high note, which perhaps does nothing to improve maritime relations.
I have an easier time in the front of the kayak than my paddling partner at the back, who bears most of the responsibility for tight turns and gondola avoidance. We manage a 360-degree turn under the Rialto Bridge without collecting a vaporetto and at peak hour recross the lagoon from San Marco to Giudecca.
Back at the Cipriani, I have damp hat-hair, my shirt is wet with lagoon spray and I've been sitting in a puddle. There's only one way to enter the hotel from here - past a frocked-up pool party of gorgeous young things on their third aperitivi. As I tiptoe past the glamazons with my bare feet and dripping clothes, someone points a camera and shoots. This time, not at me.
Helen Anderson travelled courtesy of Emirates and Hotel Cipriani.
FAST FACTS
Getting there
Emirates has a fare to Venice from Sydney and Melbourne for $1925 low-season return, including tax. Fly to Dubai (about 14hr), then to Venice (6hr 45min). See emirates.com. This fare allows you to fly via an Asian city and fly back from another European city. A water-taxi transfer (or vehicle) from Venice airport to hotels within a 100-kilometre radius is complimentary for business and first-class passengers.
Staying there
Hotel Cipriani offers guests experiences ranging from kayaking on the lagoon (from $182 a person) to access to the ateliers of traditional artisans and a film-lover's tour of the city. Open April-October, the hotel has 95 rooms and suites, and another 16 rooms and apartments in two adjoining 15th-century palazzi. Most of the rooms have lagoon views; others face the hotel gardens, pool and private vineyard. Double rooms cost from $965, including breakfast. Phone 1800 000 395; see orient-express.com.
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