Venice Diaries: Better out than in
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
A quick note before we start. Recently I conducted a poll to see who would like to read about my food poisoning incident in Venice. Since it’s not my usual shtick to talk about quite such a miserable time I thought I’d give you a choice. Over 75% of you did want to read about it, so here it is. If you were one of the 25% you might want to stop reading now.
Some of life’s mistakes make themselves known almost instantaneously. Break a plate, drop an infant, fall off a cliff, you think oh shit I’m in deep trouble. But eating something that doesn’t agree with you isn’t like that. There isn’t an instant, glass-shattering, life-altering, oh shit moment. Usually.
There is this time. I could eat cicchetti anywhere in Venice and yet I choose a dinghy café on a side street. I could choose any kind of cicchetti and yet I choose the classic, a piece of bread topped with cod in a creamy sauce, and really quite quickly realise I’m in trouble.
It tastes too fishy, that’s the first clue. And for some reason that’s a bad thing. Fish shouldn’t taste fishy it should taste fresh, which means it should taste like nothing. Flavourless pieces of white meat that are good for you. But here there’s a bite about halfway through, and that doesn’t just taste fishy but wrong. My whole body shivers as I bite down on it and a swift but all-too-late attempt to spit it out does nothing for Anglo-Italian relations.
It’s extremely unpleasant but I think I’ve gotten away with it. I’m not vomiting as I sit there waiting to pay the bill and for the next few hours my only qualm with the dinghy café and my first experience of cicchetti is that it was a waste of money, not a biohazard.
It’s after dinner that this changes. It starts as an uncomfortable fullness, and as we walk back to the hotel grows into a knot of pain and though the hotel grows closer my stomach grows ever tighter and hotter and something is really, very wrong. I reach my bed and it now feels like a creature is trapped inside my belly and is clawing its way get out.
It does claw its way out, violently and repeatedly. I have clearly eaten a fish so bad that in large quantities it could be weaponised. I go to the toilet, I clamber back into bed, I go to the toilet, I clamber back into bed. And so pass the next eight or so hours.
I am a pathetic patient. A mild cough and a negligible fever and I am wont to start considering my funeral arrangements. The way I see it I’m one nasty flu away from death and with each new one I assume the mantle of a man being stalked by the reaper. But this one actually does feel like I could be dying and so now I long for those silly little colds where I can wallow in self-pity but sit secure in the knowledge that I’m in no real danger. This feels like my body is under attack and there’s no time to wallow because it’s time to go to the toilet again.
Still, at least I have a canal view. That was the selling point of our luxury Venetian room. It really is luxury - that’s the name of the place. Luxury Venetian Rooms. And isn’t it nice being sick in a luxury Venetian room. Better to be sick here than in a non-luxury Venetian room, that’s for sure. The toilet’s a good one and is not far from the bed, and I have a canal view.
Well, sort of. It’s a canal view if you open the window and peer out over the edge. Then you can see the canal about twenty feet below. I don’t do this more than once because if the fish isn’t going to make me vomit then looking down twenty feet certainly will. I have many failings, not limited to an inability to digest dodgy fish, but my biggest is my fear of heights. Looking out the window of my luxury Venetian room is lovely for a brief second until my brain registers how far down the canal is and then it’s panic stations.
Besides, I’m bedridden. I think that if I do die at least the force of the fish that killed me will mean I’m studied by science as a medical marvel. Then I think that rather than study me they’re more likely to dump me into a boat, sail me out into the lagoon and shoot me with a fire-arrow so that I burn to a crisp and then sink into the murky depths. I’m clearly patient zero of something unknown and nasty.
So I can’t open the window and peer out over the edge. So I can’t see the canal. I can hear the fact that there’s a canal. The room should be advertised not as canal view but as canal audio. Gondoliers are singing outside the window and I want to shout down and tell them to go and stick their oar through the window of that dinghy little café near the Piazza San Marco.
But that would involve peering out over the edge and so I stay and convalesce. Throughout the next day I make more trips to the toilet even though there must be nothing left inside of me. Not food, not bile, not vital organs. All gone down the toilet of my luxury Venetian room.
Then suddenly it’s clear it’s my last trip to the toilet. Not of my life, death isn’t here for me yet, but of this particular sickness. Something about it says, okay, you’re done now, it’s gone. There’s no big finish when it comes to food poisoning. It’s disappointing in a way that the most violent part of the illness is the beginning. There’s no crescendo, just a steady petering out until you’re stood spitting bile into the toilet of your luxury Venetian room, feeling and looking like half the man you once were.
Not many people come to Italy and lose weight, but I managed it. If you too want to take the Venetian diet may I recommend a dinghy little café near the Piazza San Marco. It may be gone now, though, I suppose. If the health inspector hasn’t taken it out then someone who had a very, very bad evening might have.
If you are going to pay it a little visit, though, may I recommend you stay in a luxury Venetian room? The toilet is very close to the bed.
A request.
You may have seen that since January I’ve been writing travel guides on topics of my choice. Well recently I did an interview post with
over on her publication - and answering her questions got me thinking. Instead of me picking the topics to write about in my guides - I’d like you to ask me your travel questions. In each post I’ll pick a few and answer them. So, what travel question would you like answering? It can be an ask for tips, advice or just my take on something. Leave a comment below with your question.Thank you so much for reading. If you liked this post please do consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Not That You Asked. Paid subscribers get two free travel guides a month for just £4.99, which is way cheaper than Netflix. If £4.99 is a bit steep in this economy there’s a 50% off forever sale on at the moment to celebrate two years of Not That You Asked.
The only thing worse than food poisoning on vacation is food poisoning on an airplane. Glad you recovered quickly...and that you can laugh about it now!
I don’t want to “like” the post -- it’s more like a “care” button here, although I will say that I enjoy at least the way you wrote about the experience. The petering out of food poisoning, British self deprecation, and “canal view” hotel scamming we’ve all had....these are intriguing elements of the writing itself. Happy you made it through, Tom!