Venice essay – stuck

I’ve started and re-started an essay on visiting Venice. I can’t seem to move it past a dull recitation of events.

That annoys me because there were some serious events. A volcanic eruption in Iceland stopped me and my kids in Venice. We had to take several trains across Italy and France to escape a city where most people would be happy to be stuck.

This was the spring of the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption. It messed us all up. I was teaching abroad, and my students and I were all on break. It blew an ash cloud over western Europe that shut down air traffic.

We made a video about it. Watch above from 14:06.

Skies were blue, but planes couldn’t fly. We had ridiculously cheap round-trip tickets from Paris to Venice, but couldn’t use the “get home” half of them.

So we had to struggle to find train tickets and crawl across northern Italy and into France. It cost me about five times what I’d budgeted. But we got to see the Milan train station.

Next summer I’ll see Venice again. Iceland can erupt again if it has to. I’ll be traveling there by rental car from Switzerland with Eric Trimble, then taking the train to Rome where we’ll hang out with my Roman friend, Tatiana Visona.

Keats’s grave awaits us there, as does Shelley’s. Goethe’s son is in there as well, along with Antonio Gramsci. And Gregory Corso.

While I’m doing all of this I’m going to work on that essay and hopefully make it into what I want it to be.