I was in northern Italy for holiday last week, and the first place I visited was Venice. I was really looking forward to it, and yet to be honest i had to say it was disappointing. Not because it wasn't pretty, or nice, but because it was nothing more than a giant tourist attraction, a Renaissance theme park rather than a Renaissance city.

The experience is kind of like meeting your childhood hero and then finding out that he's not what you thought he was. To me, Venice was Titian and Canaletto, Tintorretto and Tiepolo, a Florence on the lagoon, a city with a romantically glorious past. But i always thought it was a city, not a theme park, and yet that was what I saw, as it's only activity is tourism. And beautiful as it is, there's no place to sit down and draw, the restaurants are quite expensive, the pizza looks frankly terrible by Italian standards. Since venice is a city on the lagoon, there is also no non-touristic area per se. I went to the edge of the dorsoduro to try and see if there's an actual town with actual people living there, but once you get away from the tourists the town simply feels... dead.

The problem with tourism is that most tourist only want to see things because they are famous, not because they are interested in it. When I was in Verona, the most crowded place was Juliet's house - which is not really juliet's house as it was the Capellas and not the Capulets who lived there. The wall on the entrance, 'Juliet's wall', so to speak, was full of graffiti and chewing gums of lovestruck teenagers. It's kind of sad that here we are, in a world-heritage listed town full of wonderful architecture, and most people prefer to see a fabricated attraction rather than real historical ones. Earlier I was in the beautiful romanesque church of San Zeno with pre-renaissance frescoes and a magnificent altarpiece by Andrea Mantegna, and yet the church would have been practically empty if it wasn't for the group of schoolchildren who was there on excursion. Similarly, I saw a market on the piazza delle Erbe, but it was selling only souvenirs. No local produce or food stalls. In contrast, when I arrived in Bologna i saw a market and straight away my backpack was filled with salami and truffle sauce.

When a place becomes reliant on tourist, somehow you kind of feel that it's lost its soul, for lack of a better word. Like the restaurants in Venice with their laminated, english language menu with spaghetti bolognaise - it's just not really italian anymore. It's like an actress or model that had too much plastic surgery - it may look nice, but you know it's fake, and that somewhat cheapens it. Smaller Trattorias and Osterias are much more appealing because they're real - real food, real people. In Verona I had lunch in a small Osteria where the menu was hand-written with a cheap pen on a brownish grey piece of paper and the main course only has three items on it, all of which contains horse meat. The food (and wine) was cheap, good, with friendly service - the kind of meal experience which makes you feel like you've learnt something.

I love Italy,but rather than Venice, I much prefer cities like Bologna - beautiful medieval palaces sorrounding large town squares and wide, arcade lined-streets dotted with beautiful churches, it's like Florence without the busloads of foreign tourists. Why? Certainly not because it's any less beautiful, and the food is, if anything, better, but simply because it doesn't have Michaelangelo's David or some other world-famous attraction.







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