Darryl Marsch continues his Bond-inspired European adventure, tracing 007’s footsteps through the canals, cuisine, and cinematic landmarks of Venice.
On the railway map, Venezia Santa Lucia station is a terminus, a proverbial end of the line, but when stepping down onto the platform, it becomes a gateway opening to an ancient city and culture born out of the sea. Our “driver” met us at the train and carried our bags to a private water taxi docked in Venice’s main waterway, the Grand Canal.
From the air, Fleming described the Grand Canal as a “straggling crack” in the “irregular[,] brown biscuit” of Venice, but from a boat, the Grand Canal lives up to its name. Standing in the back of the water taxi with elbows resting on the roof like celebrities do when entering Venice is the best way to take in the view from the Grand Canal. The blue-green water is wide and the buildings between the Rialto and the Accademia bridges looked just as they did in Casino Royale. Though thankfully, no buildings fell into the water.
Every place along the canal is beautiful or famous, but most are both. On the starboard side, we passed the museum housing the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and to our port side the Gritti Palace, the 15th-century palace-turned-hotel where James Bond stayed in Ian Fleming’s short story, “Risico.” We couldn’t stop smiling.
Fleming correctly diagnosed what we were feeling, “a temporary state of euphoria that a first night in Venice engenders….”
Just the week before our visit, crowds followed constellations of movie stars at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. Celebrities attended their premieres and parties, and a number of them, including Daniel Craig, showed up for the unveiling of the new Aston Martin Vanquish.
For what I thought were obvious, historical reasons, Venice is a terrible place to bring an Aston Martin. In the year 421, refugees fleeing a barbarian invasion on the mainland needed a place safe from aggressors. So, they established a settlement on the islands of the Venetian Lagoon, stayed, and built a wealthy, powerful maritime republic that lasted for over a thousand years until it was sadly conquered by a small man named Napoleon.
The Venetians built most of the structures out in the water atop one million wooden pilings pounded into the mud at the lagoon’s bottom. The pilings support a city of canals, footbridges, and narrow, winding passages further designed to frustrate potential invaders and anyone, even James Bond, in an Aston Martin. Because there aren’t any roads, Venetian vehicles are the gondola, the water taxi, or the vaporetto (public water bus). Of course, 007 knew this. He drove his amphibious “Bondola” hovercraft in St. Mark’s Square in the film Moonraker.
Our water taxi took us to the Hotel Cipriani on the island of Giudecca, directly across the lagoon from St. Mark’s Square. The hotel is more relaxed than the Gritti Palace (mentioned above) or the Hotel Danieli (built in 1822 and where Bond stayed in Moonraker), which are in Venice proper. Instead, the Cipriani provides a quieter postcard view of Venice and requires the splendor of a boat ride across the northern lagoon to reach the city.
The Cipriani was built in 1958, and there is plenty of land on Giudecca for spacious gardens, a clay tennis court, and an oversized swimming pool. According to legend, there was a miscommunication about feet and meters, and the hotel ended up with a salt-water pool over three times larger than planned. By today’s standards, it’s still luxuriously large, and it’s heated to boot. The Cipriani’s style is 18th-century Venetian cream-and-white glamor with accents hued in pastel pinks, blues, yellows, and greens. We checked into room 37, which spilled out through heavy drapes onto an 800 square-foot private balcony overlooking the pool.
We enjoyed our accommodations, changed clothes for dinner, and walked the dimly lit path adjacent to the gardens to arrive at the hotel’s newest restaurant, Oro. The dining room was round with bare, oversized windows that looked directly out onto the lagoon. This gave the effect of floating on a giant life raft like the round, yellow ones from You Only Live Twice and No Time to Die. Above at the ceiling, an impossibly fragile Murano glass chandelier reflected light against a large metallic tray, bathing the restaurant in a golden glow. The wait staff were helpful and charming, and they eagerly indulged our desire to order in Italian.
My companion had a dish that translated as, Eggplant, Eggplant, Eggplant, and I ordered hat-shaped tortelli stuffed with seafood, Ferrara “Pasticcio” (a traditional Carnival dish with a beef ragu, béchamel, plus a mountain of shaved black truffles), and a smoky lobster tail “Mechoui” (Moroccan spit roasted and served with mussel sauce).
Before and after our main course, our waiters kept bringing us little delicacies, like gold-leaf mantis-shrimp crudo or paprika crackers. We also had two unconventional and very refreshing gelati (Italian ice creams). One was a palate cleanser, sage gelato with roasted peaches. The other was a mountain celery gelato under a mille-feuille of thinly sliced fruit for dessert. After dinner, the head waiter brought Chef Vania Ghedini out to meet us, and we thanked her for a spectacular culinary experience.
The next morning we slept a little later and then had a few pale biscuits and a complementary bottle of Ferrari Prosecco on the balcony. The loud pop! of the cork in the cool, crisp air surprised us. Italians call it “Il pistolotto,” the little pistol shot. Venetian sunshine sparkled on the lagoon, and friendly honey bees from the Cipriani hives buzzed between our patio table and the trumpet-shaped blooms of red and white dipladenia. A florist arranged pink, blue, and white hydrangeas for the Swedes’ birthday party at Il Porticciolo, the restaurant at the edge of the lagoon. Goggled swimmers swam morning laps in the pool’s gin-clear water while we lingered and enjoyed our coffee, as Bond does, very black.
Later, we went down for a bite of pasta at the poolside bar, where a falconer employed by the hotel stood nearby and occasionally moved between lunch-crowd tables.
We deduced that the falcon was there to ward off pigeons and seagulls. As we later witnessed, the seagulls are so brazen that, without the threat posed by the raptor, they would otherwise swoop in and snatch food right off the table. When intervention was not required, the falconer stood to the side lovingly petting and talking to the bird of prey as if it were a house cat.
Next, we boarded a water taxi to St. Mark’s square where we took a private gondola ride through the canals that appear at the end of From Russia with Love.
Stepping into the gondola, which was moored in the lapping waters of the lagoon, was a little daunting, but we accomplished it without incident.
Our gondolier, Marco, projected an effortless magnetism that made him a standout among the members of the identically clad gondoliering community. As we wound through the canals, he greeted every gondolier by name and spoke to them in a subset of Venetian dialect reserved solely for gondoliers.
We passed between the Doge’s Palace (Palazzo Ducale) and Piombi prison and under the Bridge of Sighs, which connects the two. The bridge is made of white limestone and has small windows with stone mosaic “bars.” Marco explained that Lord Byron named it the Bridge of Sighs because he imagined the sighs released by prisoners at their final view of Venice before being taken down to their cells.
He added that the famous lover Giacomo Casanova was imprisoned in Piombi in 1755. Surprisingly, the romance associated with the Bridge of Sighs comes, not from Casanova, but from the 1979 film A Little Romance, where according to the plot, kissing under the bridge is considered good luck.
Every so often, Marco briefly broke into song (traditional Venetian songs, not Dean Martin hits). We snaked through the narrow canals next to ancient houses still jutting above the water, and finally Marco paddled back to our starting point. I came away from the gondola tour very favorably impressed by an activity that I thought might be kitschy and touristy. Instead, it was a lovely and uniquely Venetian excursion.
My overall impression of Venice was that it was much cleaner and less crowded than I had expected.
In 1960, James Bond observed that “it is still better to share Venice with the minimum number of packaged tours and Lederhosen,” a sentiment that contemporary Venetians have taken to heart. Recently enacted cruise-ship bans seem to have done their job reclaiming Venice from the throngs of day trippers. Ships greater than 25,000 gross register tonnage (a measure of internal volume, not weight),180 meters in length, 35 meters tall, or that have “a production exceeding 0.1% of sulfur” simply can’t come near the Venetian Lagoon.
The most commonly asked question we get about our trip, though, is not about crowds, but whether Venice smells bad. It does not. Rather, Venice has a vaguely marine scent, slightly salty, but not “fishy” like some coastal cities. As we would learn firsthand, tides refresh the canals each evening. No garbage littered the piazza or the footpaths, not even a stray bottle cap, thanks to the recent European ban on untethered drink lids.
That night, we dressed for the opera. A water taxi picked us up early for a pre-show tour of La Fenice opera house. A public relations person from the opera guided our way from pictures of diva Maria Callas, to opera house scale models, and up to Napoleon’s royal box. From the box, the opera house resembled the inside of a giant pink, blue, and gold-leaf layer cake.
Our guide knew everything about the building’s history. We discussed how Callas launched to international stardom at La Fenice in 1949 in the role of Elvira in Bellini’s I Puritani, and that Angelina Jolie just debuted a film about Callas at the Venice Film Festival. Our guide also commented on the architecture and in-fighting among wealthy opera patrons and the perhaps unfortunate, prophetic naming of the theater, La Fenice (The Phoenix). It burned to the ground in 1836 and 1996 and was rebuilt from the ashes both times as the name also implies. And finally, we discussed that Napoleon probably never set foot in his special royal box after he conquered Venice in 1797. The royal box was full of gold leaf — it was like standing inside an inverted Fabergé egg. Alas, a missed opportunity for the small emperor.
When walking down the stairs at our tour’s conclusion, it was impossible for me not to pretend being James Bond during the opera house scenes in Quantum of Solace. After all, I was already dressed for the part, and under the electric lights, my midnight-blue dinner suit appeared blacker than black. I chuckled remembering how Bond “acquired” his dinner suit for the opera in Quantum.
So without improvisation, we made our way downstairs to meet up with our friends Paul and Sally from the Orient Express and took our seats for Puccini‘s Turando, which first premiered at La Fenice 98 years ago that week. Surprisingly, our performance included a large number of children, who comprised a chorus of Peking street urchins. I nevertheless enjoyed the opera with strong singing in the roles of Liù and Calaf. After Calaf melted the ice princess’s heart, we again found Paul and Sally, and together traversed the dark, narrow streets back to the dock where we jumped up into the water taxi — up because a two-foot tide had come in.
Back at the Cipriani, we enjoyed a gold-flecked “Orient Express” cocktail and Paul ordered a midnight “toastie” for us by the pool. The Swedes started to sing at the piano bar….
The next morning, we met up with “Our Man in Venice,” Lorenzo. Lorenzo was a native Venetian, a 007 aficionado, and likely an art-history major, making him an ideal tour guide for Venice. We asked him to primarily speak to us in Italian, and this became one of the most fun experiences of our trip.
When vacation planning a year before, my companion and I resolved to learn Italian for this trip. In part because it’s a very James Bond thing to do, but mostly because we wanted to connect with Italy as you can only do in Italian. Try it too and you’ll be met with a reception “molto gentile.”
James Bond often spoke Italian. He spoke Italian to Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love when he thought she was on the housekeeping staff at a hotel overlooking San Giorgio Maggiore. And for reasons not entirely clear, Bond off-handedly broke out an Italian toast for Mary Goodnight while in Thailand in The Man with the Golden Gun. Bond chuckled with us in Quantum of Solace when Mathis’s companion remarked in Italian that he only bought cheap white wine. About the only time 007’s Italian was really useful was in SPECTRE when he overheard Marco Sciarra and his crew plan a bombing in Mexico City.
Lorenzo ran down the morning’s mission briefing, which included locations from the films Moonraker and Casino Royale. During the briefing and well before the tour, it became apparent that stealing is a venerated tenet of Venetian society, and I don’t mean pickpockets. (Ironic side note, we encountered none despite numerous warnings on the Internet).
After leaving the water taxi, we walked between two slender columns holding statues of St. Theodore and St. Mark (both stolen and one had a stolen “replacement” head) through St. Mark’s Square, and past the Doge’s Palace, the Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs (stone figures stolen from Constantinople), and St. Mark’s Basilica.
Lorenzo also told us the story of the Venetians who stole the body of St. Mark from Muslim-controlled Alexandria, Egypt by cleverly smuggling his corpse to Venice in a barrel of pork. A depiction of that scene is proudly painted on the front of St. Mark’s Basilica while the stolen human remains lay inside.
Lorenzo explained that many of the finest pieces of sculpture in the square, including the bronze Horses of St. Mark, were stolen by the Venetians, and perhaps because of that they remain preserved for posterity.
The Horses were made around the second or third century (or perhaps earlier) and first stolen by Constantine. Crusaders took the Horses and brought them to Venice around 1204. Napoleon later took them to France, but they were returned to Venice in 1815.
Our first stop in the square was the Museo Correr (Correr Museum), which doubled as part of Bond’s hotel room in Casino Royale. There, we peered out the window overlooking St. Mark’s Square just as Bond did before M called to inquire when he would deposit the poker winnings.
At the ticket booth, we picked up passes for a private tour of the Torre dell’Orologio (St. Mark’s Clock Tower), where James Bond fought Drax’s henchman Chang in Moonraker.
Having been completed in 1499, the clock is only medium-old by Venice standards. It was purchased, not stolen, by the Venetians and stands next to St. Mark’s Basilica facing the lagoon. We entered the tower through a secret doorway in the arch. A clock-tower specialist joined us to explain the clock’s inner workings, including animatronic, wooden figures of the three magi and a herald angel (probably stolen). The figures move across the clock face on the Epiphany and the Ascension, bowing to the Virgin and Child sculpture. The guide noted that the clock tracks the moon’s phases and the sun’s position in the zodiac and that the clock has a digital readout in addition to its analog face, making it perhaps the oldest digital clock in the world. The large, blue clock face is enamel-painted metal, not glass, so 007 could not have thrown Chang through the dial as depicted in Moonraker.
At the top of the tower, about 300 feet high, we stepped out for an up-close look at the bronze sculptures of the Moors, one young and one old (both stolen, of course), whose hammers strike the bell on the hour.
On the way back to the water taxi, Lorenzo pointed out the building briefly used for the Venice branch of Basel Bank in Casino Royale, where Vesper, in true Venetian style, stole the money that Bond won from Le Chiffre at the casino in Montenegro.
That evening, we embarked on the highlight of our trip, a sunset sail for two on the Venetian Lagoon. Bond and Vesper sailed there on a Spirit 54 yacht in Casino Royale as David Arnold’s “City of Lovers” theme swelled, creating the most romantic scene in all the 007 films. Our sailboat, the Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex), arrived at the Cipriani dock to collect us at about five o’clock. The 16-meter wooden sailing vessel is a showstopper with a storied history. It was built in 1942, famously rescued people fleeing the Nazis during the war, and was later owned by poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was a close friend of Maria Callas.
Our sommelier poured glasses of regional wine paired with local products from surrounding farms. We sailed south along the Lido where the breeze was milder and the water still like glass. There is truth in what Fleming wrote about Venice, which is, “[T]here is absolutely nothing to say about Venice. It is there, and all that one can tell people is that they should go and see it for themselves.” It’s a complement wrapped inside a sarcastic remark —Fleming’s ornery way of saying that no words can do justice to the experience of Venice. To the point, on board the Edipo Re, there was nothing to do but connect and take in the beauty all around. Words cast only a pale shadow of what it is like to sail on the Venetian Lagoon.
As sun dipped lower on the horizon, the blue sky turned apricot. Later, when the sky cooled to purple, we climbed atop a pad in front of the wheelhouse to recline, drink more wine, snuggle, and get a bleary look at the small island of San Servolo, which had once housed a monastery for Benedictine monks, later an asylum for the insane, and now a museum and university. Finally, as the sky fell to black, we sailed north toward Venice and past San Giorgio Maggiore ending our sailing trip back down at Giudecca.
Words and pictures © 2025 Darryl Marsch. All rights reserved.
Also see Part I: London, France and the Orient Express
