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abstractions. Beauty. Art. Death.
    “Look!”
    Tess points at our vaporetto as it arrives to pick us up and take us along the length of the Grand Canal to our hotel. Look! is about all she’s said since we landed. And she’s right: There is so much to see, so many details in every building’s façade, there is a constant dangerof missing new evidence of the astonishing. I am more than happy to follow her pointed finger, my daughter close to me, sharing the exhilaration of awakening to a different world.
    We board the vaporetto and it chugs off, cutting through the chop of the other delivery boats and gondolas. Almost instantly we are out of sight of any evidence of the modern.
    “It’s like Disney World,” Tess notes. “Except it’s real.”
    So I point out some of the realities learned over my crash-course reading on the plane. There the gray Fondacco dei Turchi with its imposing, dead-eyed windows. And here the Pescheria, with its neo-gothic hall operating as a fish market since the fourteenth century (“Smells like some of the fish have been on sale since the fourteenth century,” Tess observes). Over here, the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, where tax evaders were once imprisoned in the cellar.
    In what feels like only a handful of minutes the Grand Canal narrows, and we pass under the Rialto Bridge, its span so weighted with tourists I worry it will collapse upon us in an avalanche of digital cameras, sunglasses, and carved stone. Then the canal bends and widens once more. We pass under the less burdened Ponte dell’Accademia and the course gives way to the larger Bacino di San Marco and, beyond it, the glinting breadth of the lagoon.
    The vaporetto slows and turns toward the dock of Bauers Il Palazzo, our hotel. Brass-buttoned valets secure our boat, hauling our luggage inside and offering a gloved hand to Tess. Within an hour of landing we have been transported from the anonymous anywhere of an international airport to the almost unthinkable particularity of one of the finest hotels of Venice, of all Europe.
    Tess stands on the dock, taking mental snapshots of the gondolas, the lagoon, the San Marco clock tower, and a stupefied me.
    “Glad we came?” I ask.
    “Don’t be dumb,” she answers, linking her arm around mine.
    T HE T HIN W OMAN WASN ’ T KIDDING AROUND.
    “This place is nice ,” Tess confirms, noting the polished, brownmarble floor of the Bauer’s lobby, the Bevilacqua and Rubelli fabrics draping the windows. “Who’s paying for this?”
    “I’m not entirely sure,” I confess.
    Once checked in, we go up to our room to freshen up. Up to our rooms , that is: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and an elegant living room with eleven-foot glass doors opening onto a balcony overlooking the Grand Canal.
    We shower, get changed, and head up to the rooftop lounge for lunch. From our table, looking one way we can view the lagoon, looking another the whole plaza of San Marco. It is, as the tour guide boasted, the finest vantage point in Venice. And the highest.
    “You know what they call this restaurant?” I say. “ Il Settimo Cielo . Guess what it means.”
    “I don’t speak Italian, Dad.”
    “Seventh Heaven.”
    “Because it’s on the seventh floor?”
    “Give the girl a kewpie doll.”
    “What’s a kewpie doll?”
    “Never mind.”
    Lunch arrives. Grilled trout for me, spaghetti alla limone for Tess. We eat ravenously, as if merely looking about us the last couple hours has earned us fierce appetites.
    “What’s that place?” Tess asks, pointing across the canal at the white dome and elegant columns of the Chiesa della Salute.
    “A cathedral,” I say. “One of the plague churches they built in the seventeenth century, as a matter of fact.”
    “Plague church?”
    “They built it to protect themselves when a terrible disease—the Black Death—came to Venice. Took out almost half the population. They didn’t have the medicine to fight it at the time, so all they felt they could do