My First Day At The Venice Film Festival Was Una Giornata Di Merda

Please forgive me; I won’t be telling you about the movies I saw my first day at the Venice Film Festival because I didn’t get to see any. Instead, I’d like to whine about my bad day and I hope you don’t mind.

I got to Venice in the morning and the vaporetto ride to Lido was already starting to wear on my husband, Brian’s nerves. It was crowded, super crowded, and those things go mighty slow. But we got out to the island and a nice local couple that saw us looking confused with our maps offered to walk us to our hotel, The Hotel Villa Cipro, the hotel that Brian has crowned the worst hotel he’s ever been in.

I probably would have just stayed there but Brian was really annoyed, and rightly so. The promised wi-fi was down, and I didn’t get the vibe that it would be up any time soon. The unconcerned front desk team assured us of nothing but that they were too busy to worry about it. When I reported that the shower was not working, one of them threw her hands up in the air in a kind of “what can you do?” gesture, as if that answered everything.

This $325 room was dirty, smelly (it smelled like clorox), and had a big hole where the minibar was supposed to be.

I got on the phone with Hotels.com, my heroes. They got me out of there with a refund I wasn’t supposed to be able to get, and they got me into the Hotel Luna Baglioni, right by San Marco. It’s double the money but at this point Brian probably would have paid triple. When we arrived at the Luna Baglioni they said they only had one room left and it was a suite, so they gave us a free upgrade.

And we all lived happily every after.

I’ll tell you about movies tomorrow; I’m going to see Luigi Lo Cascio’s directorial debut, La Citta’ Ideale and I really hope he’ll be there.