Whenever my mother goes away, she always tries to find a local pool to swim in. Even if there’s a pool at the hotel, perhaps especially if there’s a pool at the hotel, she’ll always try and find a nearby place to have a swim. My dad finds the spirit of new places by taking photographs and I go grocery shopping, but my mother finds her way into a new location by doing a mile in the local swimming pool. As a family, we’ve swum in Greek water parks, Italian lidos, French lakes and, memorably, in 1997, found out about the death of Princess Diana whilst swimming in a gorgeous Danish municipal pool. When she visits Venice, once or twice a year, my mother always makes sure she fits in a swim at her favourite spots and, on our last trip, I went with her to the pool at Sant’ Alvise, in the Canareggio district.

Sant’ Alvise Pool, Venice. Photo: http://www.piscinasantalvise.it

Swimming in Venice is both an entirely natural thing and an entirely bizarre thing to do. Natural because you’re surrounded by water on all sides and so your physiological instinct is to get in and splash about. Bizarre because in Venice, your relationship with water becomes complicated; the canals and the lagoon are beautiful to look at and necessary as a means of transport for everyone and everything - after all, this is a city built on water. However, the still, stagnant canals feel malevolent sometimes, the water is polluted and rises unpredictably in winter and the city is slowly sinking into it. Plus, Venice is such a gorgeous, odd and other worldly place that the idea of doing anything as prosaic as putting on a swimsuit and doing lengths seems utterly incongruous with your surroundings.

We walk down to the Piscina Communale Sant’Alvise first thing in the morning. The Cannareggio district is in the north of the city, a long walk down the Fondamenta della Misericordia from our flat in the Castello. Cannareggio is more residential than other parts of the city and at this time of the day, it’s too early for tourists – it’s just ordinary Venetians going about their business. Except that it’s raining and so the only people we do see are delivery men, hunched into their jackets as they unload pallets of supplies from a boat onto the street next to the hospital, and a few fathers, heading for nursery drop-off and struggling to get buggies over the steep hump of bridges. By the time we get to the pool, we’re already soaked through.

The swimming pool is housed in the relatively new Centro Sportiveo Constatino Reyer and a series of linked rooms takes you through to the water – a room for shoes, another to change in and another to shower in. You can’t swim without a hat or poolside flip-flops and the receptionist mimes both for us to check we’re equipped. Lockers in the changing rooms aren’t a thing here, so you can either leave valuables in a locker in the entrance hall (bring your own padlock) or with your Dad while he has coffee nearby. We opt for Dad and go off to get changed. My Mum points out the vending machine by the exit, which, she says does the best hot chocolate in Venice (although she accepts that post-swimming sugar cravings may be a factor in her decision here…)

The pool hall is stylish and modern, with a dark wood pitched roof, under which a series of mustard yellow pipes are arranged and wide windows which look straight out onto the lagoon (the water comes right up to the edge of the building). Pop hits of the early 2000s play over the stereo system. There are two pools, a small, learner’s pool, which on closer inspection, is equipped today with sub-aquaneous exercise bikes, and a twenty-five meter main pool. The water is clear, mint-blue and warm, lapping at the white tiles around the edge. When you slide in and push off, it feels soft too. If I had better eyesight, I think, I’d be able to watch boats coming and going along the lagoon outside the windows, repeating bodies of water, blue and grey. In the lane to the right of us, a water aerobics class takes place, rows of legs moving in unison around neon-coloured floats.

As I swim up and down, looking at the pipes above, I consider that swimming in Venice makes you feel a bit closer to the bones of the city. When I swim, I sometimes like to think about what’s beneath the pool. In my regular spot at home, I know it’s just earth - and perhaps some as-yet undiscovered archaeological finds. Here, it’s more water and an upside-down forest of ancient trees holding up the structures of the city, mineralised by their centuries of submersion so that they are more like stone pillars than anything else. I think about the mosaics on the west wall of Torcello Cathedral which I saw the day before, with its specific scene of resurrection for those who have drowned at sea, including a re-used portion of Roman mosaic which depicts fish and sea creatures, of the Lido – Venice’s beach, and of the pictures I’ve seen of people swimming there. I think of Lord Byron, taking his evening dip in the Grand Canal and of the hospital supplies boat, bringing everything in by water.

Those drowned at sea resurrected at the Last Judgement. Photo: monicacesarato.com

I wonder then what Venetians think of swimming – how many professional swimmers come from Venice? How many Olympians? Do more people swim as a hobby here than in other places in Italy? Is swimming something you can divorce from your surroundings? Is it like going to the gym, just a matter of normality? Sadly, I have no Italian to ask the good natured chap who is sharing our narrow lane (he does attempt some chat with me, but we resort to polite hand gestures to let each other overtake, after realising that we do not speak each other’s language).

Con bolle - The work of Maurice Marinot, Le Stanze del Vetro, Venice, May, 2019; photo: my own.

The sun comes out suddenly and falls through the tall windows, creating beautiful, illuminated, wavering grids on the bottom of the pool, like light through the big clear windows of Wren churches. I let myself sink down into the water at one end, watching other swimmers pushing off, creating great big clouds of glittering silver bubbles. I’m reminded of the exhibitions of glass we’ve seen this week and on our previous visit; the descriptive labels often carrying the words ‘con bolle,’ – ‘with bubbles’, to denote bubbles caught in the surface of the glass. All of my pontificating and wondering stops and I feel weightless and suspended, as if I’m just being held, as if I suddenly have no form. I drop down to the bottom of the pool and then push off to rise up again, watching the play of light through the water and feeling joyful and fizzy and silly, utterly in my element. Part of me feels as if this sudden blissful moment could have happened in any pool, but part of me feels that this is just another part of the magic of Venice. The constantly shifting light, the endless encounters with outrageous beauty and the unexpected and devastating moments of wonder are as likely to get to you when you’re doing something prosaic as swimming as when you’re admiring a Titian or listening to Vivaldi. There’s no way to escape, even in the water. Perhaps you’re especially susceptible in the water. We get out and put on flip-flops, collecting our towels. Before we leave the hall, we step outside for a moment, through the open fire-escape onto a flat patch of concrete, rapidly drying in the warm morning. The lagoon stretches away, boats bob over the water, the sun warms our skin, ants crawl over our toes and we’re caught between the mundane and the sublime all over again.