The Independent on Sunday: September 2004

The Perfect Weekend


The summer holidays are over and it’s a long time until Christmas.  We’re going to need a break.  Our Weekend Special kicks off with travellers’ tales of the getaways they’ll never forget.

Mrs Smith and I had a really good trip to Venice.  The best thing was arriving at the airport, because you arrive right by the water then get on to a James Bond-style speedboat and see Venice for the first time from the lagoon, which was really quite special.  We stayed at a really cool boutique hotel, which is called DD724 and is in the Dorsoduro district that isn’t very touristy.  It was near the Guggenheim museum, which we walked to and that was fabulous.  It was a slightly cooler side of Venice, away from the Japanese and Americans clicking their cameras.

We did classic things such as having an expensive coffee in St Mark’s Square, which was lovely.  We also found a cool mask shop called Ca’Macana which was stunning and produced the masks for Eyes Wide Shut.  The beautiful thing about Venice is that you can just walk, which is funny for a city with so much water;  you end up doing more walking than boating, because the gondolas have become expensive.  We stumbled around some amazing lanes, and it was great fun to get lost.  We found a really fabulous local restaurant called the Ristorante Cantina Canaletto.
The last thing that we did was buy a sculptured wood oar-rest from a gondola from a man called Saverio Pastor who has a workshop where you can buy them;  they’re fantastic and we now have it as an objet d’art at home.

James Lohan is the co-author of the guide book ‘Mr & Mrs Smith European Cities’, published in November by Spy Publishing (www.mrandmrssmith.com) and ‘Mr & Mrs Smith Hotel Collection’, which is out now.