Gillian Longworth McGuire is a food and travel writer and information curator, also known as The Source because of her wealth of information about some of Italy’s most sought-after destinations. Originally from the States, she spent many years in Africa before relocating to Rome. Italy wasn’t love at first sight for her, but rather a slow process of discovery and easing into a culture that she always thought she’d, at some point, leave behind. Until she came to Venice one winter, and a voice in her head told her that that’s where she was meant to be. After a long house-hunting process and an ongoing renovation, Gillian is now a resident of Castello, the quaint, residential neighbourhood that has become the starting point of her exploration of the city. In this interview, she delves into the details of her falling for Venice’s beauty and way of life, the quest for a place to call home, and her goals for the months to come.
INTERVIEW BY VALERIA NECCHIO
PHOTOS BY GILLIAN MCGUIRE // PORTRAITS BY VALERIA NECCHIO
Listen to Gillian’s playlist* x Gli Incurabili
VN: You mentioned that the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Venice is that you find it quiet.
GM: So quiet. We used to visit during the first couple of weeks in January. So I just thought, ‘Well, it’s quiet in January, but surely, in July it gets noisier. But it really doesn’t.’ Especially in the Castello area, which is where we now live, it can be really, really silent.
VN: What changes between summer and winter is that you hear the voices of your neighbours.
GM: Right, when the windows are open. We have the communist circle at the end of the street. I’m always so excited when they have a party; there’s life outside. One day, I’m just gonna jump in.
VN: I’d love to hear about the first time you visited Venice, how that felt, and how it felt to return, and eventually think it would be a good place to call home.
GM: I came here for the first time when I was 15 with my father. He was teaching in Italy for a short period. We had been together for a couple of weeks and by the time we came to Venice we were completely sick of each other. I didn’t want to see another church, I didn’t want to go to another museum. So I just took his card and went shopping for sweaters. But I got hopelessly lost –– I had no map, no phone, of course –– and that quickly turned into wandering around. And I remember wondering, what kind of crazy place is this?
VN: And when did you return after that?
GM: The next time I came, I was with friends from University. My best friend was studying in Austria, and as soon as we landed in Austria we said, ‘Let’s go to Venice!’. It was February, and it was just a kind of magical moment, it was winter –– I’ve always come in the winter, somehow. I remember going on a quest for a legendary nightclub in Lido, which I don’t think ever existed, and if it did, it was certainly not open in February!
And then I didn’t come again for a long time. Even after I moved to Rome with my family in 2006, I didn’t come up here very often. We came up at one point for the Biennale and that was the first time we visited as a family, and it was also my first time looking at the city as a grown-up. And it’s bewitching, really. I mean, there’s no middle ground here: it either completely captures you or you see it as a chaotic, stinky mess.
VN: It’s true, there’s no space for grey areas or in-between feelings: it either rejects you––and you reject it––or it’s completely bewildering. It’s as if you’re looking at two different pictures of two completely different places. But it’s the same place, the difference stands in the eye (or sensibility?) of the person who’s looking.
GM: I know, I’m always very curious when people say, ‘oh, like, how can you live there?
Or –– and I don’t get this all that often, but I do occasionally –– ‘Are you allowed to live in Venice? Really? Oh, that’s fascinating!’ And mind, the last person who asked me this question is a well-travelled, intelligent person; she just couldn’t conceive that people live here. There is definitely this strange perception of there being life here.
VN: And would you say that this perception might be related to visitors struggling to understand that, precisely because there are people living here, the city still has to run at a normal pace, that daily activities need to be carried out?
GM: I’d say that I experienced the opposite: things move a bit slower here. This has been another big adjustment for me: the fact that things can’t move past a certain speed. You adjust to that, it was a very kind of subtle difference, it’s almost intangible, how the day stretches, but it is a noticeable one for me. And with this said, we’re not in Venice for practice. There are more profound reasons.
“We’re not in Venice for practice. There are more profound reasons.”
VN: When and how did the idea of moving to Venice come to be?
GM: We were living in Rome and my husband’s contract was ending. By then, I had lived overseas since I was 22 years old. I was ready to go back to America, and we were making plans to move to California. And then, we came up to Venice for a meeting, because I wanted to find a way to come back and enjoy the city once or twice a year –– so I thought I might start organising a workshop. And on the way home from that meeting, I had this voice in my head going, ‘I want to live in Venice, I want to live in Venice.’
But it didn’t seem possible at the time because, even though we had lived in Italy for 17 years, it was on a diplomatic visa, so none of that time counted. And then, a few weeks later, my husband asked me to watch this retirement video and it turned out that the rules had changed and the Italian government had agreed to count time for people who had worked for the FAO. So I told him, ‘Well, this seems like something we should do even if we decide to go to California. I feel like this is an opportunity not to be wasted, an incredible gift.’ So as we started that very complicated visa process, it never occurred to us to look in Rome. I don’t know why. I just said, ‘Let’s move to Venice’, and my husband said, ‘That’s a great idea, let’s do that.’ I looked at house prices in Venice and, especially compared to the centre of Rome, it all made me think that the plan could work. In retrospect, I think staying in Rome would have felt like a concession in some way. Whereas my life is only elevated here. I miss Rome. I don’t miss living in Rome. Life here is easier in many ways, more predictable.
VN: How was the house hunting process?
GM: It was an adventure. As the buyer, you have to do all the work. So I was calling real estate agents and spending hours looking at online listings. And then, I looked at about 10 properties, so not an inordinate amount of houses. And there was one we really loved, with a little balcony overlooking the Rio dei Greci, so you could see gondolas and the garbage boat and all the things I love. And on the backside, it looked out on the gardens of the Knights of Malta. It was beautiful. But it had some register problems.
VN: I don’t think that there’s any apartment in Venice that doesn’t.
GM: Right? But anyway, of course, my husband was like, we can’t buy this. And I’m like, they’re all going to be like this. So, we saw it four times. And I kept thinking to myself, how do you buy something with your life savings that you’ve never slept in? It seems crazy. All these questions: What are the neighbours like? What does it sound like on a Sunday when there’s a game on? All of these unknowables. But still, we put an offer on it in the morning, but that same night, it disappeared from the website. They had taken a different offer. We were shattered.
So then, I returned during Carnival the following year, and on the train I had seen this other house, which had a horrible staircase in the middle of the room, and another room which was painted bright green…I mean, horrible. But I thought, let’s just go see it, I love that street [just off Via Garibaldi, ndr]. I went and there were two young men living in the house who were both waiters and both seemed very tired –– they didn’t seem too happy about showing the house. So I literally spent 10 minutes there. And as we left, this person, Lorenzo, who had been helping us with the whole process, said: buy this house. And I said, it’s really ugly. And he said, we can fix ugly. The roof is good. Everything is good. All these other houses you’ve looked at, don’t buy them. Buy this one.
And so we did.
And in all of the chaos of buying this house, we got to live there for almost four months. And it just got better and better. The neighbours are nice and the street is lovely. The house is warm and not damp. All very crucial things –– things that are difficult to fix. Turns out, Lorenzo was right.
VN: What happens now?
GM: Now it will be chaos and it will make me cry, but at least it’s moving forward. We had six months in which we thought we’d lose a lot of money and a lot of time and that was maybe going to get ugly. Nobody wanted that. So thankfully everybody just kept pushing the ball forward, and we are starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel.
Now, we just walk out of the door and walk to the water and think, how do I get to live? That’s what I say every day. How do I get to live here? And mind, it’s not glamorous like some neighbourhoods are, but it’s just so Venetian.
VN: How did you feel in relation to the community?
GM: It’s hard to make new friends in a new city as an adult. It’s hard to make new friends. But I find that the foreign community here is more open and welcoming than the similar community in Rome. I don’t know if it’s because Venice is smaller and you have to really choose to live in Venice, but this has been my experience. Again, compared to Rome: I got sent to Rome, it was another place my husband had a job in. I fell in love with it eventually, but it wasn’t a choice. Whereas I don’t think very many people end up here by accident. So there’s already this kind of filter, it’s a very particular kind of person that can put up with this.
VN: And this circles back to what we were saying before, about the city not allowing any in-between feelings.
GM: Here’s a story I think you’ll appreciate. When we were moving to California, I visited my very best friend in Maryland –– that same friend that lived in Austria. I said to her, we are leaving Rome and we’re going to move to Los Angeles. And she sat me down and took me by the hands and said, I will say this to you one time, I’ll never bring it up again. You are surrounded by beauty in your life, she said. You cannot move to Los Angeles. And it is something I think about, you know, if not daily, certainly every week. She was so right. There is beauty in Los Angeles, of course, like there might be in Mestre. But it is not beautiful. Whereas here, you’re surrounded by it, you know.
“Now, we just walk out of the door and walk to the water and think, how do I get to live? That’s what I say every day. How do I get to live here?”
VN: And then you have the presence of water all around you. I’m saying something super trivial now, but it’s true that, if everything around you is beautiful and then you have the water that reflects that beauty, it is all amplified to the nth.
GM: And you can hear it. I hear the water all day long. I hear the boats –– that’s my background noise. And it’s so much more soothing than normal traffic, obviously.
VN: Now that you’ve settled in, do you have a classic or favourite path you take, or a favourite ritual or routine?
GM: I don’t think I have a real routine yet because, even though we got our keys in September and moved in then, I have been holding my breath for all the bureaucratic reasons we spoke about, and until now I have been afraid to jinx it, which is silly, but I wouldn’t put a key on a pretty key chain until, you know, until I had that piece of paper.
In general, I’m not a morning person. My husband gets up and goes to the gym in the morning, so I have that big block where no one’s in the house for writing, which I love. Then I go out in the afternoon and take a long walk. I love the area around San Francesco della Vigna, that cloister is my favourite, favourite thing. In the winter, when it’s not so crowded, there’s nothing better than walking along the Riva degli Schiavoni towards San Marco in the sunset. It’s just magical.
VN: So you’re a walker by nature.
GM: Totally. I dislike cars. I always choose to walk if I can. So in that sense, this is the perfect place for me.
VN: How do you relate to the tidal nature of the lagoon?
GM: I’m a beach girl, not a lagoon girl, that much I know. I love the idea of the lagoon. I love being immersed in it, but I find it a little lakey, so I’m not tempted to swim in it. I still like to look at it, It’s just spectacular. I’m lucky enough to have a couple of friends who own a little house and a farm on Sant’Erasmo. They are very generous and invite us there, which is perfect. I love visiting. They both want to move out there and live there forever. I can see why, but it’s definitely not for me. It’s the country. I’m not a country mouse, I’m a city mouse. I love going to visit and then I’m very happy to get off the boat in San Elena and walk on stones.
VN: You’re a beach girl, you said, so you must enjoy the Lido.
GM: Lido has been this incredible discovery. I had always kind of dismissed it thinking, you know, it’s just like some strange suburb. And then a friend came to visit last year from the States and he said, ‘What’s this Lido about?’ And so we went to explore it, and it was a huge surprise.
But in truth, it’s always very hard to get me out of Venice. There’s too much to see. Particularly before we moved here, I just had too many things I wanted to do on the main island. Lido feels like you’ve gone on a vacation. It feels so different from Venice.
VN: I also was like a late discoverer of the Lido. And once I did, that was a reminder that, well, we actually live at the beach, sort of. In the summer, I can finish work and hop on a vaporetto and I go swimming until sunset, have a drink and come home to your city life.
GM: Exactly.
VN: What are you looking forward to?
GM: One of my 2024 goals is to cross every bridge.
VN: That’s so cool!
GM: It’s just as a way to get me to every corner and, as the crowds come back, stop allowing for my world to get smaller and smaller. Because this is what happens. You retreat to the backroads. I don’t want that. So yes, there are about 400 bridges, and I have some checklists on my phone with which I keep track. Castello is done.
VN: It’s interesting, this concept of not wanting to retreat. It’s also about taking space, and having some form of agency. It’d be very easy to just complain behind closed doors, but we’ve seen where that’s taken us. What needs to happen is the exact opposite of that: reclaiming space, quietly or loudly, selfishly or selflessly. But taking space –– being that virtual or physical.
GM: Let’s bring in young, interesting people. I saw a movie recently, called Cielo Aperto, that talked about this exact thing, about reclaiming space, and lots of the people doing that were young people doing things like underground discos, or taking up decommissioned pavilions. So I totally agree that this is a needed process –– reclaiming space as much as we possibly can, together, without fear.
//
*A note from Gillian on her playlist: “Venice is a difficult complicated beautiful place. The decision to move wasn’t hard. Being able to live here is/has been a long and tedious process, but what dream worth having is easy to achieve? These songs tell part of the story of that dream. From leaving my beloved Rome to celebrating Redentore in a gondola parked in front of the Piazza San Marco to watching Italians sing every word of an anti war song on Christmas Eve in a repurposed vaporetto on the edge of the northern lagoon. And finally after so much waiting, being home.”
