Philip Gwynne Jones was born in South Wales in 1966, and lived and worked throughout Europe before settling in Scotland in the 1990s. He first came to Italy in 1994, when he spent some time working for the European Space Agency in Frascati. Philip now lives permanently in Venice, where he works as a teacher, writer and translator. He is the author of the Nathan Sutherland series, which is set in contemporary Venice and which has been translated into several languages, including Italian and German.

PRAISE FOR PHILIP GWYNNE JONES

‘A playful novel, recounted by a witty and engaging narrator . . . as Venetian as a painting by Bellini (or a glass of Bellini). Oh, and it’s also an unputdownable thriller’ – Gregory Dowling, author of Ascension, on The Venetian Game

‘A crime book for people with sophisticated tastes: Venice, opera, renaissance art, good food and wine . . . I enjoyed all that and more’ – The Crime Warp

‘The Venetian setting is vividly described and Gwynne Jones’s good, fluent writing makes for easy reading’ – Jessica Mann, Literary Review

‘It is no surprise to find that Philip Gwynne Jones lives in Venice . . . art and architecture interweave into a story that builds to an almost surreal climax’ – Daily Mail, on The Venetian Game

‘A civilized, knowledgeable, charming antidote to the darker reaches of the genre, full of entertaining descriptions of the city . . . Lovely. Makes you want to book a flight to Venice straight away’ – N J Cooper, Bookoxygen.com

Also by Philip Gwynne Jones

The Venetian Game

Vengeance in Venice

The Venetian Masquerade

CONSTABLE

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Robinson

Copyright © Philip Gwynne Jones, 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-47213-021-1

Constable
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

For Caroline. None of this
would be happening without you.

Introduction

At the end of 2011, my wife Caroline and I gave up our jobs in order to move to Venice.

We had no idea if it would be possible to live there full-time, if we would be able to earn a living, whether homesickness would drive us back to the UK or, indeed, how to go about a project such as this.

I set to work trying to find some information that could help us, either in print or on the internet. I found numerous accounts of moving to Italy, but surprisingly few on Venice itself; and even fewer from the perspective of ‘normal’ people – those who would have to get a regular, non-glamorous job in order to make ends meet.

I decided that, whether it were to be successful or not, the experience would be worth recording, either as a ‘how to do it’ guide or as a terrible warning to others. In the event, the scope of the book grew as I wrote it, and became the saga of what I once called ‘The Venice Project’.

It is not a history of La Serenissima – the story of the Most Serene Republic has been written many times, and by writers far more adept than I. Neither is it an art, music or architecture primer. It’s the story of what happened to us during the most extraordinary few years of our lives; when we went from nine-to-five jobs to living in the most beautiful city on earth.

This is the story of how we did it; and how we are still, just about, getting away with it.

Prologue

Music has been my great love, ever since I was a kid spending my pocket money on 1970s punk albums that my parents looked on with horror. The New Wave supported me through school, while university was a voyage of discovery into progressive rock. I went through a brief folky phase, complete with Aran jumper. When I started playing guitar in my twenties, I became obsessed with old blues and jazz records.

In the early 1990s, I found myself working on an IT contract for an oil company in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. I was the only Brit in the office, and living in a hotel. Weekends could be lonely and I knew I had to do something other than spend them in the pub with a book.

I discovered that you could go to the opera in Essen for not much more than ten Deutschmarks. I figured I had nothing to lose. My first opera was Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. I’d like to say it was a life-changing experience, but the truth is I nodded off during the second act. I knew, however, that this was something I wanted to explore and went back a month later, for Parsifal. I stayed awake this time. I had acquired a new obsession.

I spent many years working away from the UK, and frequently on my own. Music – mainly classical by this time – was my travelling companion. Then I moved to Edinburgh in 1996 and ended up staying.

I came to know a group of people – anonymously – via an online classical music chatroom. A number of them were based in Scotland, and we arranged to get together for a few beers in Glasgow. We talked about concerts, recordings and whether it was right for a pub in that particular part of the city to be offering such a thing as a ‘Pint and Panini [sic]’. It turned out that the meet-up was also a farewell party for one of our number.

He was leaving to move to Spain with his wife. He told me they were going to teach English. Something called TEFL, which I found out stood for Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

I’d never heard of this and thought little more of it until the following year when I ran into him again, this time in a pub in Edinburgh. He was back to visit family for a couple of days. He talked about life in Spain. He seemed happy. I complained about my job. A lot. He put up with this with remarkable patience, went to the bar, returned with a pair of pints and smiled.

‘Look, Phil, you’ve got no kids. You’ve got no real ties here. You could do this as well, you know. What’s keeping you?’

I never saw him again.

Chapter 1

I met Caroline on 23 July 1998. I was living in Edinburgh, had recently finished a contract with Scottish Gas, and was desperately looking for something I could do beyond computer programming. As well as classical music I had become addicted to playing the electric guitar, and I was going to take time off to study it properly.

I’d signed up with the Guitar Institute in London. I’d given notice on my flat, and told my boss I wouldn’t be renewing my contract. I’d found a place to live in London, and hired a van.

I was in my mid-thirties, I had only played in covers bands and – in my heart of hearts – I knew I was never going to be more than a competent pub rocker. It was, in retrospect, an insane plan.

On what I thought would be my last ever day of work in the IT industry, I went for a meal with friends, and then on to the pub. People drifted away, until two of us remained. Graeme was a pal from a previous IT job, and we frequently met up over a beer to talk about football and old guitar bands. It was getting late, and the atmosphere was downbeat. We didn’t know when we’d next see each other.

‘Hi, Graeme.’ The speaker was a woman standing at the bar.

‘Hi, Caroline.’ Graeme dragged a stool over to our table. ‘D’you want to join us?’

She came and sat down. She’d been for a drink with her ex, and had decided to stay for one more beer after he’d gone home. Graeme had known her for years and, with impeccable timing, had waited until I’d decided to leave Edinburgh in search of rock stardom before introducing us.

We talked. And then we talked some more. About music and theatre and opera and art, about politics and pubs, and which Bob Dylan album was the best. We discovered we had the same recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. And at some point we realised that Graeme was no longer there . . .

The next day I rang my landlord and told him I’d changed my mind. I rang my boss and asked if I could have my job back. I lost my deposit on the van and the new flat.

I didn’t care. Because I knew that Caroline and I were going to get married . . .

We became engaged that Christmas, and married in 2000. Both of us, for many years, had been freelance IT workers, regularly moving from company to company every couple of years. Caroline – who had studied Prehistory and Archaeology – had ended up in IT by mistake, and was a systems analyst; I was a programmer and discovering that work opportunities were becoming thin on the ground.

Neither of us wanted to work away from home any more, and we decided it was time to settle down in Edinburgh. We were middle-aged, we had no savings, we owned no property. We needed to start thinking about the future. We would buy a flat and get steady, secure jobs that would see us through to retirement and a comfy pension. We were going to do the right thing. The sensible thing.

We ended up working for the Bank of Scotland.

The roof collapsed in 2008. Despite all assurances to the contrary, everyone at work knew that something was wrong. Each week, an email would arrive from the chief executive, assuring us that we were all doing very well and the bank was going from strength to strength. It didn’t fool anyone. The big giveaway was when the mirthless grin on his attached photograph changed to a stern, unsmiling one.

Then, one September afternoon, the BBC website reported that Lloyds Banking Group was seeking permission from the government to relax competition law and proceed with a takeover. The site was quickly blocked and half-hearted denials were posted on the office intranet, but everybody knew that the game was up: in the space of ten years, a bank that predated the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland had been run into the ground.

In late 2010 we were told that Caroline’s job as a senior analyst was at immediate risk and that mine – a more humble but knuckle-whiteningly stressful position in technical support of financial systems – would also be within twelve months. We faced redundancy, in middle age, in a sector that was dying on its knees. Our flat, bought shortly after joining BoS, was worth less than we had paid for it and our pensions were practically worthless. We had to face the fact that we had been rubbish at capitalism.

Except that, the more we thought about it, the more we wondered why we would want to stay with the bank at all. It hadn’t been much of a job for years and, following the takeover, the situation had become progressively worse. We saw a steady stream of friends and colleagues losing their jobs and any job satisfaction was long gone, replaced by the fear of redundancy. We worked in an industry that the public despised. It had become a horrible place to work.

I knew that my best years in IT were over a decade behind me. I was burned out. In my darker moments I felt as if I would be trapped in a job I hated until the stress of it killed me.

Why would we want to stay there? What if we were to try something else?

I remembered the Man in the Pub, and started to think.

I first came to Italy in 1994, when I spent some time working for the European Space Agency in Frascati, a small-ish town in the hills outside of Rome. It sounded like the most exciting job I was ever likely to have. The reality was somewhat different.

I was not designing satellites or Mars probes (to be honest, that was probably for the best). The job could be described as ‘collating a list of periodicals and subscribers across various legacy platforms and migrating them into an integrated bespoke system on a distributed client-server architecture’. Or, in plain English, ‘taking a lot of old address books and putting them all together’.

It was not the best job in the world, and the project dragged on for six months. I hadn’t anticipated that and so, instead of finding an apartment in Rome and enjoying all the capital had to offer, I rented a house in a remote village in the Colli Albani which, I reasoned, would be ‘romantic’. I had not thought about the logistics of living in a village with no public transport at the weekends.

Despite an unrewarding job and long late-night walks up narrow and unlit roads, I enjoyed Italy immensely. No, more than that, I adored it. I loved walking around the ancient sites of Rome, or taking the train to Florence and realising that every building you entered held something amazing. I enjoyed the company of Italian football fans during the team’s doomed but heroic World Cup exploits. If I hadn’t quite made the most of the experience, Italy, I knew, was somewhere I wanted to return.

I never did manage it, until I met Caroline. We became engaged while on holiday in the Dolomites, honeymooned in Sicily and kept returning to Italy, year after year. Amalfi and Positano. Naples and Palermo. Rome and Florence and Bologna. Venice. And, always, the same conversation, typically on the last night of the holiday: Do you think we’ll ever be able to move here?

It seemed impossible. We didn’t have the money or the language skills, and I was dubious about the European Space Agency ever taking me back. It would have to be post-retirement, but I wasn’t sure we’d ever be able to do that anyway. It was a pipe dream, something to take the edge off going back to work.

But now a Man in a Pub had told me about something called TEFL, and living in Spain while teaching English. What if we were to try this in Italy? With this TEFL thing and a bit of redundancy money, might it be possible?

I spent hours upon hours running the figures through spreadsheets. We could clear our debts, use the remainder to move and attempt to live off whatever income teaching would bring in. The most basic of research indicated that this was not going to be a lot but, if the two of us were bringing in a salary, it started to look feasible. We would have between one and two years of contingency to try to make it work.

There is no easy way to tell your wife that you’ve had a life-changing idea based on a conversation with a man you met in a pub years ago. I was prepared to laugh it off as a silly joke on my part. And yet, when I explained the figures, Caroline looked at me and said, ‘So . . . we could actually do this?’

We had a good life in Edinburgh. We had pubs, the theatre, concerts, galleries, plenty of friends. I liked the way we would run into people we knew simply by wandering about the town. I had lived there for nearly twenty years, longer than I had spent anywhere in my life, and the city fitted me like a comfy old pair of shoes. I had never imagined wanting to live elsewhere.

It was a lot to give up. Were we really going to take such a life-changing decision on the basis of something so uncertain? Yet it was a spine-tinglingly exciting idea.

There was no great moment of decision for us, but in the early part of 2011 we tacitly crossed the line from ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we did this?’ to ‘We’re actually going to do this!’

The Venice Project was born. The next time the bank held a round of voluntary redundancies, we would stick our hands up. We would pool whatever money they gave us and move to Italy to teach English.

It was not risk-free, but we had tried risk-free before and the path of least resistance had led us to the financial services industry. If it worked, the prize was a great one. If it didn’t, and we ended up back in the UK – well, we would at least have tried. There would never be a better opportunity of doing something like this.

There was also, of course, the possibility of ending up broke and unemployable. We preferred not to think about that.

Why Venice?

We didn’t come for Vivaldi, Gabrieli or Monteverdi. We didn’t come for Titian, Tintoretto or Tiepolo. We didn’t even come to have a gondola ride. We came for Gilbert and George.

Our first visit to Venice, in 2005, was for the Art Biennale, the huge international contemporary art exhibition that takes over the city every couple of years. We had a week and figured that would be enough. As it turned out, that was scarcely enough time to scratch the surface of the Biennale, let alone the city itself.

The strange thing is, Venice itself didn’t make much of an impact on us. I came away with an impression of it being ‘quite nice’ but little more beyond memories of the suffocating heat of the Arsenale and aching feet. We decided we should come back in a non-Biennale year and see what it was properly like. Or, as I put it, I wanted to look at art by dead people.

Forward to 2006. Our flight from Naples had been delayed for hours. It was past midnight when we arrived at Marco Polo airport in Venice. There were no boats at that time and we didn’t have the budget for a water taxi. We took the bus to Piazzale Roma and caught the night vaporetto to the Zattere, and our hotel.

It was 2 a.m. by the time we arrived and, fortunately, the night porter let us in. We barely had the energy to open a bottle of prosecco from the minibar before crashing out.

The next morning, I opened the curtains and gazed at the view across the Giudecca canal to Palladio’s Church of Il Redentore, the Redeemer. The sun was shining on the water and I knew I had never seen a more beautiful city in my life. I was beginning to understand why Venice is special. We returned year on year, for longer and longer. If our Italian never improved very much, we started to feel at home in the city and to know our way around; and we could kid ourselves that having a Venezia Unica card – and hence the ability to buy cheaper tickets for the vaporetto – was almost as good as being a resident.

At the end of our last holiday, in July 2011, we took the Alilaguna boat from the Zattere to Marco Polo airport. Caroline, somehow, snoozed the whole way. I leant my face against the window, watching as the city slipped from sight. The unbearable thought had occurred to me that we might never be able to return. If only one of us was able to give up their job, the redundancy wouldn’t be enough money to fund The Project, neither would we have the cash to come back on holiday.

We had thought we would go anywhere in Italy where we could find work, but no. It had to be Venice. It had to be The Venice Project.

*    *    *

I’d been spreadsheet-pounding for weeks, trying to work out worst-possible-case scenarios along the lines of ‘If we can’t find work, how long before we have to give up?’

I looked at our possible redundancy pot and added in what we’d managed to save on overpaying the mortgage. I deducted the cost of clearing all our debts. Then I made a stab at estimating the living cost in Venice. I assumed that neither of us would be able to find work for a year.

It didn’t leave a lot left over.

We could soften the blow by renting the flat, but that still wouldn’t be enough to cover the mortgage. Did we really want to be over a thousand miles away in the event of problems with the flat or with the tenants? Would the fact that the rendering on the building needed to be replaced – a job that would involve months of scaffolding blocking out the view, ruining the flat’s main selling point – make it impossible to let anyway? There was also the not-inconsiderable cost of putting all our furniture into storage.

It was a problem. Not enough to stop us going ahead, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we didn’t have sufficient contingency.

We spoke to our next-door neighbour, a young man involved in the property business, with a view to getting his opinion on the best thing to do; and in the hope he’d manage the letting on our behalf. Except that as soon as we told him what we were doing he said he and his partner would like to buy the flat off us.

It was a shock. This had never been part of the plan, not least because nothing was selling in Edinburgh. This was knocking away every support and fall-back position. We’d bought late, at the top of the housing market, and if we cut our losses now the chances of being able to buy anywhere in the future were remote.

Yet when I punched the new figures into the spreadsheet, it became obvious. We’d gain another pot of cash and massively reduce our outgoings. It would give us a degree of comfort. If we couldn’t find work in Venice, we would at least have the chance to start again elsewhere.

There was really no decision to be made. We haggled over the price but, realistically, it was the only thing to do. In the middle of a desperate crisis in the housing market, we had been lucky.

That left the question of what to do with our possessions. We’d moved from a spacious rented property into a flat half the size and a third more expensive, for the dubious privilege of being able to say that it was ‘ours’. We’d already downsized significantly and got rid of a lot of our stuff. I’d taken so many boxes of old VHS tapes to the Oxfam shop in Morningside that they’d been able to hold a special SF and horror video sale.

But we still had too much clutter and the cost of storing it was going to be enormous. On a weekend visit, my cousin mentioned that they had some outbuildings that we could use. This was marvellous, but it wouldn’t seem fair to take advantage of this for free, surely? Her younger daughter was about to start university and would need a car. We weren’t going to need ours in Venice; so they’d take the car off our hands and, in exchange, we could store all our possessions with them. We’d have to transport everything to their house in the New Forest, but it was still a good deal.

We’d been lucky again. It was starting to seem like destiny. Caroline worked an absurd ten-month period of notice as IT staff migrated systems that would ultimately make their own jobs redundant, but became free to work on The Venice Project full time from October 2011.

All I had to do was successfully lose my job. I’d been assigned to a series of dead-end projects throughout the year, all of which had been cancelled within months of initiation. I thought this had to be a good sign. Surely, if they couldn’t find me any work during the most intense period of IT activity in a decade, they’d be more than happy to let me go. It seemed unlikely that I’d suddenly become indispensable. In all likelihood they would realise that I’d been bluffing my way through the job for years and this was a gilt-edged opportunity to get rid of me. Nevertheless, the thought that it wouldn’t go to plan was costing me more than a few sleepless nights. We needed to get lucky one more time.

A Friday afternoon, late September, 2011 . . .

My manager sat across the table from me and laid out a sheaf of papers. We’d worked together for years, and had always got on well. She’d been sympathetic to the fact that my job had been slowly run down over the previous years, but there was nothing she could do about it. I’d been hoping all day that she’d be able to give me a nod or a wink to tell me everything was going to be OK, but she’d been dragged into meeting after meeting, finally finding a space for me right at the end of the day.

‘This bit has to be formal, Phil, as you know.’

I half-nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

‘I’m pleased to say your application for voluntary redundancy has been accepted.’

I let out a deep sigh. I might have cracked a watery smile, but my main recollection is of trying not to shake. She pushed a sheet of paper towards me.

‘This is what we can offer you.’

I read it through. It was almost exactly as I expected. The figure on the bottom line was not huge by any means. Yet again, I ran through the sums in my head.

‘You don’t have to sign it now. Talk to Caroline first if you like. But if you do sign, you have to be aware that this is final. You won’t be able to change your mind.’

For a few seconds I paused. I was certain, so absolutely certain that I wanted this. I had been almost sick with worry that morning, drinking endless coffees and cursing that – having given up years ago – the consolation of a cigarette break was denied me. But, for a moment, I stopped and wondered. If I signed, everything would change. All we’d managed to save over the past few years would be put at risk. There was no certainty that this would work. If it failed, we would not be struggling IT professionals. We would be bankrupt ex-IT professionals, with worthless pensions, facing a bleak future.

The feeling lasted for a few seconds at most. Then the doubt passed and I reached for a pen. My breathing returned to normal, my heartbeat slowed.

‘Are you quite sure, Phil?’

My hand was steady and I scrawled my signature. I passed the forms back and slumped in my chair, exhaling heavily.

‘Thank you. Really, thank you.’

She smiled. ‘I’m glad you’re pleased. We’ll miss you. Are you off to tell Caroline then?’

‘In a minute. I need a coffee first. Actually, I need a drink, but a coffee will do for now.’

I got to my feet, unsteadily, and we shook hands.

‘Oh, just one more thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t suppose I could have gardening leave?’

She laughed and shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Oh well. It was worth a go.’

I grabbed a coffee and went back to my desk. At this time on Friday, most of my colleagues had left for the weekend. Only a few people were around, and nobody gave me so much as a quizzical glance. I reached for the phone to call Caroline . . .

It was settled. We really were going.

The reaction to our news was mixed. Most people thought it was fantastic. The support we received was touching, and humbling.

There were, of course, a few Jeremiahs. It would have been strange if there hadn’t been. There were voices of concern along the lines of ‘you’ll find it difficult to get work’ (a fair point, there was no guarantee of this at all), which we accepted were well-meant; but also some rather strange ones.

‘Is Caroline OK with this?’ (No, I’ve made her give up her job and sold the flat against her wishes.)

‘Are you Catholic?’ (And, on being told no, ‘Hmm. It would be better if you were.’)

‘But Italy is broken!’ (Damn, now we’ve got no jobs and no home, why didn’t you tell us earlier?)

There was more than a little validity to the last point. I’d been reading the online Italian papers for a couple of years – it had been a way to pass the time while I waited for my latest project to be cancelled – and by the end of 2011 I was under no illusions about the state of Italy. I became familiar with the phrases lo Spread vola and Borsa crolla. President Giorgio Napolitano had finally, somehow, persuaded Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to resign to spend more time with his lawyers, and installed a technocratic government under the leadership of economist Mario Monti. There was a feeling that at least the grown-ups were in charge again, but there was no getting away from the fact that Italy had (and, indeed, still has) serious economic problems.

But what were we to do? We would have felt better if we were leaving for a country with a booming economy, low unemployment and a prosperous population desperate to spend their spare money on English lessons. But, in the middle of the worst economic crisis of my lifetime, this didn’t seem likely in the near future.

It had to be now. We’d often hoped to be able to move to Italy in the future, but could we realistically plan for it? Could we assume we’d have our health? Given the state of our pensions, there was no guarantee of being able to retire at all. If we were moving to a country facing great uncertainties, we were also leaving a deeply unhappy one.

The chances of this opportunity coming along again seemed vanishingly small. It had to be now. Carpe diem or, if you prefer, se non ora, quando: if not now, when?