Once, Out of Venice

Once, Out of Venice is a lyrical travel memoir that captures the quiet, profound beauty of a winter road trip across northern and central Italy in 2002. After the intoxicating whirlwind of Venice Carnival-where the author arrived with three hundred rolls of film and departed carrying a single, indelible memory of collective joy-he and his friend Paul turn their backs on the lagoon. They trade gondolas for a tiny blue hatchback and set off along a route sketched on a map in Paris, chasing the permanent revelations of stone, mosaic, and marble.
Over twelve unhurried days, the journey unfolds as a private dialogue between a photographer, a scholar, and the Italian landscape. From the hushed, golden mosaics of Ravenna's Byzantine basilicas to the sharp, vinegary depth of traditional Modena balsamic; from Brunelleschi's impossible dome in Florence to the shell-shaped embrace of Siena's Piazza del Campo; from the fairy-tale cliff-top cathedral of Orvieto to the exhilarating, leg-burning conquest of Rome by bicycle-this is a pilgrimage measured not in miles but in cappuccinos, exposed film canisters, and the gradual weight of wonder.
The book is steeped in sensory detail and contemplative observation. Nabati writes with a photographer's eye for light and fragment, revealing how silence can ring louder than crowds, how ancient gold tesserae still shimmer after fifteen centuries, and how a simple meal in a quiet trattoria can feel like communion. Historical and artistic insights are woven seamlessly into personal experience, never didactic, always illuminating.
Beneath the beauty runs a subtle thread: the lingering spirit of Venice-its masks, its fleeting magic-does not fade but travels with them, quietly revealing that Italy, for certain temperaments, is less a foreign country than a long-awaited homecoming. Intimate, elegant, and deeply felt, Once, Out of Venice is both a love letter to Italy's timeless masterpieces and a meditation on the transformative power of slow, attentive travel.
It reminds us that the greatest journeys are often those that begin the moment the spectacle ends.