Rachel and I set out from Cardiff at 3:50 in the morning. By the time we got to Mestre and installed ourselves in the airbnb room, we were so exhausted we couldn’t see straight, so we took a siesta. By the time we mobilized ourselves to bus into Venice for dinner, there were dark clouds in the sky.
On the walk to the stop, I heard a distant rumble. Rachel convinced me it was airplanes or a truck.
We got to Venice, disembarked, and crossed the Rialto just in time for the sky to turn purple and open up. It had been eighty degrees and muggy till then, but the water was shockingly cold.
It cleared the streets of tourists remarkably quickly, so we took a near-private stroll through the back alleys. And by took a stroll, I mean immediately got lost.
Deep in the dim veins of obscure residential Venice, in alleys narrower than hallways, we began to hear snatches of song from the most angelic choir. We tried to follow the sound, but the centuries-old lanes and plazas and bridges and canals distorted the sound until it almost seemed to be moving. As we chased after it, a sudden flash of lighting illuminated every brick in bone-white, followed by a peal of thunder. Peal is the only possible word. It was louder than the church bells, loud enough to almost shake the door frames.
We never did manage to find the source of the music, but for a moment, we found ourselves in a dead-end medieval alley filled with splattering rain and snarling thunder and the notes of a song that seemed to echo straight out of the past.