Unlike Venice, Abu Dhabi felt alive like all boom towns, its air was suffused with the aroma of endless possibilities. A nautical stone’s throw from its noxious canals, life on the mainland was even worse: Edison and other petrochemical giants had long since turned the port of Marghera into a toxic wasteland whose refuse streamed into the Venetian lagoon’s ancient salt marshes, turning them into putrid putty.Īfter my family left Venice, my parents often reminded me of the unfettered excitement that seized me not long after we relocated to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
The Venice of my birth, a far cry from Casanova’s Serene Republic, whose spectre tourists chase at the tune of hundreds of euros a day, had already been pimped out to cruise ships by the time I had learned to walk in the late 1980s. Jeffers’s Tor House in Carmel / Photo by L.
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