Ettore's Dream

From Cervia to Venice by bike, along the coast: four days that may have been a single night

Ettore is an invented character, and his is a dream. The places, the ferries, the pontoon bridges and the voices that cross it are real: they come from travel accounts and reviews left by people who have ridden this road wide awake.

Ettore falls asleep on a bench at the edge of the Cervia salt pans, his bike leaning against his knees and a canvas bag in his lap. Inside is half a kilo of sweet salt. The last thing he hears before sleep is the salt shifting, like sand in an hourglass turned by someone else. The last word he says is: Venice.

When he opens his eyes it is dawn, but the wrong dawn. The salt pans have become mirrors, and in every mirror there is a different sky. The flamingos stand on one leg, hundreds of them, just as a review read who knows when had promised: come in June or July. They all turn north together, like a compass needle. Ettore understands that he must follow them. He climbs into the saddle, and the salt stays under his soles, as another unknown voice had told him: bring rubber sandals, the salt stays on your feet.

The first day, or perhaps the first hour

The pine wood of Milano Marittima opens like a curtain and closes behind him. At Porto Corsini the ferry is waiting with its engine running: on board only a lady with her dog and a gull on the railing, staring him in the eye. Somewhere far away a voice complains: in summer the queue is an Odyssey. But in dreams there is no queue. There is only the water of the canal moving aside to let them through.

Then the embankment between the Reno and Bellocchio. Ettore recognises the phrase before the place: a ribbon of land spared by the sea. He rides a thin thread between one lagoon on the right and another on the left, and the crosswind speaks into his ear in his grandmother's voice. The flamingos rise and for a stretch they become his sky. Ettore realises he is answering the wind, and the bike, he would swear it, answers him.

In Comacchio evening falls all at once, like a sheet laid over the canals. He stops on the Trepponti, the bridge that leads in five directions, and in the dream all five are the right ones. He eats eel: it tastes of a memory he did not know he had.

The second day: a river over a river

The bell tower of Pomposa appears on the horizon long before the abbey, and for half an hour Ettore pedals without getting a metre closer, as in those dreams where you run and never arrive. Then, suddenly, he is there. In the Bosco della Mesola the road turns to sand and he gets off to push, as he had been told. Among the holm oaks a deer watches him, motionless, with the eyes of one who has seen every cyclist in the world go by and already knows how this journey will end, but will not say.

At Gorino the river has built a bridge out of its own boats. Boats side by side, a deck of planks on top, the Po flowing beneath without hurry. Ettore feels the water breathing under his wheels: he crosses a river walking on a river. At the toll booth a man asks him for two euros fifty; a distant voice, from a review, protests that it is too much. Ettore pays and says thank you: in the dream it seems a fair price for the privilege of floating.

On the other side another country begins, though no sign says so. Around the Sacca degli Scardovari the landscape changes with every blink; someone had written it, a thousand landscapes every 100 metres, and in the dream there are even more. The mussel poles rise from the water like an orchestra waiting for its conductor. The fishermen's cavane float a hand's breadth above their own reflection. A coypu crosses the road with the gravity of a notary; Ettore brakes, and she gives him a nod that means: here, right of way has always been ours.

That night, inside the dream, Ettore sleeps in Porto Tolle, and dreams of dreaming. His clothes no longer smell clean but of wind and lagoon. At dinner he eats the mussels of the Sacca he watched growing that afternoon, and it feels like greeting old acquaintances.

The third day: the boatman

The third day is made of rivers. Every time Ettore believes he has crossed them all, another one appears, like a word that returns in a song. At Porto Levante there is a small ferry, the passo barca, and a boatman with the face of every boatman of the last five hundred years. "Where are you going?" he asks. "To Venice," Ettore replies. The boatman nods the way one nods at obvious things: everyone, sooner or later, goes to Venice. Even the water they are floating on.

Rosolina, the pine woods of Porto Caleri, the Brenta and the Adige passing water to each other like two old men sharing a secret. Chioggia reaches the nose before the eyes: fish, wet nets, diesel. In the harbour the fishing boats bear the names of women and saints, and at night, in the dream, they talk quietly among themselves. Cats keep watch over the quays. Ettore understands that Chioggia is the Venice that Venice dreams of when it is tired of being looked at.

The fourth day: the islands in a row

The last day begins on a line 11 boat. Bikes board after the passengers, if the captain agrees. The captain looks at Ettore, looks at the bag of salt peeping out of his pannier, and nods, as if he had been waiting for centuries for someone carrying that cargo.

Pellestrina is a long, thin island, drawn with a single pencil stroke. On one side coloured houses and boats pulled up on shore, on the other the murazzi, the great walls of Istrian stone the Serenissima built to keep the sea out; in the dream they breathe, as the pontoon bridge breathed. Someone called it a placid world, marked by the rhythms of fishing. The women in front of their doors work bobbin lace, and the threads stretch to the horizon and stitch the sky to the lagoon. They greet him as if he had passed by yesterday too. Perhaps he did.

At Santa Maria del Mare, the last ferry: five minutes of water to Alberoni. Then Malamocco, the little Venice where the Doge once lived, and the Lido, as far as Santa Maria Elisabetta. There the road ends, because in Venice you do not cycle: the city is crossed on foot or on the water. Ettore locks the bike and pats its handlebars, as you would a horse.

The vaporetto glides towards St Mark's. Ettore opens the bag and lets a handful of Cervia salt fall into the lagoon. It dissolves in an instant, as if the water had been waiting for it for centuries. And then something happens that no review had foreseen: the flamingos of Cervia all land together in the basin of St Mark's, on one leg, and turn towards him.

Ettore wakes on the bench by the salt pans. It is dawn, the right one. The bike leans against his knees, the canvas bag in his lap, a little lighter than yesterday. Under his soles there is a film of salt, and in his legs the exact feeling of two hundred and eighty kilometres. He looks north and smiles: the most beautiful road to Venice is the one from which Venice is never seen, until the very end.

So he climbs into the saddle. Wide awake, this time.

If you want to do it for real (wide awake)

• Stage 1 – Cervia → Comacchio, about 95 km: Cervia salt pans, pine wood, Porto Corsini ferry, embankment between the Reno and Bellocchio.
• Stage 2 – Comacchio → Porto Tolle, about 80 km: Pomposa, Bosco della Mesola, pontoon bridges of Gorino and Santa Giulia, Sacca degli Scardovari.
• Stage 3 – Porto Tolle → Chioggia, about 70 km: passo barca at Porto Levante, Rosolina, Porto Caleri, Sottomarina.
• Stage 4 – Chioggia → Pellestrina → Lido di Venezia, about 35 km: ACTV line 11 boat Chioggia–Pellestrina, Santa Maria del Mare–Alberoni ferry, Malamocco, Santa Maria Elisabetta.
• Surface: tarmac, cycle paths, gravel and short sandy stretches in the Bosco della Mesola. Almost no climbing.
• Ferries and pontoon bridges: some are seasonal or closed when the river is in flood. Always check timetables and opening before setting off.
• Venice: you cannot cycle in the historic centre. Leave the bike at the Lido and continue by vaporetto.