We boarded Air France and were on our way to Venice.  The Venetian airport was covered in enormous, sexy color photos of beautiful, half naked Italian men selling Versace and Dolce & Gabbana.  It was hard not to gawk.  The next shock came dropping 100 euros on a water taxi to get to our hotel from the airport in what could have only been a six minute ride.  It was exhilarating and somewhat unnerving to be zipping along in a vaporetto where the man literally steered with one hand as he was turned around BACKWARD chatting with us, all the while weaving in and out of boat traffic at breakneck speed and with a seemingly blind eye.  But docking right at the door of our hotel was one of the coolest things ever.  It was hard to fathom a doorway leading directly from the ocean that stepped one straight up into our five star hotel.  I chose it because of my passion for Vivaldi.  He taught there when it was a girl’s school and even performed his “Four Seasons” in it.  The building was likely first depicted in 1500 in the famous “bird’s eye map of the city” by Jacopo de Barbari, celebrated Renaissance painter and engraver.  It also boasted the largest collection of antique crucifixes in all of Italy!  I think that is really saying something given the Vatican in Rome.  I once wrote a book on Christian iconography; getting to see them up close and not even in a museum was incredibly special.  As I recall they had impressive collections of ladies’ fans and gentlemens’ snuff boxes as well.  All were in excellent condition and had exquisite detail.  The hotel was steeped in luxury and history.  In addition to Vivaldi in 1690, Freud stayed at the hotel in 1895.  Going down that proverbial waterway, I found my first visit to Italy and Venice to be laden with all kinds of sexual undertones.  If Paris was feminine, Venice struck me as very, very masculine.  There were penises everywhere, and I don’t mean just on statuary.  Vendors had them on men’s jogging shorts, cooking aprons, underwear and even on spoof credit cards that read “Mister Hard:  Accepted from women all around the world”.  As a feminist I was glad to see men naked for a change.  But this was a city I do not feel a woman should walk in alone.  The INSTANT I left my husband (we went looking in separate stores) I was hand kissed and hit on aggressively by several Italian men who did not seem to be inclined to take “no” for an answer.  The entire city carried a dirty, dark, sexual feel for me I was not expecting.  They had “living statues” of body painted people posing for Euros wearing creepy masks which freaked both of us out.  I did some research and discovered the masks originated with the plague.  Its macabre history dates back from the 17th century French physician Charles de Lorme who adopted the mask together with other sanitary precautions while treating plague victims.  The “plague doctor” mask to me looked birdlike, with a hollow beak and round eye slits.  The doctors who followed de Lorme’s example wore the usual black hat and long black coat as well as the white mask and white gloves.  They also carried a long stick to move patients without having to come into physical contact with them in hopes of preventing contracting the disease themselves.  Mass graves have been discovered on Venice’s “Quarantine Island” just a couple of miles from the famed Piazza San Marco.  The Bubonic Plague decimated Venice, as well as much of Europe, throughout the 15th and 16th centuries.  We were told that if one encountered a bird-like masked person back then it was a warning to turn around because the plague had struck.  Comic fantasy writer Christopher Moore said, “Everything in Venice is just a little bit creepy, as much as it’s beautiful.”  That pretty much sums it up for me.