“Venice is terrible,” a bartender told me one night just a few steps from the city’s famed St. Mark’s Square. It was a statement so loaded and hyperbolic, not to mention patently wrong, as evidenced by the thousands of tourists that trample through the Italian water city all day, every day, rain or shine. But his job isn’t to be a tourist. His job is to keep an eye on the water level and put out the barriers to prevent water from coming into the bar, all while his manager yells at him to watch the wood paneling on the floor and to be careful not a drop makes it past the front door.

Such a dichotomy—people who love and hate