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A swat-resistant SWAT of mosquitoes in the bedroom (we’d had all the windows open since arrival) threw Christine into misery.

Along with the noise from revelers and inebriated diners laughing their way back home late on a Saturday night. And there will be another blog entry about the way-close-by church bells that did not knock off their chiming of the hours at, oh, say, sunset.

It was pretty much a sleepless first night in Venice. At one point, her forehead wildly swollen from a single mosquito bite, Christine declared in the darkness, “I hate Venice. I want to go back to Bologna.” This was at bong bong bong o’clock in the morning.

Even so, I suspect we’ll apply the Italian genius for arrangiarsi (literally, to arrange oneself, meaning to find a way to set up a good life for yourself no matter how badly externalities want things otherwise) and end up (1) protected from mosquitoes, (2) oblivious to boisterous revelers, (3) inured to a noisy alarm clock on a nonnegotiable sixty-minute snooze setting, and (4) in love with this car-free, improbable city.