Out of the Ashes

By Isaac Mei • Jun 4 2025 • 6 min read

“This bird rises from the ashes. Take a group picture in front, with false moustaches.”

The riddle lay heavily in my mind as I walked through the medieval labyrinth that was Venice. How was I supposed to find this place in this city riddled with elements that the mind couldn't even conjure? As Adam and I paced around, the words "This bird rises from the ashes" seemed obvious, but the rest of the riddle didn't give much information, except that we needed fake mustaches.

First, Guido, our tour guide, was offering help after our long walk around the city that day. When we showed him our riddle, he barely glanced at it briefly before looking up with a smirk. He confidently told us that we didn't need any of his help and moved on to someone else's riddle. It seemed as if he already knew we were closer than we realized, and he didn't want to ruin the satisfaction of our discovery. We quickly rushed out of the church where the tour had ended to find locals to talk to.

Outside, we started out nervous, especially after asking one lady who said she wasn't from around here while she was rushing around a corner. That especially scared me - we were told that the locals would be friendly, and even though that woman wasn't a local, something was intimidating about reaching out to locals. We decided we had to come up with a different strategy. Since it was around the time that school got out, we decided to target people with kids because they had to be locals. While we were crossing Ponte dell'Accademia, we found someone even better - he also had a dog, something unlikely for a tourist to possess. We asked with the little Italian we knew, saying "posso farle una domanda?" and handing him the paper, which he accepted cautiously. He barely took a look at the paper and knew. "Phoenix," he said as he looked up, "Fenice Teatro is over the bridge and to the left." Theater! Of course, that was what the fake mustaches meant! We repeatedly said "Grazie Mille" and started running over, overflowing with joy. We ran down the street and stopped right before entering Campo San Stefano. On our left was a building where we were going to watch a Vivaldi Concert that night. While we couldn't confirm that it was a theatre, we wanted to try at least.

Adam Thinking on the Ponte dell'Accademia After Talking to our Favorite Local

Luckily, a local vendor was selling small trinkets across the street. We asked her again in our broken Italian if she could help us, and she took a look at the paper and laughed. "This is so easy," she exclaimed. She said the building we thought wasn't quite it and guided us towards it. She gave very exact navigation directions, and we listened carefully and sprinted off.

As we got closer and closer, we saw a sign saying Calle de la Fenice on a wall, and we knew we had to be close. The alley finally came to an opening after getting tighter and tighter, and we turned to our left and looked up. There it was. A gold sculpture of a Phoenix shone brightly in the daylight over the main doors of the theater. "Teatro la Fenice," it read on all the posters around. Just to make sure, we went inside the bookstore to ask a staff member and find fake mustaches. When the staff member looked at us like we were asking if the store sold postcards, we knew we were in the right place. The confusion on her face confirmed it, and we went to take a picture in front of the building. Since we couldn't find mustaches, I drew some, and Adam used his sunglasses to pretend. We were at the theater, after all!

At first glance, the hunt was just about solving a riddle and looking good in front of our classmates. However, the more we walked, asked, rerouted, and, most importantly, listened, the more it completely transformed. What I experienced became less of a scavenger hunt and more of a lived encounter with the city's spatial and cultural fabric. I was now a participant, not just a consumer of space. It is like what Michel de Certeau states when he mentions that "to walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place…" (103). As a tourist in Venice, I had no sense of belonging; a constant search for new sights to see was always in the back of my mind. Each step felt completely detached, with no sense of belonging; I moved through spaces that weren't mine and followed signs and crowds rather than forging unique paths. However, my experience also involved being directed by locals through the city, pushed and pulled through the city's web of relations and social settings. Certeau doesn't view this as a negative; instead, it is a generative act of developing new relationships, interactions, and discoveries to emerge. In fact, when he discusses narrated adventures and spatial stories in chapter 9, he exclaims that "they are not satisfied with displacing the latter and transposing them into the field of language. In reality, they organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it" (16). My experience with locals completed my journey, and they made the space intelligible - not through the maps or search engines I was forced out of using, but through the stories, gestures, and directions that oriented me in ways that no "official" guide could. The laughter of the vendor, the man's friendly dog, and the woman's puzzled looks weren't just a side note of the story; instead, they were threads that weaved the narrative. As de Certeau suggests, they structured my movement through the city, creating a co-authored map.

This also reminds me of Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopias. In our class lectures, tourists were mentioned as being in their own heterotopia, being outside of space and time, pushing and bumping their way to take pictures of sights in the middle of the day. My heterotopia became slightly different, however. It was defined by a special kind of connection rather than detachment and spectacle. I was pulled into moments of sacred experience - asking for directions in broken Italian, laughing together with a local vendor, and interpreting gestures more than words. I was grounded in a space that was in both the tourist and local world, but also neither. This juxtaposition was the heterotopia, where "real places… something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites… are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted" (24). In this sense, my experience around Teatro La Fenice became a heterotopia because it collapsed the boundaries between the scripted and the spontaneous, the ordinary and the spectacle. The conversation's real sites were connected together, changing the experience of space into something co-created. Teatro La Fenice, though a landmark wrapped in history, became more than a just that - it became an incentive for human exchange. I wasn't just witnessing the city; I was participating in a heterotopia, challenging the binary of the tourist and local and revealing a history rich with a shared narrative.

Adam and I posing as Phoenixes in front of Teatro Fenice with our Fake Mustaches