Like a lot of other cities people hate, I’m falling in love with Venice. Sure, it’s crowded with tourists. It’s run down. It smells funny. The food is expensive. But so what? It’s Venice.

Kyle and I are staying in a (literally) funky little hostel in the Canareggio neighborhood. It’s all brick and plaster, arched windows with decrepit green shutters, yellow flowers in the window boxes. A balcony. Inside it’s dark and sort of filthy, piled with mattresses. Outside we have our own private bridge over a moat of a canal, with boats passing under it and everything. There’s a little piazza, called a campo here in Venice, with a trippy cylindrical church.

We thought at first that it was a Masonic temple - it looks like a secret uncovered in a Dan Brown novel. Seriously, this building is so weird it has to be fiction based on a sophomoric misunderstanding of a bit or art history trivia. It turns out it’s a seventeenth century renovation of a Romanesque chapel. Still doesn’t account for the mysterious symbols and oddly secular Latin inscription over the doorway, but I’ll take it. Nothing to see here. Moving right along.

People talk about Venice as a dead city, maybe even an undead city (somebody please make a zombie movie in Venice). But it’s full of life. Quiet life, to be sure. They don’t call it “La Serenissima” for nothing. But irks breathing. Little old ladies drink macchiato at the bar in the cafe. Guys with paunches play video poker, little glasses of Birra Moretti. Gutter punks duet on flute and guitar for spare change in the campo. Toddlers whine for toys (“Basta, Sofia!”) and schoolboys race bikes along the canals. Dogs are everywhere. After the zombie apocalypse, Venice will be taken over by the dogs.

How can anyone not love this place?