The Joys and Perils of Return Travel

Last week I went to Venice, where I was invited to participate in an arts conference. It was the first time I’d been back in 32 years.

Venice is one of those bucket-list places, a city so extraordinary you want to see it at least once. But unless you’re the kind of fabulous person who regularly attends the Biennale or the Film Festival or owns a palazzo, it may not be somewhere you return. It’s small, it’s expensive, it’s overcrowded and it’s sinking.

Then again, it’s Venice.

For those of us who love to travel, the question of whether to revisit a place you’ve been to before is a repeated conundrum. You go back to some places to see certain people or to visit in the company of new people. You return to see what you missed, or to see it again. Whichever way, return travel is as much an act of time travel as it is a geographic one.

You’ve changed and the place has changed. You’re visiting not simply a place, but a place captured in a moment in time — one that exists for you in the past and to a past version of yourself.

Travel writers often wrestle with this conundrum. “By day I wander the alleys and monuments that had so fascinated me as a young man,” the legendary travel writer Colin Thubron wrote on returning to Damascus in 2017 after 50 years. “Sometimes I find myself gazing through his eyes, remembering the youthful enchantment of entering an old mosque or a sultan’s tomb.”

For me, the simple idea that 32 years could pass since I first went to Venice seemed impossible. Surely my adult life couldn’t contain intervals that long.