I choose to start the journey from the furthest mouth from home: Chioggia (Clodia). From Castello, Sarah and I took a Vaporetto that brought us on a bus which was then loaded onto a larger boat. In this setting, we traveled along that 21-kilometer-long and 300-meter-narrow strip of land that brings us straight to Chioggia after a two-hour journey.

There, we found huge breakwaters crushing the strength of the waves and bright rust left on the rocks by time and tides. On one side of the Sottomarina breakwater, we could see the salty waves of the Adriatic Sea, on the other side, the brackish water of the lagoon.

After the sunset, we headed towards the Malamocco mouth where we stopped for one night of little rest and many mosquitoes. At dawn, we reached Alberoni beach, on the opposite side of the mouth. There a seaweed foil was covering the rocks, as if to protect them, and cruises were floating on a grass sea while reaching Porto Marghera.

In reverse, the last place to reach was the Lido mouth (Lio) where we arrived cycling from Punta Sabbioni through the seafront, till that roundabout for rotating dervishes van.

It was too early for tourists to be on the beach, they were replaced by an array of sandpipers with hundreds of their drawings left on the sand. Sarah, looking at the bus going to the club Il Muretto, highlighted the tedious look of boys dressed in shirts compared to girls, each accessorized in their own way.

“Acqua in bocca” means to drown, it is a secret, but to the lagoon it is breath, it is voice. The three mouths are together access and exit, they are limit and togetherness, detachment and encounter. Within that gurgling of sense and contradiction, one month ago we scattered the ashes of my mother, on the fortieth day when—according to different cultures—the soul greets the earth. In many beliefs, the sky embraces the souls of those who leave. For us, it was the water.