Beautiful Venice Part 1

Gorgeous Venice.  On the Grand Canal.

Heather on the balcony of Basilica San Marco (wearing €3 scarf bought to cover indecent
shoulders, required for entry - the scarf that is, not the shoulders!).  The marble balcony (probably not
its correct name) is quite high, must weigh hundreds of tonnes and slopes alarmingly towards the piazza.
Bits of metal strip join up cracks. Vertigo?  Well, it's been there for hundreds of years, right? 

The Basilica of San Marco in the middle picture is the epicentre of Venetian tourism.  This rather strange, cream-cakey, onion-domed building attracts zillions of tourists and attendant hawkers. The lower picture shows Piazza San Marco in front of the Basilica with the Doge's Palace left. Top picture is the Piazza at 7am – apparently tourists sleep in.

We have been in Venice a few days now and have got used to the Vaporetti (water buses) and the intense heat; local bar owners recognise us and have started to smile when we stagger in. Venice is water and walking. The thing is, there are no motor vehicles and that means everyone walks or takes a boat. We all know this but it is still a surprise when you arrive to find a pedestrian/aquatic city.  When we went to the Lido (the long narrow island that protects the laguna from the open sea) yesterday for a swim in the Adriatic it was a shock to have to watch out for traffic because for some reason you can ferry your car there from the Italian mainland. The only things on wheels in Venice proper are luggage, children's scooters and trolleys for delivering goods. 

Venice is so overpoweringly beautiful, it's enough to make you cry. Really, we wept a little when we arrived and glimpsed the Grand Canal! Everywhere there is water, lapping and slapping, shimmering and glimmering. The Grand Canal curves sinuously in a sort of backwards 'S'. Hugging its banks is a wonderful collection of gorgeous palaces, hotels and houses, most hundreds of years old and seemingly just a few in serious disrepair, despite constant sloshing water. The smaller canals join, branch and intersect, and everywhere the buildings crowd together in a higgledy-piggledy, unplanned way. Yet it works. There is something so right about the combination of the water, the fondaments, the calles (lanes) and the pontes. It's just beautiful. And everywhere there are the the boats: gondolas, launches, cargo carriers, construction barges, rich men's yachts, couriers, garbage collectors, ambulances and of course the vaporetti.  

Humour me Bernard. This calle is very like the
other calles you showed me yesterday…

This one? No the other one.

Where are we? Which way? That way?

We've been around here before you idiot. Call yourself a
navigator! I've had enough, I'm going back to Dusseldorf!

Watching the tourists – a pleasant way for old friends to spend
the late afternoon over a cold drink.

But Venice is also a maze. One calle (narrow alley) looks just like all the other thousand or so calle. Once we were lost and wandered disconsolately for ages even though "home" was in a parallel calle just 50 metres away. It might as well have been in a parallel universe. The locals look on in bemusement as clutches of tourists emerge from a calle, the leader studying the map the others dragging behind, hot, disheveled, tired. They disappear around the corner, only to reappear two minutes later out of another calle, still confused, hotter, even more tired and increasingly grumpy. That way? No, that way… Some come back three or four times. We often have a cold beer at the end of the afternoon (well, actually every day – it's very hot) at a bar on the corner of Crosera San Pantalon where we live and feel superior because we now know the way, sort of. We try to identify the passers-by: academic? (there is a university nearby); local?; German?; disgruntled public servant?; IT guy?  Stop Press - the bar is closed for Sunday. Oh no!

There are also many dogs, mostly tiny but a surprising number huge. Where do they live?  Where do they run?  They are walked late in the afternoon or in the evening by their owners, some chic, some strange, some hippy looking, all plastic-bag-ready and quick to collect the deposits. Those who fail to do this must be very unpopular – everyone walks the narrow lanes.