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Grand Canal
Place of legend and literatureAt long last I have visited
Venice!
From Trieste, two hours on the high-speed motorway brought us to within sight of the island. Unfortunately for the truckers beside us, who must stay in the right-hand lane, a mysterious cause had them at a complete stand-still in a line several kilometres long.
We parked in a large facility with a parkade for cars and a surface lot for buses. With strict instructions from Manka to stay together, we congregated on a floating platform and rushed into a
vaporetto when it stopped. Vaporettos are like small ferries in the canals that make stops just like transit buses on land. For a few moments I thought we would soon travel closer to the city. Suddenly I realized that what I was seeing was what the city looked like. Buildings stood in (or maybe beside) the canals and not all of them were grand palazzos. Still, by the time we were at the end of our forty-five minute vaporetto ride, plenty of the buildings were indeed grand palazzos.
Like everyone on the boat, we got off at the end of the journey, at the hyper-famous
St Mark’s Square. Under the portico of the
Doge’s Palace Vaporetto stop
Like a bus stop on roads we met our guide, Ariana. She started talking, only to be overwhelmed by a double-sized class of school children, one of many school groups around. We moved away to a space with less concentrated and piercing sounds.
The Doge’s or
Duke’s Palace was an expression of power; he was elected by his peers and served for life (a fairly short span by the age each would have been when elected). When
Mussolini took power between the wars, he took on the title of Il Duce, specifically recalling the Doge of Venice.
Immediately next to the Palace was
St Mark’s Basilica, a highly decorated, massive structure with enormous paintings and statues. Directly in front of it is the stately
Campanile, the bell tower of the Basilica, originally a watch tower focused on the harbour and the sea. To one side is a large
clock tower, and to our delight, it rang for noon. That is, two bronze statues, each with a moving arm, struck the bell – half the strokes, long pause, then the other half. The clock face shows not only the conventional face but also an early version of digital time – Roman numerals for the hours and Arabic numerals for the
St Mark's Basilica
Fabled centre of old Venice minutes. Around the other three sides of the square are the buildings for the officials of the Doge’s administration, now government offices, a museum and cafés. One café is
Florian’s, so famous it charges 18 euros for a cup of coffee on their terrace; Ariana seemed mildly surprised that none of us knew about the café or wanted coffee there.
In passing along the narrow streets beyond St Mark’s Square we saw an infinity of small shops, especially those with souvenir masks, glass ware, and gimcrack. Occasionally there were good quality shops, fighting for the dignity of their space. We stopped in the small Corte del Teatro to learn about historic local wells, now all sealed and flooding. For years now, including this winter, the whole area has been flooded daily to several feet deep. In the squares are stacks of what look like low tables but are actually walkways put into the water for pedestrian access. The floods are diurnal – water gushes up with the tides and recedes later in the day. All the shops clean up the best they can, with no observable defense against the water. Very strange. A great engineering project is underway to
St Mark’s Clock Tower
Roman and Arabic numerals used together prevent the tides from affecting the city centre, but Ariana and many others were highly skeptical.
Trying to think of the city as many separate islands was difficult, because the space appeared so integral, not separated but rather joined together by the many foot bridges. Also, Ariana told us that there is a Venetian language still spoken by locals. Her family, for example, speaks only Venetian when together.
Accorded free time, we all nevertheless followed Manka to her favourite restaurant, where we ordered the set lunch for 18 euros and relaxed over too much food again. I had the special - fried sardines with fries. It was my worst meal on the trip: the sardines were coated in cornmeal batter and deep fried, thus destroying the delicate fish and leaving too much taste of cornmeal. The fries were too similar to the fish to be appreciated. Oh well. At least I could eat the apple tart for dessert.
With the rest of our free time, Elizabeth and I wandered back across the
Rialto Bridge towards St Mark’s Square. Ariana had mentioned that the Bridge was designed similarly to the
Ponte Vecchio in Florence; however, the Rialto crosses a much smaller
Rialto Bridge
Graceful focal point on water and on land span and rises very high in the centre, to the extent that the stone walk has shallow steps to minimize slipping. The shops on the Bridge are now souvenirs places, unlike the jewellery shops in Florence. So many people were taking their photos and selfies that we couldn’t get to the edge to look down, that is, we weren’t pushy enough. The Bridge did look good from a distance. Getting slightly lost, we continued to drift slowly towards St Mark’s. High on some buildings were yellow signs pointing either to St Mark’s or to Rialto, to help tourists find their way. Like many others, we mistakenly took small streets that ended at a canal without a bridge and had to retrace our steps and explore some more. Happily, despite all this, in a high-quality shop Elizabeth found a lovely necklace and earrings for her daughter.
We were almost back at the Square when we passed a shop with scarves and hand-worked fabric arts. I was thrilled at seeing the crochet and lace, although the prices suited the Venetian market; nevertheless, I found a set of six linen coasters in drawn-thread work that suited my fancy perfectly.
Near the
National Public Library
Well, that's what the sign said. Square was the stately building of the public library, but we couldn’t find a public entrance. A sign did point towards a reading room; perhaps that’s all there was. We diverted to find the
Bridge of Sighs on which convicted felons had been led from the court (the Doge’s Palace) to the prison. Finally, few more photos of the Venetian Lion and San Teodoro atop their soaring columns brought us to the end of our time. The vaporetto trip was reversed, we had a toilet stop in the parkade, and we climbed aboard our buses for the two-hour highway drive. The peace of sleeping passengers reigned in our bus. Actually, I didn’t sleep on any of the drives, but the others did.
Just over half-way into our journey, all traffic heading north on the divided high-way came to a complete stop. Now we were in a traffic halt, and no information was available. After a while people started getting out of their cars and trucks, and some of our group got out of the bus, following the lead of the drivers and then Manka. I spent most of the time making notes about our visit. At last, when I did decide
Bridge of Sighs 1603
Interrogation on one side, prison on the other to stretch my legs, I got out and looked ahead to the horizon. “Isn’t the traffic beginning to move?”, I asked. “No, no, it’s an optical illusion” came the answer. A minute later I shouted, “The traffic is moving!”, and we all leapt back in.
The entrance to Trieste from the Venetian direction is softer than from the Slovenian direction. Many people were out running on the path along the waterfront. On wide tree-lined streets, we passed parks, gracious homes and attractive buildings with shops.
The half-hour delay, as well as construction that slowed our speed, made us an hour late for our dinner reservation. Manka had been on the phone three times to the restaurant to assure them of our eventual arrival. We drove directly to the special Austrian “beer” restaurant where almost every dish includes beer as an ingredient. As requested in her frantic phone calls, the salads and bread were already on the table and our orders were taken almost immediately. Manka even took our drink requests to the bar. I had Bavarian sausage with sauerkraut and a red beer. Because I couldn’t have the tiramisu for dessert, Manka even paid for my beer. Miraculously,
Venice street
Just room for walking, perhaps at one time for leading a donkey within an hour we were walking the short distance to our hotel, no later than our usual time.
View map of trip to date.
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RENanDREW
Ren & Andrew
Beautiful
I have a massive soft spot for Venice despite the massive crowds. Your description of meandering through small lanes and finding fabulous shops brought back lots of happy memories of getting lost in Venice :)