Saturday, May 25, 2013

Venezia

Venice was enchanting.  I’d live there in a heartbeat. No traffic!  I personally consider the automobile the scourge of modern-day urban living, and here is a city without the automobile! 

I have a thing about islands anyway, as evidenced by my having spent six weeks living on Santorini, three months on the Ile d’Yeu, off the west coast of France, and on the Isle of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland.  For that matter, would love to be able to live on one of the many islands off the coast of Maine.  What’s different about Venice, as compared with all those other, and most other, islands, is that it is all one city.  Although really that city is made up of not just one island, but a total of 100 tiny islands.  Every time you cross one of the many, many little, and several large, bridges, you are crossing from one island to another.  There are also several larger islands in the lagoon, that are also visited by tourists: Murano, famous for its glassblowers, Burano, ditto for its lace,  Torcello, which served as the original settlement of Italians seeking refuge from the barbarian invasions of the 5th and 6th centuries, and now is virtually deserted, and San Giorgio Maggiore, directly across the lagoon from San Marco Square, and famous for the view to be had from the bell tower of its cool, peaceful church.

But let’s take it from my first view of the city, when Pat and I took an incredibly expensive (110 Euros, or about $143!) water taxi from the airport, which is on the mainland, to our hotel.  We were supposed to be provided with free transport by Perillo Tours (PT), if we were around at the 9 a.m., 11 a.m. or 1 p.m. transport times.  According to the instruction sheet we had received from PT, if we missed these pick-up times, it was up to us to get ourselves to the hotel.  Well, our connecting flight from Rome to Venice was late, setting down at 11, so obviously we had missed that pick-up time.  By the time we got our luggage it was close to 12.  We were both very tired from our sleepless overnight flight from Boston, and I saw no point in our hanging around the airport for an hour, just for a free ride.  While waiting for our baggage to show up I had spoken briefly with the female half of the only other Perillo couple we had thus far encountered, wanting to know if they would be interested in sharing a water taxi.  “Kelly” (red-haired, sassy, works as a physician’s assistant; she and her husband look about 25, but have been married 10 years with two kids so are presumably closer to 30) said they’d probably wait for the tour pick-up.  By the time the bags appeared she had disappeared, so Patricia and I  made our way out to the counter where you could purchase tickets for the water taxis.

Later I had to acknowledge that it was a shame we had lost track of the young couple from Kentucky, since that steep fare covered up to four people.  Splitting that $143 would have been nice.   But I also have to admit that, at the time, I really didn’t care.  I loved the very idea of taking a boat from the airport to the door of my hotel, loved the swift, sometimes thump/thump/THUMP careening through the water, the cool air on my face (it was a pale gray day; rain was forecast), a polite, brawny young man at the wheel, boats speeding past, going the other way, or trailing out ahead of us, behind us – a regular highway of boat traffic.  And gradually, as we moved down the wide lagoon, Venice proper took shape before us.  No tall buildings – only the tall, narrow, bell towers at San Marco Square, and San Giorgio Maggiore – but rather cheek-by-jowl buildings of four or five stories, mostly beige, pale yellow, light brown, but also pink, a brighter yellow, even aqua.  As our driver slowed the boat and we turned into a canal, we were passing just a few feet on either side from these buildings – people’s homes! – with the water lapping at the walls, slopping over the tiny step to be seen at some back doors. We glided under low stone bridges that curved above our heads, and finally turned out into what I knew must be the Grand Canal.  The buildings on either side were much grander than those we had seen in the “side” canal, often with a large centered balcony on an upper floor, where the family back in the good ol’ days (1600s, 1700s) could have gathered to watch whatever to-do was taking place on the canal.

Which was currently full of boat traffic – besides the little speed boats like ours (would hold six comfortably in the little covered “cabin” where Pat and I sat), there were the long white vaporetti , or public buses, an astounding number of gondolas, being steered by the young men in their black and white striped shirts, and a number of what I came to think of as truck boats, i.e, boats transporting goods that would ordinarily be transported by truck.  For example, on the morning we left, we watched from the small terrace of our hotel as a winch was used to lift bins of the hotel’s dirty linen from the dock into a boat, obviously to be taken off to be cleaned.  
Grand Canal from the Accademia Bridge






 
 

Looking in the other direction

 
 

There were tourists everywhere – in the boats, filling the small terraces of the cafes that fronted the canal, crowded onto the famous Rialto Bridge, that we passed under, then the rather odd Accademia Bridge, which looks like a graduate student’s geometric project, surging along the occasional narrow walkways that ran beside the canal for a short distance.  I couldn’t help exclaiming at one point, “It looks like a theme park!”  Because it was so unreal, that this could be a real place – and it was packed with tourists!

Finally, exactly at the point where the Grand Canal opens out into the lagoon, we pulled up to the dock of the Westin Hotel Europa e Regina.  We had reached our first home-away-from-home.  

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