Thursday 22 May: Gary and Dan go to Venice

After breakfast Gary and I caught a cab to the train station to get the Eurostar to Venice. The only waiting room in station was above Mickey D’s, where we watched in amusement as health inspectors and tourists alike stumbled across a women’s room flooded with sewage. We were glad to board out comfortable first-class coach! The trip north passed through Bologna and Padova. As we left the hills of Tuscany the landscape became flatter. We approached the Veneto and began to smell the sea air. The train passed through Mestre, the huge city on the mainland where most people actually live, now that real estate in Venice proper is unaffordable to most people. Finally we got out at Santa Lucia station on the edge of the mainland and the lagoon.

Venice is incredibly beautiful and truly strange. You always hear about the canals and the water, but the reality of seeing it is amazing. I thought that it would be a city with some water ways crossing it, much like Copenhagen or Amsterdam. Venice, however, is completely and far out into the lagoon on the Adriatic Sea, and the water is everywhere. Buildings, or groups of buildings, are islands, and over a hundred canals run between them, connected by hundreds of bridges. There are short streets on some of the islands, but these are not even the size of alleys. They are just hallways, and two people can barely pass each other. There is no traffic: no cars, no Vespas, not even bicycles. All goods are delivered and taken away by hand trucks, and this includes trash. Streets only run a short way, and then encounter a canal. At the canals, the streets either end or they go over a bridge to the next island. The canals are the true streets, and home of the Venetian traffic.

To get to our hotel, Gary and I boarded a water bus. These are called vaporetti, “little steamers,” although now they run mostly on diesel. The buses, taxis, police cars, ambulances, and all other transportation are boats. We got on a bus that headed out to Murano, the island of glassmakers in the lagoon. Gary realized that we were on the wrong bus! (I would have stayed on it until I ended up at the airport). Gary figured out the right stop to switch to another line that went directly to our street. Right across from the water bus stop at our landing point was another beautiful island with walls of terra cotta, covered in cypresses. We learned that this was San Michele, the cemetery island, where Venetians have been buried for the past couple of hundred years, along with such eminent foreigners as Ezra Pound and Igor Stravinsky.

Gary and I departed the bus and walked along the narrow corridor between buildings that was the “street.” Like Rome, in Venice there are gardens, flower boxes, and plants everywhere. We soon came to our bed and breakfast Ca’Riccio, on the fifth floor of a building. Our room was beautiful, with ceramic tile in the bed and bathrooms, crystal chandeliers, and no working wireless.

After we unpacked we headed out to explore the city. At the foot of the Rialto Bridge we stopped for a late lunch. Gary had tagliatelli bolognese, and I had spaghetti frutti di mare, with all sorts of seafood in it. We then boarded a water bus that went in a loop around the entire main part of Venice in about an hour and a half, and rode the whole circuit to see the sights of the city. We stopped at a pizzeria near our room for dinner, where a little dog kept walking in and begging for food (you see this in bars, caffès, and restaurants all over Italy). We returned to our b&b for a good night’s sleep.