The Sinking City

Our last stop in Italy was Venice. Venice is the most improbable place I have ever visited. It should not work; it should hardly even exist, and yet it does. The appeal of Venice is not in what you do, in terms of museums or historical sites, but in witnessing the city's very existence.


The street our apartment was on:
We didn't do terribly much - but we only had one full day there in any case. The afternoon of our arrival we went to the Peggy Guggenheim museum, a modern art gallery based on P.G.'s private collection. It was as bizarre as modern art always is but somewhat of a palate cleanser after all the medieval and renaissance art we had seen thus far.

View through a window at the Guggenheim:
One evening we walked over to Piazza San Marco for ice cream and the square was flooding softly. It's built at the lowest point of the city so I think even the movement of the tide causes these small floods. Some of the fancy restaurants have bands which play on the square and we listened to one and then the other, hopping across puddles in the piazza.

The next afternoon, I went on my own to San Giorgio where you can climb the belltower for a breathtaking view of the main islands of Venice in the lagoon. I got on the vaporetto going the wrong direction and ended up going the long way round to get to San Giorgio's. I didn't mind since it was basically like a canal cruise and once we navigated the Grand Canal, we swept out to the outside of Venice by the port. There they could open up the throttle a bit and I got to see (literally) the other side of Venice from the Grand Canal and its palazzos.

Trucks on a boat:

I certainly would not want to live there (our one experience at a grocery store proved that) but Venice is a marvellous place to visit. Get it, before it's gone!

A Venetian traffic jam: