Welcome to Venice: Get in the Boat

After disembarking the train into Venice, a meandering cruise down the Grand Canal via bus (vaporetto) is a great way to get acquainted with one of Italy’s most popular destinations. Grab a seat in the front. Wear something warm. Never stand up. This blocks your pilot’s view and he will let you have it because – surprise! – the Italians are still driving like…Italians. I never saw James Bond fly by (although we watched a film cast drift past, complete with cameraman, equipment, and actors hiding in the bow) but when you get everyone on the water it’s crazy. This is why we didn’t take a gondola ride. The tourists didn’t scream out loud, but the gondolier paddled for his very life a few times…

Playing chicken on the Grand Canal.

The water in Venice is very green lagoon water; it smells exactly like the San Diego Bay, without the salty open-ocean undertones. It’s not something you want to swim in and although we saw a gull or two, I saw no sign of marine life. The buildings in Venice are beautiful and in a constant state of maintenance. As the waters slowly rise, lower stories are abandoned in some of them. Doorsteps go right down underwater.

Palazzo Dario Ca d’Oro and a glorious green building.

As you make the first big bend in the Canal, you pass the colorful daily Rialto Market, full of fish, produce, flowers, and spices and the Rialto Bridge that gives gondoliers wonderful acoustics and bus drivers terrible tempers.

The Rialto Market A gondola, a taxi, and a bus walked under a bridge…

The next bend has the only “traffic light” in Venice. It sits at the corner and is used exclusively to allow fireboats out of the station at top speed.

If you watch long enough, you will also see garbage collectors, polizia, construction crews, ambulenzas, and other services at work…all by boat.

Hotel laundry? Who knows? Go under the Accademia Bridge next.

As you curve back around and see La Salute, this is your sign that you are about to enter the lagoon on the south of Venice. The water opens up and St. Mark’s Square is coming up on your left. You have arrived at your destination.

And so has everyone else…who parked that here? Yikes! Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute. St Mark’s symbol: lion of Venice. St Theodore and his Crocodile.

We are going to leave St. Mark’s Square for the next post (click here for a preview), but I will leave you with this story:

A long time ago, before Venice was on the map, their patron saint was Theodore, the dragon slayer. After the sack of Constantinople, Venetians brought home random pieces of statuary, which were put together to form this image and for a long time, it was good enough. His claim to fame was that he wrestled crocs could bring victory in battle.

As politics marched forward however, the founding fathers decided that a more glamorous (and less Byzantine) saint was needed. So they stole one. In 828, Venetian merchants took the mummy of St Mark from its sarcophagus in Alexandria Egypt, packed it in a chest with pork and cabbages, and thereby passed it through Muslim customs officers. (Don’t try this at home.) They hauled St Mark to Venice and began a new church for him. The church was destroyed, then rebuilt, St Mark was lost and rediscovered in the process, and finally in 1094AD, we have the basilica, square and etc.

They left Theodore on his post to watch the show go by.

But I’d love to see him take on that cruise ship.

Just another day on the Grand Canal.