From the Countryside to City Life

We flew to the northeast corner of Italy and landed in the Venice airport, which is on the mainland. From there, we were water-taxied to one of Venice's islands and our hotel.

Venice was founded about 430 AD by those escaping wars in Europe. The first settlers started building on marshy land, digging canals to raise the land above the sea. On the map, you can see there are a number of main islands with large canals in between, and then there are series of small canals providing convenient access to the interior of each island.

Each canal was sided by 3 and 4 storey historic buildings with their foundations extending down to and below the water line. We had heard the canals would be quite dirty and smell, but we were pleasantly surprised to find them to be remarkably clean.

Venice’s hay days before tourism were based on being a merchants’ trading center for the Mediterranean. Its population peaked at 160,000, but today is only about 60,000 with annual tourist visits of about 16 million.

All support activity in the city was done by boat, including ambulance, fire protection, garbage collection, mail delivery, courier service, supplying stores, construction or anything else you can think of.

On each island, there were small streets as narrow as 4 feet or 1.3 meters, with bridges crossing the canals. There was only one way to get around the streets and that was to walk.

Life for us was a marked change from Sardinia. We were no longer in the quiet Italian countryside; we were within the confines of the city, with hoards of people, mainly tourists. Rather than cycling on our own schedule, we were planning our day around a water-taxi to get from our resort to another island, and walking the maze of tiny streets to find the market, a historic building, or a park to have our picnic lunch. We were out of our preferred element. We wondered if the week would be fun or a failure.

Click here for the next story in this series:
http://travellingwithsteveandmarlene.blogspot.ca/2011/09/lost.html