When Denise met us at the San Stae vaporetto stop, I was not at all sure what to expect. All of my ideas of Venice were formed by old PBS specials, which either showed the city slowing sinking into the lagoon, or were set in the 16^th century. So as we wheeled our bags past the station (A floating barge that the water bus ties to) I was surpised by a couple of things: First, that there were streets. Second, how clean the streets were. Third, how quiet everything was.

We walked up the street, which seemed to be a normal size for a side street in a normal city. Denise was talking NON-stop, and explaining how we would be able to find our place again. (How hard could it be? I thought. How naive!) "Here is where you turn – just by this ice cream store. Now most of my clients come in during the day, so that I will be able to show them this ice cream store, and maybe even take them in for a ice cream cone. But since it is so late, and tomorrow is a holiday, this store isn’t open. Of course, it will be open later, and then you can get some ice cream. But even if it isn’t open, you can use this store as your marker to see where to turn…" Whew! So we turned from the street onto this little side street. More like an alley. We are wheeling down THIS little street, and we are given another benchmark – this time a glass store, that is alongside a REALLY narrow alley. As Doreen had said, she thought that we had turned down a narrow alley, until we turned down a REALLY narrow alley. It is no more that two and a half feet wide, and it was almost black that time of night. I felt like I was in one of the Arabian Nights tales, Doreen felt as if she was in Amadeus, and was being chased by ne’er do wells intent on mischief.

As we came through this small alley, we burst into a little courtyard (piazza) where the apartment is located. Talk about cool! It is a square courtyard, and our building is on the far side from where you walk in. There are canals on TWO sides of our building, and we have a little balcony (She called it a Pujoli. Sylvia Pujoli? I thought) looking out onto the larger of the canals. Motor boats and gondolas both use this canal. It turns out that we have this building all to ourselves. The owner is renovating the downstairs apartment, and we have the upstairs place. It is HUGE compared to Paris, and Denise spent an inordinate amount of time telling us about how to use various appliances. Especially considering it was about 11:00 PM, and she had a 50 minute vaporetto ride home.

The next day, we decided to just walk around the city without a map, without a camera, and without a plan. We are here for two weeks, and want to get a feel for the place and just not worry about what we "need" to do. In many ways, Venice is nicer than Paris for this sort of vacation. There are certainly things to see, but they can wait until later. We just wanted to wander.

So we walked out into our little courtyard. Down the narrow alley past the glass store. Into the wider alley past the ice cream store, and into the street. There, we realized why this place is so quiet: NO CARS!!! There are no cars in the city of Venice. All transportation on land is on foot, and because the canals really DO go just about everywhere, the stores get their merchandise delivered in boats. Throughout the city, you see young men pushing (or pulling) handcarts loaded with food, paper, books, anything that you can imagine.

That first day we wandered down to the most famous part of Venice – Piazza San Marco. This is where the big church is, as well as the Doge’s palace (Pronounced with a soft "g" and in one syllable. NOT "dogie" as Doreen likes to say…) You can talk about your people! Wholey Moley, this place was PACKED! I mean, it was just STUFFED with people. And on the way over there, we saw more glass stores and mask stores than I thought existed in all the US east of the Mississippi. Heck I STILL believe that there are more glass store and mask stores in Venice than there are in all the US east of the Mississippi. All I can imagine is that people buy a lot of masks that get put into attics around the world.

One thing that is sort of hard to convey is just how confusing it is to get around in a city that does not have a gridded street system, and indeed doesn’t have much of a street system at all. We got turned around several times, and seemed to end up where we were going more from Brownian motion rather than any sort of plan. That did not bother us, except when we were trying to get back to the apartment. We DID find the place again, but mainly because we stumbled across our landmarks (This ice cream shop, that glass shop) which seemed oddly out of place when we DID see them.

RETURN TO GRAND TOUR HOMEPAGE!