Round the World 2015: Venice (Venezia)

We visited the Da Vinci Museum in the morning before leaving Florence. It was full of reproductions of Da Vinci's paintings and machines. Leonardo was the quintessential renaissance man. With a day job as a painter (Mona Lisa, Last Supper, etc.), he still had time to be a leading engineer, architect, anatomist, physiologist, mechanic and armorer. Interesting stuff.

Da Vinci bicycle

We left Florence for Venice via train. For the first half hour we traveled through tunnels under the Apennine Mountains seeing sunlight maybe six times for a total of 30 seconds. We emerged from the tunnels about 100 kilometers from Florence, just short of Bologna. The rest of the way to Venice, we crossed the Po River valley which was extremely flat and planted in wheat, corn, hay and what looked like soybeans and alfalfa. It looked a lot like the American Midwest, but the fields were somewhat smaller and all of the farm houses had red tile roofs (by my measure 98% of all buildings have red tile roofs in Italy).

Venice is an island-city accessed via a miles long causeway located in the middle of a lagoon. It is really 100+ islands separated by canals and connected by 400 bridges. Venice is a maze of more than 2,000 alleys, many of which are dead ends and some no more than 3-feet wide or 5-feet high. We found Google Maps to be unreliable, but alleys were well marked.

There are no automobiles in the city (the causeway road ends in a large parking lot). Everything on the island pretty much comes and goes (rubbish) via boats and hand trucks. The copier repair man comes in a boat full of copiers. I saw a boat just full toilet paper which I never quite figured out how left the city (there were few foul smells in Venice).

The population of Venice is now 58,000 (down from 170,000 sometime late in last century). However, on an average day, there are 55,000 tourists in Venice. As a result, Venice seems to have an identity crisis. It is a tourist town with the feel just short of a theme park. The alleys are lined with shops, 90+% of which sell glassware, t-shirts, leather goods, masks, gelato, pizza/panini or some combination of the above.

We had a fantastic apartment in the San Polo neighborhood in the center of the city. It was the quietest and most comfortable place we stayed since the boat on the Nile. I got 8 hours sleep last night. I can’t remember the last time that happened.

We took it pretty easy in Venice, choosing to not go anywhere that required standing in a line. Walking the alleys and crossing the canals was an experience in itself. We did take a Vaporetto boat tour of the Grand Canal and also visited the island of Murano, known for glass work. The glass industry was moved to Murano to reduce the risk of fire on the main islands of Venice. As we walked the back alleys of Murano, we could hear the roar of furnaces and look in to see work being done. It seemed more like a real community and less like a theme park.

Venice is slowly sinking. Several buildings lean in awkward directions. The wooden pilings on which the city is built are slowly decaying. As the stone foundations settle and sea levels rise, marine waters reach the brickwork above the foundations causing it to further rot. We witnessed a piling break off and fall on the boat that had been moored to it. In flood-prone areas, the doorways have been fitted with flood gates. The whole lagoon is close to being flood-proofed. Four huge (1,200 to 1,500-foot long) flood gates are being constructed across the ship canals between the barrier islands separating the lagoon from the Adriatic Sea. The gates are hinged at the seafloor and when inflated will rise above the flood tides. This may work for a while, but if sea levels rise even a foot, the gates will only be able to be opened at low tides.

Venice has been around for more than 1,500 years. Almost all of the livable area was raised from the lagoon marshes. For most of its existence, its only source of drinking water was rainfall. An elaborate system of drains, sand filters and cisterns was constructed to solve the problem. The cisterns were unlocked by magistrates and opened only twice a day.

Typical Venice canal