Rough Guides - The Rough Guide to Venice & the Veneto (Travel Guide eBook)

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BARDOLINO VINEYARD, VERONA

Contents

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Introduction to

Venice & the Veneto

Venice has been depicted and described so often that on arriving in the city you might have the slightly anticlimactic feeling that everything looks exactly as expected. The Canal Grandes water-lapped palaces are indeed as picturesque as the coffee-table books made them out to be, Piazza San Marco is as perfect as a film set, and the panorama from the Palazzo Ducale is more or less as Canaletto painted it. Any sense of familiarity quickly fades, however, as you start to look around: seeing a stack of furniture being hoisted from a barge up to a top-floor window, or someone fishing knee-deep in the lagoon a hundred metres from dry land, you understand that life here is not like life anywhere else. And the more closely you look, the more fascinating Venice becomes.

Founded fifteen hundred years ago on a cluster of mudflats in the centre of the lagoon, Venice rose to become Europes main trading post between the West and the East, and at its height controlled an empire that spread north to the Dolomites and over the sea as far as Cyprus. As its wealth increased and its population grew, the fabric of the city grew ever more dense. Cohabiting with the ocean, Venice has a closer relationship to nature than most cities, but at the same time its one of the most artificial places on earth theres hardly any undeveloped space on the hundred or so islets that compose the historic centre. And very few of its closely-knit streets and squares bear no sign of the citys long lineage. Even in the most insignificant alleyway you might find fragments of a medieval building embedded in the wall of a house, like a fossil lodged in a cliff face.

Addresses in Venice

Within each sestiere the buildings are numbered in a sequence that makes it possible for houses facing each other to have numbers separated by hundreds. This is because, in essence, the numbering system tends to follow walls rather than streets: thus if a small alleyway intersects with a major one the numbering on the major alley may continue round the corner and down the minor alleyway before turning around to flow back towards the main drag. Venetian addresses are conventionally written as the street name followed by the sestiere followed by the number eg Calle Vallaresso, San Marco 1312. Sometimes, though, the sestiere is placed before the street, and sometimes the street is omitted altogether, which makes the place impossible to find unless youre in the know.

Acque alte

Floods acque alte have been an element of the Venetian winter for hundreds of years, but since the middle of the twentieth century theres been a relentless increase in their frequency. Its now very rare indeed, between November and late February, for a week to pass without a significant flooding .

An acqua alta begins with water seeping up through the pavement of the Piazza and other low-lying areas. Soon after, wavelets start spilling over the quayside in front of the Palazzo Ducale. If you hear sirens wailing it means that theres about four hours to go before the peak of a significant acqua alta , which is defined as a flood that rises in excess of 110cm above the mean lagoon level at the Salute. A single siren tone, repeated, signifies a minor acqua alta ; floods of greater seriousness are signalled by repeated rising patterns of two, three or four notes four notes means theyre expecting 140cm or more, enough to make many areas impassable.

But the city is well geared to dealing with the nuisance. Shopkeepers insert steel shutters into their doorways, while walkways of duckboards ( passerelle ) are constructed along the major thoroughfares and between the chief vaporetto stops and dry land. In extreme instances such as in November 2012, when the Piazza was under 1.5 metres of water the passerelle can get washed away, but usually the city keeps functioning, and even on the severest days there are many parts that remain above the waves.

If the waters get unruly, invest in a pair of the plastic overshoe boots made by Goldon (goldon.it), you can buy these for 1012 a pair from street vendors, souvenir shops and other outlets in the acqua alta season.

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The melancholic air of Venice is in part a product of the discrepancy between the grandeur of its history and what the city has become. In the heyday of the Venetian Republic, some 200,000 people lived in Venice nearly four times its present population. Merchants from Germany, Greece, Turkey and a host of other countries maintained warehouses here; transactions in the banks and bazaars of the Rialto dictated the value of commodities all over the continent; in the dockyards of the Arsenale the workforce was so vast that a warship could be built and fitted out in a single day; and the Piazza San Marco was perpetually thronged with people here to set up business deals or report to the Republics government. Nowadays its no longer a living metropolis but rather the embodiment of a fabulous past, dependent for its survival largely on the people who come to marvel at its relics.

Where to go

The historic centre of Venice is made up of 118 tiny islands, most of which began life as a micro-community, each with a parish church or two and a square for public meetings. Some 435 bridges tie the islands together, forming an amalgamation thats divided into six large administrative districts known as sestieri , three on each side of the Canal Grande. The sestiere of San Marco is the hub of Venice and the zone in which the most visited sights are clustered. On the east its bordered by Castello , and on the north by Cannaregio . On the other bank the largest of the sestieri is Dorsoduro , which stretches from the tip of the Canal Grande, south of the Accademia gallery, to the docks in the west. Santa Croce , named after a now demolished church, more or less follows the curve of the Canal Grande from Piazzale Roma to a point just short of the Rialto, where it joins the most commercially active of the districts on this bank San Polo .

The monuments which draw by far the largest crowds are the Basilica di San Marco the mausoleum of the citys patron saint and the Palazzo Ducale once the home of the doge and the governing councils. Certainly these are the most imposing structures in the city: the first a mosaic-clad emblem of Venices Byzantine origins, the second perhaps the finest of all secular Gothic buildings. Every parish rewards exploration, though a roll-call of the churches worth visiting would feature more than fifty names. In addition, two of the distinctively Venetian institutions known as the scuole retain some of the outstanding examples of Italian Renaissance art: the Scuola Grande di San Rocco , with its dozens of pictures by Tintoretto, and the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni , decorated with a gorgeous sequence by Carpaccio.