Hot, smelly, noisy, over priced, over crowded and still the greatest tourist destination of them all. Venice has that hold of tourist imagination that won’t go away. A sensuous, aqueous city that brings them by the coach and boatload from the neighbouring towns and countries.
Go to Garda, Slovenia or Northern Croatia and you will find Venice is the most popular day trip. Thousands come to camp on the shores of the Laguna and come to Venice.
But to skip through is to miss the heart of the city. To catch the real Venice you have to have stayed in one of the old hotels in the city, preferably one with water access.
Plonk your luggage there, buy a three-day bus pass and revel in the weirdness of it all. No matter how often you have done it, there is always a thrill in getting on board a bus which is a boat.
Even the transfer from the airport is not an ordinary one. It takes an hour, ten minutes of it by coach and the rest by water taxi, usually u90 ride.
Unlike things which can be spared if the budget is tight, like the over-priced gondola ride or u10 cappucino in St Mark’s Square, the taxi is a must-do, to avoid the crush and chaos of the Venetian public transport system.
The taxi speeds up, along a buoy-lined course through the water, slowing occasionally to bounce over the wash of oncoming traffic.
They usually pass under a bridge along a small canal before turning into the S-shaped Grand Canal that we all know from those postcards.
Do it by moonlight and you will never be the same person again.
The grandeur of Venice is best viewed from the water. The star attractions around St Mark’s Square fill with day trippers, a delicious mixture of culture and clutter.
They queue for the over priced gondolas and disappear down the side-canals, queues of men in hooped jumpers with poles sharing jokes and slagging each other in dialect when the water does an impression of the M50.
The big merchant’s houses compete with each other with classical facades. Italian noble families loved building high towers. In Venice, the swampy ground meant that towers collapsed and those that still remain lean slightly. Instead they concentrated on facades.
Some of the best have been turned into art galleries. The Guggenheim has parts of its collection in a brand new setting.
In the Palazzo Grassi they have assembled the trendiest and some of the most expensive modern art, Damon Hurst’s formaldehyde cows amongst them, as part of an exhibition “Where are we Going?”
The ancient palace has been tastefully restored, and a short walk brings you to the urban “insula” of Santo Stefano and to the “sestiere”, to discover its art masterpieces and the precious medieval ceiling “a carena di nave.”
Then something old that is new. A fire in 1996 destroyed La Fenice, the classical Opera House.
Everything has been reassembled, with a new air conditioning system which makes listening comfortable but caused a debate or two among the singers who prefer their opera houses to follow old norms, including a little heat in summer.
La Fenice was originally a splendid semi-circle until Napoleon put his imperial box in. The imperial box has been restored too, except that the mirrors are now clear and actually reflect the over-rouged faces of theatre-goers, which confused some of the early guests. The best sounds, we are told, are not from the imperial box but from the cheap seats in the loft.
You can spend two or three days like this, rushing from gallery to basilica, to museum, and feel slightly superior to the day trippers frantically cramming it all in. But there is more.
In the evening the day trippers and the hawkers head home. This is when you get to see the city at its silent, car-less best and a kind of ageless serenity settles over the watery warren.
They say Venice is for people in the first or the final flush of romance. But it isn’t necessary. There is enough romance in the city to go round for everyone whether they have their lover with them or not.
Best of all, relax and let this unique city wash over you.
And when the tide is high, we mean wash in the most literal sense.
