The Grand Canal at the sunset, after the day's water traffic has died down. Photo / Getty Images
The Grand Canal at the sunset, after the day's water traffic has died down. Photo / Getty Images
It's all happening on Venice's Grand Canal, so hop on board a vaporetto and enjoy the views, writes Marian McGuinness.
A nun walked over a little arched bridge, her gaggle of small charges following. When she reached the path, she stopped and turned to the children. She sang a few lines and the children responded in song as she banged a saucepan lid with a wooden spoon to keep them in time. They all went off singing.
Italy has its share of seductive towns, but few can capture and sustain your heart as the water goddess herself. La Serenissima. Venice.
The singing nun with her students, just going about everyday life along the Grand Canal. Photo / Marian McGuinness
Venice's extraordinary history began when Attila the Hun drove settlers to the swamps of the Adriatic Sea. They began linking the 117 small islands with bridges which today number more than 400 spanning its 150 canals.
Over the past four centuries, this limestone city has been underpinned by a petrified forest of 10 million oak and pine wooden piles. Embedded in airless mud, the wood has been naturally preserved.
Some may see Venice today as no more than a tourist theme park, but if you surrender to her from your first moment of arrival, she will carry you along her jade waters into her 1200-year history whether you travel by romantic gondola, sleek, teak water-taxi or, as I did, by chugging vaporetto.
A slice of everyday life
It's twilight as I board Vaporetto No. 1, the all-stops Grand Canal waterbus, at Santa Lucia train station for the 8km, 40-minute meander through the heart of Venice. I wheedle my way to an edge squashing alongside costumed passengers. Three are dressed as Statues of Liberty complete with masks haloed by seven golden spikes. It's February. Winter is shrugging off and the city is celebrating its annual Carnevale di Venezia, just as it has every year since 1094. Carnevale originates from the words carne vale, or farewell to meat, as it foreshadowed the tradition of Lent before Easter.
Just some of the many colourful costumes at the Venetian Carnevale. Photo / Marian McGuinness
The motor grinds and we're off into the breeze along the most exquisite avenue in the world. We glide by candy-striped mooring poles and share our space with FedEx couriers, garbage collectors and barges laden with boxes of televisions and microwaves. There's a smell of oil as we slice through the canal's ruffled waters. We pass a construction barge balancing a crane and an excavator. An ambulance silently overtakes and suddenly there's commotion on the starboard side as we have a near-miss with a clutch of blue-striped gondoliers. It's road-rage Venetian style as insults and gesticulations fly between the vaporetto captain and the gondoliers.
The famous Rialto Bridge with a clutch of gondolas parked outside. Photo / Marian McGuinness
The deckhand pushes through the crowd to get to the gate as the vaporetto pulls alongside a creaking, bucking pontoon. He lassoes the thick rope around the mooring post, slides the gate open and passengers disembark into mysterious, narrow alleys.
A small motorboat putts past. Two older Venetians are sitting up like king and queen on stately cane chairs. They are sipping prosecco and eating nuts from a bowl enjoying the ambience of their evening drive. It's that magical moment of twilight when time is taken to relax and celebrate the wonders of the day.
And so, the collision with everyday Venetian life continues as we zigzag the canal's 20 pontoon landings. There is harmony and rhythm on the water. It is the choreography of a water ballet.
Shopping for vegetables, canal-style. Photo / Marian McGuinness
A barge with a frame of plastic-wrapped dry-cleaning, motors past. Geraniums spill from terracotta pots lining the steps of a mooring quay encrusted at its pocked base with the moss of ages. Some houses have barred windows, and whether fact or fiction, it was not to keep the women in, but to keep out the unscrupulous local lad, Casanova.
A city rich in history
The canal curves. Like masks of alabaster, rouge and ochre, the palazzos and churches slide past, ornamented with Moorish windows, Baroque facades and Byzantine domes. They are the palaces of the popes and doges of old. They have housed the superstars of writers, artists and musicians.
One notable swimmer of the Grand Canal was Romantic poet Lord Byron. At night, he'd often swim naked the 7km stretch from the beach island of Lido, propelling himself with his right arm while holding a torch with his left to warn sleepy gondoliers of his presence.
As I dream of Lord Byron's derring-do, the 16th century, marble-arched Rialto Bridge comes into sight. I look for Shakespeare's Shylock, from The Merchant of Venice in the scrum of tourists snapping away with their cameras. So many are in capes, wigs and masks, Shylock may well be there.
This is the site of the famous fish markets, where fishmongers sing as if they are Pavarotti. This is also the stop to see the house where the explorer Marco Polo lived. Nearby is the statue of a hunchback called, Il Gobbo. It was the finishing point for criminals who, as punishment, were made to run naked from the Piazza San Marco.
Another homage to the naked in this area is the pink-painted, Ponte delle Tette, the Bridge of Breasts, where 15th-century prostitutes displayed their wares.
Music, machismo and mosaics
Venice is also the home of 17th century Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi. Carnevale was often a time of extramarital amour that resulted in many illegitimate children. Vivaldi served as music teacher at the Ospedale della Pieta, now the exclusive Hotel Metropole. In Vivaldi's time it was a convent, orphanage and music school for abandoned girls. It was here that Vivaldi wrote the universally-known, Four Seasons, and where an ensemble of 40 girls dressed in white robes and crowned with pomegranate flowers, would perform his music for the churchgoers from a brass-grated gallery.
Music is never far from the Grand Canal. In 2021, the 12m Noah's Violin, named after the biblical ark, stopped sightseers in their tracks as it floated down the canal with a string quartet onboard playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It was crafted as a musical message of hope as the world navigates the Covid-19 pandemic.
As our vaporetto plies onwards, we pass beneath the Accademia Bridge, one of only four bridges to cross the Grand Canal. Adjacent is the colonnaded Gallerie dell'Accademia, housing masterpieces of the Venetian Renaissance.
Nearby, a waiter carries a giant burgundy parasol along the pedestrian promenade to an al fresco cafe and plants it over a table. There's a group of gondoliers having a smoko. "Beware signorinas," one calls to a party of schoolgirls travelling in one of the polished, black beauties, "he thinks he is Casanova". The girls giggle and the handsome gondolier laughs. He adjusts his sexy sunglasses and thrusts his oar with even more Italian machismo.
A Venetian gondola driver demonstrating the classic foot technique. Photo / Marian McGuinness
Bells chime to hail the end of day as Venice drifts into evening. The canal has become a trail of beaten pewter. Chandeliers wink from 12th-century palazzo windows and I become a voyeur of painted ceilings, ornate furniture and velvet drapes that frame their marble balconies. I imagine aristocratic ladies leaving their palaces wearing sumptuous gowns and high platform shoes to keep their dresses above the dirty streets as they step into their gondolas to be transported to a ball.
We round the final bend of the Grand Canal and I glimpse the mosaics of St Mark's Basilica, my last stop before the vaporetto lumbers into the darkness of the lagoon towards the island of Lido. The goddess's mood has shifted. The sun has set and the moon hovers like a blood orange in the sky, illuminating the duomo and campanile of St George on the island across the water, just as it did 100 years ago when Claude Monet sat here and painted San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk.
The Doges Palace at Venice's famous Piazza San Marco. Photo / Getty Images
I alight into the chaos of Piazza San Marco and the tide of masqueraded revellers sweeps me into the maelstrom of Carnevale. It's like stepping into a Cirque du Soleil opera of stilt walkers, fire-eaters and acrobats. No wonder Napoleon claimed this piazza to be "Europe's most beautiful salon".
I'm framed by the arcades of the Procuratie and the Doge's Palace with its baroque Bridge of Sighs. Byron wrote of this bridge where prisoners glimpsed their last look at Venice while being transferred from prison cells to the execution chambers, as "I stood on the Bridge of Sighs; a palace and a prison on each hand".
Before me is the sky-piercing bell tower of the Campanile, its pyramid spire topped by a golden weather vane in the form of the archangel Gabriel. To my right is the ornate, five-domed St Mark's Basilica where, in 828, merchants from Venice brought the stolen the body of St Mark from Alexandria in Egypt. According to legend they hid his body in a barrel under layers of pork in order to smuggle him to Venice.
My journey is finishing and beginning. It's now time to indulge in fine dining at Caffe Florian, sharing the same spot as Casanova and Dickens, or perhaps I'll head around the corner to Harry's Bar, the haunt of Ernest Hemmingway, to sip a Bellini. And while I'm there I might even contemplate getting lost in Venice.
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