Venice: Look Ma! No Cars!

The moment you step out of the train station in Venice, you feel like you just stepped onto a movie set. Colorful, artfully decaying buildings, canals of murky water, and of course, gondolas and their gondoliers wearing classic striped shirts. It's all true. It's not just some fanciful fabrication as I had suspected. It's a city straight out of a coffee table photo book. And in August, high-season for vacationers, it was pure madness.

Instead of traffic jams, there were gondola jams. Instead of packed city buses, there were packed Vaporettis (the poor-man's gondola), and the narrow streets of Venice were engorged with camera-laden, guidebook-carrying tourists, just like us.

Vaporetti in the canals.



Navigating the streets of Venice to find our B&B was particularly hard. I had been forewarned about the difficulties of finding - well, just about anything - in Venice due to the bizarre street numbering style.

Venice is split into six districts, and each district contains the street numbers one through several thousand. However, numbers start at one end of the district and are assigned along streets and alleys as they are encountered. So it's a guessing game as to where your street number is on specific street, and you better make sure you're in the correct district or you could find yourself up a canal without a gondola oar. It's a baffling Venetian system designed to confound and confuse tourists who are endlessly lugging their suitcases up one crowded staircase and down another in the humid, hot conditions.

However, all the major attractions are well-signed throughout the city which means if you learn to navigate by landmarks instead of streets, you'll be much better off.

Did I mention it was pretty? Like really, really pretty? This is how pretty it was.



And while it was packed during the day, during the evening, after the mass exodus of day-trippers, it became even more picturesque.


There is very little green-space in Venice but we managed to find a small patch of it and met this local resident.


We spent a few days cruising around in the Vaporettis and took a trip over to Murano, the island known for (expensive, very, very expensive) hand-blown glass.

The Venetian equivalent of "Buck or Two" dollar stores.


The weird thing about Venice, I mean outside of the "no-cars-just-boats" thing is that there is a no-picnicing rule. There are signs everywhere reminding you of this. Want to sit down for moment while you're eating your pizza slice? Illegal. Want to sip your cappuccino while sitting on the steps at St. Mark's Plaza? Illegal. Even the locals seem to be in on the whole thing because we saw many handmade "NO PICNIC" signs alongside the official city ones. The fine for getting caught seated, mid-sandwich? 50 euros.

At first I thought it was something pushed by all the over-priced restaurants in Venice (which is most of them) in order to get people sitting down, paying the cover charge, service charge, and their inflated meal prices. But I read later that it might have something to do with tourist litter.

They say that on any given day the local population of historic Venice is outnumbered by the 12 million tourists that visit yearly. If they are in fact littering (bad, bad, tourists!), I can begin to see the point of the no-littering bylaw, as strange and cruel as it seemed at the outset of our visit.

The mailbox at Doge's Palace, where citizens of Venice could anonymously accuse their peers of wrongdoing. I'm reporting some people for picnicking, or better yet, just turning in the litter-ers.


Venice is an expensive city for tourists, but imagine living there. You pay more for most things, it's hard to get around, due to the heritage status of most buildings it's nearly to impossible to renovate your house if you can afford one, and to top it all off, there is that slow, sinking feeling you get because your city is actually, slowly sinking. Despite the city's efforts to bribe residents into staying with housing incentives, the population of Venice is declining as more and more people flee to cheaper, easier places to live on the mainland. For all these reasons, Venice left me feeling a bit melancholy.

Just after dawn on the morning of our departure. Our last views of Venice.