City of the Lion

On Sunday morning, we boarded the commuter train at Quarto d'Altino for the 20-minute ride into Venice. J liked the outing from the start. We'd been talking a lot about our impending visit to the city where the streets are made of water.

 

From Santa Lucia station, we emerged breathless and blinking back tears before the Grand Canal, and boarded the #1 Vaporetto for a 40-minute float down to San Marco. There could not have been a better way to draw back the curtain on this miraculous place.

Even today, amid zig-zagging gondolas, water-buses, and water-taxis, the Canal has what Henry James called "the supreme distinction of its tranquility."

We were delighted to see that a crowd had turned up on the Ponte dell'Accademia to greet us! (We found that even the crowds here were quiet in their reverie. And despite the numbers of people, everyone was good-humored and seemed to be sharing in an experience of the place.)

 (Basilica di San Marco, west portals)

 Above: Goethe lived in that house on the left.

It's astonishing how easy it is to step off the canals into the tiny alleys and feel that you've got the city to yourself. We stumbled into a little campo and had an impromptu picnic under this old house. For most of it, all we could hear were our own voices and the banging of a few wooden shutters in the wind.

 (Rialto Market area)

We spent the whole first part of the day wandering the alleyways of San Polo and Santa Croce. Though we were nominally in search of the house of the pioneering 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, most of the time we were utterly and enjoyably lost. J loved being able to run ahead down the empty lanes, and we enjoyed knowing there was no threat of him stepping out in front of a car.

J's been intermittently honing his photography skills. We asked him to take a picture of the two of us. He managed the fifty per cent above.

 Then some passing Italian tourists, chuckling to find us waiting on J's shutter-click, offered to take this one of all three of us.

 Gelato!

Below: After our wandering, we got back on the vaporetto and crossed the lagoon...

 

...to the Lido

Above: J's evening dip in the windy, wavy Gulf exhilarated him so much he did a spontaneous dance number on this beach stage.

And then we crossed back to the city and floated back up the Grand Canal to the train station, as evening fell.

  (San Marco)

 James again: "It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility."

The best kind of tired.