 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Main Street, Venice-Style
Cruising the Canale Grande (Grand Canal) of Venice, Italy
It's the watery Champs-Elysées of Venice, the city's main artery and primary boulevard, a two-mile ribbon of water plied by hundreds of ferries, gondolas, garbage scows, speedboats, and small commercial craft daily. This inverted S-curve of a canal is lined with more than 200 of the most gorgeous Venetian palazzi (palaces), called home at times by a legion of expats like Wagner, Byron, Robert Browning, Hemingway, Proust, Henry James, Ruskin, and James Fenimore Cooper.
The buildings and palaces fronting the Grand Canal range in style from early Byzantine-Romanesque—where pale green, creamy yellow, or blood-red plaster walls are hung with marble sills sporting pointy, eastern style windows—to proportionately precise Renaissance palaces and neoclassical temple-like mansions.
Best of all, you don't have to book an expensive gondola ride to do it. Just sit back on the no. 1 or 82 vaporetto line—they're open at the prow; grab one of the outdoor seats—and take an excursion in observation from Piazza San Marco to the Ferrovia (or vice-versa).
Don't worry about which palazzo is which, rather open your eyes and your camera lens to search for the telling Venetian details—an old woman swathed in black leaning out her window; workmen replacing water-rotted wooden mooring piles by pounding in fresh-cut trunks; cats sleeping precariously on open windowsills; churches whose entrances lead up out of the canal, as if only the faithful with boats can attend; and private docks whose ancient marble stairs cling with algae as they disappear under the murky water.
Related Articles |
Outside Resources |
This article was last updated in December 2006. All information was accurate at the time.
Copyright © 1998–2008 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
