Vivid Waterways of Venice

Venice stays with you long after you’ve left  it. A visit to a place that has a powerful aura of history, mystery and beauty distilled down to its essence without the distractions of modern city life —  makes a very lasting impression…and a very colorful one.

This city charms you with blissful little moments: the completely different sense of scale; the narrow passageways opening up unexpectedly onto  squares in the maze-like configuration that makes getting from point A to B just enough of an adventure to become a happy memory; the constant nearness of water; the pace of the happily meandering fellow tourists; walking the old streets, on bridges over the canals with gondolas gliding through narrow passages and up to the San Marco square…it’s all just beautiful!

Venice is a city of  small islands, enhanced during the Middle Ages by the dredging of soils to raise the marshy ground above the tides. The resulting canals encouraged a nautical culture to flourish. Today an intricate maze of around 117 canals thread through the city with 409 bridges for the flow of foot traffic.

The canals in Venice vary widely in size. The main canal is about 1200 feet wide and varies based on the location. The smaller canals can be between 50 to 200 feet in width. Their depths range from 8 feet to 16 feet.

You see vivid colors everywhere..on the crumbling walls, fading boats, water layers, hanging washings.. the dark reds, brilliant blues and vibrant yellows that either stand out and yell or just blend in with a muted vibrancy to more closely mimic colors found in nature.

Jetting around the canals in Venice is totally fun. I loved travelling on the vaporetto; the city’s ferry system. This is the main way of getting around Venice and the tickets set you back just a few euros which leaves plenty of coin for sunset aperitivo at a rooftop wine bar :-). Even better is to get the day passes.

And if you’ve had your share of the public ferries and romantic gondolas, then think about rowing your own boat. The fact is, Venice highly restricts the operation of motorized vessels to specific canals but non-motorized boats have a free rein. You can go anywhere at anytime in a paddled or row boat;  even against one-way traffic 🙂

“A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.”

Find more color in Daily Post’s Weekly Writing Challenge: A Splash of Color