On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
randy khan
Boats and where to put them and some miscellany.
I’ve mentioned the water taxis, and this is one of them. They all look pretty much like this. They’re pretty zippy, and they have cabins in back that hold maybe 8 or 9 people if you’re good friends. The best way to ride in one is to stand up in the sunroof and get the breeze in your face.
In a city where the roads are canals, everything gets delivered by boat, so here’s the smallest freighter you’ll probably ever see.
Yes, there still are gondolas, entirely for tourists, and not cheap. Because it’s obligatory, our group had a gondola ride from one side of the Grand Canal to the other, which probably didn’t really take much more time than the water taxis would have. Here are a bunch of gondolas waiting in a canal.
Where most people have garages, Venetians have docks. Some of them actually inside the buildings, so you can get in and out of your boat under cover.
A nice little metal bridge.
This garden was kind of a surprise. Venice is not a city of gardens; it’s a city of stone. This was in the back of a palazzo where we had lunch one day. (Venice seems to have an endless supply of contessas who will open up their palazzos for lunch, presumably for a fee. At one point we were joking about contessa conventions where they could see vendors selling bric-a-brac for their palazzos because we saw several bits of décor in more than one palazzo.)
This is one of the newest bridges in Venice, used by people who come in on cruise ships. Venetians are not entirely thrilled about the cruise ships, which bring lots of people and, Venetians fear, cause damage to the city because of their wakes. The bridge isn’t anything special, but it has one extremely unusual feature – that round thing, which is for people who have trouble going up and down the bridge, including people who use wheelchairs. It was literally the only accessibility feature we saw anywhere outdoors during our entire trip.
This is a view across the Grand Canal at night. It was really lovely. Sadly, all of my photos from here have a railing going across them, but I think you’ll still get the idea.
Mary G
I am loving this whole series of photos. The night shot, the garden, the contessa’s house, the little bridge. The accessibility bubble looks like it would be of no use whatsoever.
CaseyL
@Mary G: I can’t imagine what it would take to make Venice ADA-compliant. Not possible, probably.
This is a great series, randy khan; thanks so much!
JanieM
Besides the beauty of the scenes, I like this set for the way it gives me a feel for a human-scale Venice, where people actually live and work. It’s not all just famous ancient buildings! And it’s so colorful!
Seeing pictures of water at the doorsteps (metaphorically speaking) made me wonder what the buildings were built on. I mean, those of us with basements often worry about water getting into them….
Having googled, the first (and only) link I followed was this one, which tells me enough to satisfy my basic curiosity. Somebody should have told these kids that there’s no such thing as an “artisan well,” but hopefully their info is otherwise trustworthy. /pedantry
Auntie Anne
Randy, this series has been lovely. I now have another place to visit on my list, and until I can get there, I plan to revisit this series.
TomatoQueen
@Mary G:
Accessibility bubble indeed. It’s otherwise perfectly charming, as befits the setting, but as Endeavor says about Venice in the season finale last year, “The streets are full of water!” Also can recommend The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt ( of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fame), about the fire at La Fenice, as well as many other aspects of Venice, in the late 90s. Great rambling read, to get lost in, the way one wants to in Venice.
randy khan
@JanieM:
Venice definitely has a human scale – most of the buildings are no more than 5 or 6 stories tall, and because there are no cars or trucks, the streets mostly are pretty narrow and, of course, filled with people. Even on St. Mark’s Square, on three sides the buildings aren’t particularly tall; the cathedral is the exception.
J R in WV
There are artesian wells that spew water, seemingly forever, as long as the pressure lasts… perhaps they just misspelled that?
Anyway, the images of Venice are wonderful — thanks again!
Comrade Colette
OK, laugh at that bubble-boy-bridge if you like, but it links the wheelchair-accessible train station to the wheelchair-accessible vaporetto stop at Piazzale Roma, from which a number of accessible vaporetti serve quite a lot of accessible stops. For example, you can take a vaporetto from the Piazzale Roma to the Fondamenta Zattere, the quay that runs along the Giudecca canal, where all of the stops are accessible and the bridges along the Fondamenta have relatively recently-installed ramps, and from there you can roll all the way to the Grand Canal before you get stuck (although there are lots of other accessible stops on other lines that give access to points on the far side of the Grand Canal).
Venice is not by any means the most disability-friendly place, but they make a remarkable effort considering the basic geography and bridge-intensiveness.
/rant
Have I mentioned how much I love Venice?
RaflW
As I mentioned the other day, one of my favorite parts of staying in Venice was breakfast daily on the Fondamenta de Cannaregio. The many little cargo ships going by, some stopping to unload a few cases of this or that for the small grocery a few dozen meters away. I loved it all! Hubub, but somehow a bit leisurely paced.
They were fairly specialized, too (which makes sense since they’re small). One had basically just paper towels, t.p., and the like. There was a reefer/freezer one that delivered ice cream. No 53′ tractor trailers with palletized loads from SuperValu warehouses!
The view in fact looked a lot like the first photo today’s set, though the yellow building across the way from Ca’ Dogaressa had more moorish influences. Fond memories.
RaflW
@Comrade Colette: Oh, that’s cool. I remember being a bit aghast in 2012 at how little seemed accessible then. Maybe I just wasn’t looking closely enough. Or things have improved. Or some of each.
(Oh, and PS to my above comment: “Riding” along in the google canalview boat, I see now why the OP’s photo seems so familiar. It is the Canale Cannaregio, just about five hoses down the opposite side from the hotel I stayed in.)
Mary G
@Comrade Colette: Oooh, thank you. I thought it was virtue signaling on the part of the cruise ships, but hearing that there is a little bit of accessibility makes me want to go post-COVID.
randy khan
@Comrade Colette:
That’s good to know. Our group didn’t take vaporetti, and there was no particular reason for us to have noticed accessibility on them the one day my wife and I were on our own.
ET
I went to a wedding in Venice in 2002 and the entire wedding party and guests in all our finery took gondalas from the wedding to the reception and each had a bottle of wine for the trip. That was the way to take a gondala to make it special.
There were two things that struck me. One, the inaccessibility of the place for those with any mobility issues. I have a feeling if you have them their universe may be sort of small. You had your neighborhood church, your neighborhood trattoria, your neighborhood store, etc.
Second, what that the pace and scheduling of life activities large and small had its quirks. I saw one barge piled higgledy piggledy, because on palazzo on the Grand Canal was either being renovated or moved, while a more speedboat type boat someone was transporting a washing machine. I was also amused by the garbage pick up. The bags used at individual houses were small (and I think they came more often) because they had to picked up at the residence by one person and brought to a central spot on a bigger canal to be picked up by someone else.
Thor Heyerdahl
I visited Venice in the autumn of 2004. The tides were high, duckboards were all over the place (they’re not a place to stop and take a picture when everyone is trying to get through), and the Italian women were fitted out in stylish rubber boots. I liked the small pickup truck like boats for delivering building supplies; taking the waterbus with a vaporetto; and the small, fast police speedboats.
JanieM
@J R in WV:
Yes, that was my (implied, sorry, I guess I should have been explicit) point. Meant lightheartedly…..