Venice

With a bag full of sandwiches, pizzas, fruit and water (courtesy of Pierpaolo's mom) Jackie, Stefano, Pete and I hopped on a train bound for the island city of Venice.

Stefano studies architecture in the city, so he was appointed as our guide with plans to see the best of the architecture, canals, bridges, duomo's, and squares that this packed city has to offer (I've never seen a place so incredibly full of tourists, it was like Disneyland, no one lives there, everyone is a visitor, and even the locals don't really call it home). But what a beautiful city. With more bridges than houses, the city winds its way around the many canals that are themselves filled with more houses (in the form of boats) and more gondolas than you could count.

Like most places in Europe, the buildings are packed tightly together and offer a variety of architecural styels and colors. The thing about Venice though is that it seems like little buildings are squeezed into any space possible. If a walkway is wider than necessary, the Venitians just smack another building in between. The combination of this and canals and bridges for some roads and not others makes getting around the city more like a wander through a maze than a leisurely stroll between destinations. One wrong turn and you end up at a dead end or without a bridge to cross the canal.

Venice really does seem to be a city that won't last much longer. Countless buildings lean and tilt while others are warped as if in a cartoon. Along waterways many building have garages, not for cars but for their boats. How cool would it be to just walk downstairs and pop in your boat for a run to the supermarket down the canal?!

Another thing about Venice is all the glassware. Blown glass originated on the neighboring island Murano and shops are full of the beautiful pieces that people make from it. Figurines, jewelry, pipes, wine stopper. You name it, I bet you could find it made of glass somewhere in Venice.

We enjoyed lunch in one of the many piazzas (city squares) before walking to another park along another canal to take a little nap in some cool afternoon shade.

To get us back to the train station, we decided to hop on a traghetti, one of the large open-air boats, for a ride through the canals for about €5 each. (gondola rides will set you back about €100 (on the low end of the scale) and as Pierpaolo explained jokingly, only Asian tourists or entrepreneurial millionaires ride on them). On a boat through the Grand canal was a great way to depart from the city and see its many sights.

So that was Venice. A beautiful, dirty, warped city that may one day be swept into the sea but until then remains an island to be wandered and cherished for its unique heritage and existence.