A Few Words About Venice

The Rialto

We visited Venice on Friday, July 2, 2010.

A few words?


Teaming with people even on a slow day.

Hot (sure, could have been avoided by visiting sometime between October and April).

Humid (ditto).

Dirty (not much you can do about this one).

Graffiti (not much they are doing about this one).

Green, putrid water (what can you do about this one?).

The gondolas reminded my of the "Small World", or any other ride, at Disneyland (without the horrible music). Gondolas lined up nose-to-tail--at who knows how much a pop, $100?--as if they were on those little rails that you see at amusement park rides. I almost expected to see some young kid in a park uniform queuing up the folks in turn as they stood in line to board the boats.



Take a look at the famed Rialto Bridge. . . . One of the iconic structures of Venice. It's a run-down mess. Many of the buildings around Venice are in sad shape.

The water smells. The city smells. People are everywhere. The shops are tourist traps selling over-priced junk.

Oh, but they had a Burger King!

I absolutely, completely failed to see the romance in Venice. It's a decaying, sinking, sad mess. We saw dozens--and there are certainly hundreds--of smaller towns throughout Italy with as lengthy a history and far more charm than Venice.

I know I said in an earlier post that I'd provide a sentence about Venice, and I later mentioned I'd have three sentences on Venice. I couldn't express my disappointment with our foray to Venice in so few words. The train ride from Castelfranco Veneto to Venice and back was fun. It was only about an hour, or hour and a half. Pretty inexpensive, too. There's not a better way to get there and back than the way we did it--taking a car down there, I hear, is troublesome and not worth the hassle (and prone to break-ins).

I can say I've seen it, and I can say I have no need or desire to go back.