Time and chance

Last night we carefully planned a walking tour of Venice, fully anticipating that it would not go according to plan. In Venice, you expect to be diverted. We first set out on the longish walk to Dorsoduro to see its great church, Santa Maria della Salute. (It means, St Mary of the Health. It was built because Venice survived a plague.) 

As we walked I noticed a sign for a traghetto across the Grand Canal which would potentially take hundreds of metres off our journey. Even better, a traghetto is a gondola ferry. For €2 you get a short gondola ride and nobody sings! On the short hop across the Grand Canal a strange vessel crossed our bows. It was an omen.

A traghetto has two oarsmen. This is the bowman. Ahead of him is our destination.

Lyn here is enjoying the ride and the spectacle.

What?

We entered the church and mass was about to begin. Mass for Lyn was planned for 6:45 pm but she saw this as a sign and so I got to sit through a mass in Italian. (I swear I’ve gone to more masses than most Catholics.)

We came out onto the steps to find a crowd of picnicking Italians watching some strange event on the Grand Canal which involved every form of non-motorised craft imaginable. It was quite a sight. There were clearly different nationalities and districts represented as well as kayaks, rowing eights, dragon boats - you name it.

We wandered to the point of Dorsoduro admiring the spectacle. Then we walked north towards our next destination, Ca Rezzonico, a Palace and art gallery. However, at this point, Google decided that the only way to walk there was on the Grand Canal. Mass had not given us special powers so a change of plan saw us cross the Academia bridge and walk to Palazzo Fortuny instead. This was another art gallery, with the added twist that the entire palace, except for the exhibition spaces, looks in danger of crumbling into the canal. The art was modern. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that much of this bores me but then so does a gallery full of madonnas and cherubs. The point is some of it was interesting. Lyn liked the detailed models of buildings and I liked an installation which at first I thought was just part of the crumbling palazzo. I was also fooled by 3 first aid cabinets which I stupidly thought were first aid cabinets.

It is difficult to discern the dividing line between exhibits and palazzo.

We drifted towards Rialto and treated ourselves to lunch at a restaurant by the Grand Canal so we could watch the crazy spectacle on the water. A dragon boat went past very fast flying the Australian flag. Another went past with its crew chanting and stroking with military precision - Germans of course.

After lunch we walked into Castello to visit surely the world’s quirkiest bookshop, Aqua Alta Libreria. Aqua Alta is Venice’s periodic flooding. The low-lying shop solves this problem by piling its books into boats and stacking them on crates well off the ground. There is no real cataloguing. I heard a young woman explaining that the book finds you, not you the book. Out the back the proprietors have turned unsellable old encyclopaedias into a flight of stairs.

From there we navigated to the Arsenale end of Castello to scout out a hotel at which a friend planned to stay. Venice’s calle were quieter than usual today and this region was almost peaceful.

We had certainly done our exercise for the day. We headed home for a nap. Lyn had one last request, a sunset stroll after dinner. On a day when nothing much else went quite as planned, I planned this properly. I checked the time that the sun would set. I calculated when it would light up the gilded facade of San Marco. I even worked out where I could see over all the people for a photo. Or that’s my story anyway.