Venice
"...this solitude was anciently chosen by man for his habitation. They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the san and strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children were to be the princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride;... Had deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would again and again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had stronger surges beaten their shores, all the richness and refinement of the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary seaport. Had there been no tide.. the narrow canals of the city would have become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the water-access to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible... Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of flood and ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily intercourse, must have been done away with. The streets of the city would have been widened, its networks of canals filled up, and all the peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed."
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![Gondolas, Venice [click to enlarge]](http://cascoly.com/showjpg.asp?jpg=qtr11534.jpg) |
![San Marcos, Night [click to enlarge]](http://cascoly.com/showjpg.asp?jpg=qtr17346.jpg)
"Nobody arrives in Venice and sees the city for the first time.
Depicted and described so often that its image has become part of the
European collective consciousness, Venice can initially create the
slightly anticlimactic feeling that everything looks exactly as it should.
The water-lapped palaces along the Canal Grande are just as the brochure
photographs made them out to be, Piazza San Marco does indeed look as
perfect as a film set, and the panorama across the water from the Palazzo
Ducale is precisely as Canaletto painted it. The sense of familiarity soon
fades, however, as details of the scene begin to catch the attention - a
strange carving high on a wall, a boat being manoeuvred round an
impossible corner, a window through which a painted ceiling can be seen.
And the longer one looks, the stranger and more intriguing Venice becomes
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Chairs, Piazza san Marco Flag, San Marco Chairs, Piazza san Marco Umbrellas, Doge's Palace, Piazza san Marco Speedboat Piazza San Marco Ponte Sospiro (Bridge of Sighs) Rialto Bridge | >
then walked
