Venice - City of Canals

When you think of Venice, canals come to mind, and when you visit Venice you want to take a ride on the canals in a Gondola with a gondolier singing a mellow ballad or love song in Italian. During the middle ages, Venice developed into a regional capital and center of commerce, finance and art. Today, Venice remains a very beautiful and unique city, but faces a number of challenges, including among them pollution, erosion, subsidence, sea level rise, and the impact of tourism. These are photos of gondolas taken on a gondola ride that started on the Grand Canal and progressed onto lesser canals. A few other photos of gondolas are included. As can especially be seen in the last photo, the gondolas are works of art that are proudly maintained by their gondolier owners. Contrary to common belief, our experience was that most of the gondoliers do not sing. According to Rick Steves, those who do sing are not enthusiastic about singing a song many tourist request - "O Sole Mio" - because the song originated in Naples far to the south. Walking the narrow alleyways that run between buildings, into small plazas and over bridges, is great fun (that will be the topic of my next blog entry.) The weather changed quickly in Venice on the April day these photos were taken, starting out misty, moving to cloudy at mid-day and becoming sunny by early afternoon, so the lighting varies greatly across them.