Venice: Per Rialto, Per San Marco

Okay, so here I am in Venice and I need to do two things according to my iPhone guides. I need to go to the Rialto and I need to go to Piazza San Marco. But how do I get there?

Let’s put it this way – You don’t get lost in Venice, especially if you are looking for the Rialto, Piazza San Marco, the train station or the bus station. There are signs everywhere, and by everywhere, I mean everywhere, pointing you in the direction of these four locations. This is fortunate because the city streets resemble the maze on the back of the placemats at McDonald’s. I had a map, but that wouldn’t have done me any good because there really is no straight route from the end of Venice that I was on to the end that holds Piazza San Marco. I could have taken one of the water buses, but I had plenty of time and just wanted to explore the city.

Like I said, the trip through the city was a long and winding one. Every other street requires that you cross a bridge to continue. Many of the streets were barely wide enough for two lanes of walking traffic, though that didn’t stop the bajillions of tourists from trying to walk together four-wide at slow enough paces to screw up traffic on both sides. (I’ve got a tourist-specific post in my mind, but we’ll see how soon it gets to paper.) Little storefronts are everywhere. Every five or six streets, you’ll come along a small campo, which generally had chairs and tables from a few restaurants and children playing football. Like I mentioned earlier, however, you never get lost. You just follow the signs to the Rialto until you get to the Rialto. If you take a wrong turn, don’t worry because there are a hundred routes leading to the same destination and at the end of your wrong turn, you’ll see another sign pointing you towards the Rialto.

If I read my iPhone guides right, and I make a lot of this crap up so don’t quote me on any of this, the Rialto is the oldest bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice. It was built in something like the 12^th century out of wood and then rebuilt in like the 16^th century out of stone. That was fortunate, too, because I don’t think that a wooden bridge would have supported the fifty or so tourist traps that currently are located on the Rialto. I took some pictures of the bridge from various angles, but unless I was missing something significant, there was nothing all that spectacular about the bridge except that it’s old and in Venice. I’m old and I was in Venice and nobody was writing any iPhone apps about me being a must-see attraction. But I digress.

To the contrary, I really liked Piazza San Marco. Now, let’s see how my history is on this one. At some point during Venice’s history, it decided it needed a saint. Not just any saint, but Saint Mark. Mark was (dead and) in Alexandria at the time, but that didn’t stop the Venetians from taking his remains and bringing them to Venice. (See, it’s not just the English and French that love to steal treasures – or at least bodies – from other countries.) After relocating Mark to his new home, the city built a cathedral and square in his honor. I could be wrong about some of that, but again, sometimes I just make this stuff up.

On a beautiful day, and all my days in Venice were beautiful, it really is a sight to behold. Except for the thousands of tourists. F’ing tourists!!! The square is huge and bounded on three sides by several centuries-old buildings. At the opening is St. Mark’s Cathedral, which had ginormous lines leading to the ticket booths. (I passed.) There also were a handful of restaurants and museums. My favorite object in the square, however, is the famous bell tower. Here’s some more fractured history: The bell tower was built in the 16^th (or 12^th or 18^th, I’m really not sure) century and was one of the most famous landmarks in Venice. In 1903 (or 1912 or something like that), a crack was noticed going up the side of the bell tower. A week or so later, the bell tower collapsed. It was rebuilt, but I think it now looks like it has for centuries. (Come to think of it, I think it collapsed in 1903 and was reopened in 1912. Somebody be a fact checker and look that up for me.) Still, even with this history of falling victim to gravity, people went to the top. Once again, the long lines and my acrophobia convinced me not to follow such a pursuit.

I don’t have much more about the history or landmarks of Venice, but I’ll throw them into my next post with a little bit about my final gastronomic adventures in Italy.