Thursday, August 20, 2009 2:48:27 PM
Hotel, Blogroll, Books, Vacation
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Lying on the opposite side of the Canal Grande from San Marco, and stretching westward to the docks, Dorsoduro is one of the city’s smartest quarters, as well as the home of its university and the main art gallery
Friday, July 17, 2009 7:53:46 AM
Education, Vacation, Books, Blogroll
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Venice’s tourist season is very nearly an all-year affair. Peak season, whenhotel rooms are virtually impossible to come by at short notice, is from Aprilto October; try to avoid July and August in particular, when the climate becomes oppressively hot and clammy. The other two popular spells are the Carnevale (leading up to Lent) and the weeks on each side of Christmas. For the ideal combination of comparative peace and a mild climate, the two or three weeks immediately preceding Easter is perhaps the best time of year. Climatically the months at the end of the high season are somewhat less reliable: some November and December days bring fogs that make it difficult to see from one bank of the Canal Grande to the other. If you want to see the city at its quietest, January is the month to go – take plenty of warm clothes, though, as the winds of the Adriatic can be savage, and you should be prepared for floods throughout the winter. This acqua alta,as Venice’s seasonal flooding is called, has been an element of Venetian life for centuries, but nowadays it’s far more frequent than it used to be: between October and late February it’s not uncommon for flooding to occur every day of the week, and it’ll be a long time before the huge flood barrier (which was begun in 2003) makes any impact. However, having lived with it for so long, the city is well geared todealing with the nuisance. Shopkeepers in the most badly affected areas insert steel shutters into their doorways to hold the water at bay, while the local council lays jetties of duck-boards along the major thoroughfares and between the chief vaporetto stops and dry land.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009 3:23:28 PM
Hotel, Blogroll, Books, Vacation
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Founded 1500 years ago on a cluster of mudflats in the centre of the lagoon,Venice rose to become
Europe’s main trading post between the West and the East, and at its height controlled an empire that
extended from the Dolomites to Cyprus.The melancholic air of the place is in part a product of the
discrepancy between the grandeur of its history and what the city has become.
In the heyday of the Venetian Republic, some 200,000 people lived in Venice, three times its pres
ent population.Merchants from Europe and western Asia maintained warehouses here; transactions in the banks and bazaars of the Rialto dictated the value of commodities all over the continent; in the dock- yards of the Arsenale the workforce was so vast that
a warship could be built and fitted out in a single day; and the Piazza San Marco was thronged with people here to set up deals or report to the Republic’s
government. Nowadays it’s no longer a buzzing metropolis but rather the embodiment of a fabulous
past, dependent for its survival largely on the people who come to marvel at its relics.
The monuments which draw the largest crowds are the Basilica di San Marco the mausoleum of the city’spatron saint – and the Palazzo Ducale or Doge’s Palace. Certainly these are the most imposing structures in the city, but a rollcall of the churches worth visiting would feature more
than a dozen names.Many of the city’ s treasures remain in the churches for which they were created, but a sizeable number have been removed to one or other Venice’ s museums, with the Accademia holding the lion’ s share.This cultural heritage is a source of end-less fascination, but you should also discard your itineraries for a day and just wander – the anonymous parts of Venice reveal as much of the city as its well-known attractions.
My Opera
