Travel Blogging IX

Venice, Italy: The city with canals for streets, the beautiful and romantic Venice. We spent the afternoon there and I will share with you some reactions.

First, gondolas really are pretty cool, and the gondoliers exhibit casual skill in navigating in their rather specialized environment. Ours didn’t sing but did move us along with pushes delivered with his pole/paddle, his hand, or his foot. He also chattered in rapid-fire Italian with other gondoliers.

Speaking of “rapid fire,” hearing someone speak in another language often sounds like too many syllables in too little time. Here is an insight into why this is so. English has substantially more vocabulary than most other languages, more words to express specific meanings.

Have you been in Canada and looked at documents or package labels written in both English and French? If so you must have noticed that the French version is always about 50% longer than the English. I suspect the same would be true of English and Italian or English and Spanish.

In order to say the same thought in Italian, French, or Spanish one has to include more modifiers and descriptors than we do in English. In English we tend to have a word that means exactly what we intend without requiring the modifiers and descriptors.

Back to Venice, the water in the canals stinks; no question in my mind sewage leaks into the canals. How unclear is the water? You cannot see down three inches into it. I have to think living around what amount to open sewers isn’t healthy, I wonder if anyone has studied it? The canals in Amsterdam are about as polluted.

It is fascinating to see boats filling essentially all the roles that vehicles do on land. I saw an ambulance boat with flashing lights and siren. I saw police boats, construction boats, delivery boats, even a garbage boat. There is not, however, a direct aquatic equivalent to a motorcycle or bicycle, I suspect because the water is too dirty to directly expose one’s body to.

The buildings are old, and look it. We are told they all exist atop wooden pilings driven into the mud. Apparently during the period when Venice controlled Croatia, the Venetians cut down all the oak trees in Croatia to use as pilings. Supposedly the mixture of mud and salt water keeps them from rotting and causes them to petrify. This “petrify” I don’t know of my own knowledge, it’s just what all the guides say.

Buildings are not made of marble, even the fancy ones like churches, palaces, and the like. Reason: it is too heavy to be supported on marshy soil. Instead buildings are made of brick, which is supposed to be lighter, and limestone, ditto. The pollution causes the limestone to deteriorate and become dirty. There are a lot of restoration projects under way.

When Venice experiences exceptionally high tides, the plazas and ground floors of buildings flood. Instead of dealing with this forthrightly as the Dutch would have, Venice has sort of put up with being flooded every winter. We learned later that there is a project to control the extra-high tides and I hope it works.

The Doge was the elected-for-life duke-equivalent who ruled Venice and operated out of the Doge’s Palace. It is way past opulent, gold encrusted ceilings everywhere surrounding huge oils by various renaissance painters - all biblical allegories.

One of the ugly things about otherwise beautiful Italy is that so many Italians still smoke cigarettes. One is likely to smell their second-hand smoke in many places, particularly on the sidewalks and outdoor cafes. You smell smoke on the people too.

I remember when smoking was common in the States and we didn’t notice second-hand smoke. We’ve become unused to it and as a result it’s obnoxious. Italy will have serious medical bills as a result, unless smoking keeps the average lifespan down enough to compensate.

We’ve done something clever in the States vis-à-vis smoking that we didn’t do with regard to drinking. Instead of banning it a la Prohibition, we gradually restricted the places where it can be done. As this has happened, the number of people smoking has declined. I wonder if it would work with drinking alcohol?