For the last four hundred years Venice has been a magnet to the powerful and the talented. Her wealth and influence enabled her to summon some of Europe’s finest architects, sculptors and artisans. These were followed by painters, writers, poets, and dreamers. No member of Europe’s aristocracy or elite considered his (or her) education complete until they had taken the “Grand Tour” of which Venice was an important cornerstone.
Today the rich and famous still flock to Venice, until recently by jet, but more lately by the magnificently restored Orient Express train that thrice weekly crosses Europe from London, via Paris Zurich and Innsbruck.
No other European city has a greater linkage into the past than Venice, and arriving there is quite unlike arriving anywhere else.
One minute you are passing the industrial complexes of Maestre, where container ships disgorge the raw-material fodder for the hungry furnaces, factories and chemical plants of today’s commerce. Then a fork in the highway, a green signboard that points VENICE to the right, and you find yourself on a causeway across the shallow waters and church domes and towers beckon you. In the far distance ahead of you, buildings look somehow different.
The causeway widens into a huge parking lot alongside the railway station - monuments to the Mussolini era - and you pass about fifty yards of concrete “no-man’s-land” (an invisible but never-the-less very real border), and suddenly you enter another world.
Approaching the first arched bridge, you notice the tiny narrow streets which swallow the pedestrian throng who, ant-like, scurry hither and thither. You see water-taxis and vaporettos (the ubiquitous stand-ins for buses or street-cars) carry off the ever-arriving tourist hordes. They come from every corner of the world. Americans, Italians, British, Japanese, Arabs, Germans, Australians, Scandinavians and Austrians come in couples or groups, the mix of languages akin to a modern-day Tower of Babel.
Once you have set foot on your Venetian water-craft, and it starts to chug down the canal you suddenly feel as surely cut off from a sense of reality as you are from the land.
For somehow you have entered a strange blend of past and present, of real and surreal, of incredible beauty and awful tourist trash, trivia and trinkets. Here is a world of harsh mid-day summer-light that gathers intensity as it bounces off a thousand shimmering water-mirrors. Or you could be there in the hazy, pastel winter-light when fog layers soften and blur, filtering the shapes of ghost-like water craft and the buildings looming out of the eerie, damp mist.
Be it summer or winter, Venice is a dream - a through-the-looking-glass mirror beaming your mind and thoughts backward, into a time when, from the 12th to the 15th she was the leading power in the Mediterranean and when her galleons, sweeping all before them, carried trade and armies into the farthest corners of the then-known world.
Your boat rounds a corner and there is the floating city’s main thoroughfare - the Grand Canal, flanked by four-and-five hundred year old buildings whose footings are sunk and dirty like worn-out shoes, but whose upper sections, though a little faded, are basically unchanged - still proud and gracious.
Like most of the other passengers, you disembark at Piazza San Marco, the very heart of this marvellous city. It was from here that decisions were made that altered the course of history. From here the Venetian armada set out in 1204 to carry Europe’s crusaders to fight the non-believers, and took them to plunder Christian Constantinople instead, filling the magnificent Church of San Marco with booty in the process.
Today the same square is filled with tour-groups - hundreds of tourists from every corner of the world, each group following its own flag-waving guide who passes on his own knowledge and sense of history to his rapt group in their own language.
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