No people, no boats

An empty St Mark's Square &
Grand Canal

I feel that the last month has been rather chaotic in my entries here. Due to visitors, having away days & just being busy I haven't kept you very well up to date. The next few may seem to be back tracking or out of sequence but who cares?

When I arrived in January the following day was a holiday for Epiphany & after then many of the bars & restaurants & some shops all closed for a month or so. The city was so quiet. Very few tourists, most of those were from SE Asia (the only ones taking gondola rides) & only a sprinkling of European & American ones. I found I was the only person looking around Churches & museums & all the concerts I went to were sparsely attended. It was so cold that the gondolieri were wearing woolly hats underneath their straw boaters! Around the last week of January bars were beginning to re-open, tables & chairs were being put out and it was as if a flower was starting to open. Unfortunately along with this came more people – well some of them were my visitors and the aqua alta (high water). One of the most wonderful experiences have been walking through St Mark’s Square with no-one else there, going through the Church with only a handful of people & being able to gaze at the Pala d’oro as long as I wanted undisturbed. So when Carnival began & all these hundreds of thousands of visitors arrived it was a dreadful shock. Who were all these people invading my city? It was all rather tacky and I am sure dreamt up by the local council to extract money out of tourists. Those Italians & English who live here all give the St Mark’s/Rialto area a wide berth.