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Venice at twilight.
The sea mist which enveloped the city the entire day seems to be disappearing, and the sky begins to reveal herself. Thick ribbons of peach and rose hang below the clouds, making every palazzo and church dome blush. From the edge of San Marco’s Basin the stationed gondolas ebb awkwardly with the tide, their elegant curvatures looking out onto San Giorgio Maggiore across the canal, white and misty. Behind us, San Marco’s golden lunettes begin to glitter faintly, its lambency from past centuries half vanished, half darkened. Pigeons dart past our heads like bullets in the square whose pavement has been permanently soiled by their multitudinous presence. And in the silence of the dimming daylight, there's something about Piazza San Marco that leaves you breathless.
If it was cold during the day, it is freezing now but at least the drizzle and dew that were making us miserable are gone. We leave the Square and listen to our footsteps echo in the tiny stone alleys and walkways of Venice.
A few polished gondolas decorated in brocade and gold brass still glide lazily through the narrow canals and under the bridges, looking for some brave couple too in love to care about the cold. We are definitely not one of those couples. There’s romance, and then there’s stupidity, and there are better things to do in Venice for €80.
Since the moment of our arrival we had been mesmerized by a city as unique and magnificent as every art history book had mentioned. We took the vaporetto down the Grand Canal and saw the palazzi emerge, decaying; the once bright exterior peeled and faded, their striking doorways crooked and broken. Some waterfront palaces had been turned into exclusive hotels, remodelled and kept true to the Venetian style. On the Rialto Market, right below the Rialto Bridge – which we mistook for the Bridge of Sighs and kissed, convinced we were keeping to tradition – there were hundreds if not thousands of Venetian masks, all of which you were not allowed to touch, photograph, get close to or even ask for the price. And when we asked for directions to the Piazza San Marco, we were pretty much dismissed with an irritated point of an arm. Continue read
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