2014 in Italy (Venice)
On August 19, 2014, after leaving Florence, the Europe bus tour went to the famous island city of Venice (Venezia in Italian):
Visit
Of course, buses don’t drive into Venice anymore. One has to take a ferry (or arrive by train) from a terminal on the mainland to get to the fish-shaped city in the northeast part of Italy.
One could do the cliché thing and ride the gondolas on the canals, marvelling also at the architecture clustered on its narrow car-free “streets”:
However, the highlight of the visit entailed eating the pasta al nero (“blackened”) with squid ink:
It tasted better than it looked and that was a relief!
Also, in 2014, they did this thing with the Coca-Cola bottles:
Thanks to globalization, one can enjoy such delights of the “same but different” variety!
As with many stops along this tour, Venice was a mere “good morning” and “good afternoon”. To keep things on a budget, the evening entailed going back to the mainland in the sleepy suburban sections of Padua (or Padova) for a night’s rest at a chain hotel.
Reflection
With Venice, I felt like the best time to visit this city was in the distant past, while the second best time was whenever I could. Venice has a hard time keeping up with all the traffic. Eventually, I could envision them setting up "designated tourist zones" while most parts of the city would remain for locals and locals only.
Would authenticity suffer then? Who knows, but it just seems that continuing on the same path would result in Venice suffering in the long run.