Absolute chaos

This will probably my last blog inspired by our holiday last month. By now you probably will have read more than enough of our adventures. Again this is a more general one.

One of the things that really struck us was the chaos on the canals, particularly the large ones. There didn’t seem to be any obvious rules of precedence. Although the Grand Canal is essentially the high street of Venice, unlike a road on land there didn’t seem to be any rules of keeping to the left or right. Boats were constantly criss-crossing the canal. The vaporetti stopped on both sides of the Grand Canal, so for example the Rialto stop was on the other side of the canal to the Rialto Mercato stop, so the vaporetti were constantly going from one side to the other side of the canal. The same applied on the Canale della Giudecca, the other main canal.

All life passed along these two main canals – the vaporetti, water taxis, gondolas, the police, ambulances, delivery boats of all sorts. Even hearses came along. Around the corner from our hotel we saw a few flower-covered coffins being taken off boats to be put in more traditional black cars, presumably being taken to their final resting place.

In the midst of this there were a few canoes. A race was due soon after our visit so people were in training.

We witnessed several near misses as boats crossed each other’s paths. As for access onto some of the smaller canals, the problem was that some of the bridges were so low there was only room for one boat at a time. If that boat was a gondola the gondolier had to duck as he went.

Absolute chaos as I said!

Delivering to the market

A near miss. The cream boat on the left is a vaporetto

A quieter stretch & another vaporetto