And so to Venice

 

Canalside just off St Mark's Square

Life on the Grand Canal. The cream coloured boat in the foreground is a vaperetto

The time has come to write of Venice. Today I will give you some general impressions.

As a wheelchair user I was decidedly nervous about how easy it would be to get around this essentially 15^th century city built on a series of islands divided by canals & bridges. The books suggested it shouldn’t be too bad. We were even sent a website featuring some easily negotiable routes to see all the main sites. But whether everything would work out as easy as we were told was possibly a different matter.

Once we returned the hire car to the airport, the first cause of anxiety was getting into the city itself & locating our hotel – not the easiest with a wheelchair to push & a suitcase to drag along behind us. From my researches I hadn’t discovered a definite wheelchair accessible way to the city except by taxi & they were very expensive. However, I knew there was an overland bus that went to the Piazzale Roma where our hotel was & that it was run by the same company that had made all the vaporetti (water buses) in Venice wheelchair accessible. I hoped they’d done the same with the overland bus. So we first tried the ticket office in the airport terminal. Sure enough the bus was wheelchair accessible. She would just warn the driver so he could get the ramp out & help me on.

After a short drive the bus came to the Piazzale Roma. We were surprised, and relieved, to discover it stopped more or less in front of our hotel, or at least the back of it. The hotel itself fronted onto the Grand Canal. We were soon taken to the nearby annexe where all the rooms are wheelchair adapted. Immediately opposite the annexe there were the vaporetti stands to just about anywhere you may want to go in Venice. Just next door was a supermarket to get a few essential supplies such as bottles of water.

Needless to say once we’d got unpacked we were keen to go out and explore. We decided to try one of the vaporetti & go up to the Biennale gardens, passing St Mark’s Square on the way.

The vaporetto proved as easily negotiable as we were told. Every trip we made on our visit, the boatmen were ready to help anyone needing it, be they wheelchair users, mothers with prams, tourists with their suitcases, the elderly or infirm.

The route maps we’d found on the website supplied by Accessible Travel, the company that had organised our flights & hotel, proved invaluable. As we explored various areas over the following few days I’m sure we would have missed some sights, found others inaccessible, if we hadn’t had those maps.

At our hotel, over breakfast, we met a Canadian couple, one of whom had a mobility scooter. They’d arrived by train & had found the journey from the station to the hotel terrible. The station & hotel are on either side of the Grand Canal, almost within sight of one another. It wasn’t the distance that caused the problem. They had tried to cross the bridge, carrying the electric mobility scooter with them as well as suitcases. We told them they should have used the vaporetto. There would have been no problem. They’d just assumed as everywhere is accessible in Canada & the USA everywhere would be in Europe. We assured them that didn’t follow at all. We told them about the website as they had their laptop with them, however they couldn’t get a print-out of the maps done by the hotel in colour. As we by this time had been to St Mark’s Square, the Biennale gardens area, the student area we let them have our copies of the map with its accessible routes marked out for those areas.

Our biggest problem with Venice was the sheer number of people in Venice. We would have liked to have gone round the Basilica of St Mark’s & the Doge’s Palace, but the length of queues outside put us off. The Fox tried going on some of the bridges – to get a photo of the Bridge of Sighs for example, or to see the Rialto Bridge close up, but found it was just one mass of people.

The other problem was that although much of Venice is accessible, the real joy of exploring it comes from mooching around, following your nose down alleys etc, but whenever we did we quickly found an impassable bridge.

Much as I know it would have been expensive, it would have been nice to go on a gondola, or even a water taxi, as they were the only ways of exploring the smaller canals. The vaporetti are too big to go along these narrow waterways. However the gondolas & most of the water taxis were just inaccessible for me.

At the time we were in Venice, we were a bit disappointed to be honest. After the glowing colours of the frescoes in the Lakes area, the muted tones of the marble façades seemed tame. The fight through the crowds was a bit much for us. We hate to think what it must be like in high season. The food we found was poor though not as expensive as I’d feared.

Now we’re home & had a couple of weeks to recover, we look back at Venice with less jaundiced eyes. We see in our photos how impressive some parts were. We did manage to explore some of the back roads & canals. We did see the outside at least of most of the main buildings.

I suspect we would have got more from the trip if we’d stayed in a hotel more in the city centre. That way you would have been able to get more of the feel of the city outside the main tourist hours. But how you would get to such hotels with a wheelchair & a suitcase is questionable. Still we’re glad we’ve been. Would we go again? I’m not sure, but it certainly won’t be very immediately.