Marco Polo was rich, Venice floods more than the Mon Warf parking lot, and gondolas are incredible.
That’s today in one sentence.
We boarded our bus for a hefty trek from Florence to Venice early in the morning before transferring to a train to go into town. Train or boat: those are your two options to get into Venice. There are no vehicles in the city, or even bikes for that matter.
If you know anything about Venice, you know that there are a lot of bridges and waterways.
Very few people actually live along the rivers anymore; the town is mostly full of tourists these days. The city was built, as our tour guide described, “in the middle of the water in the middle of nowhere.” The Grand Canal divides the city into the political hub and its economic center, with six districts total.
We received a guided walking tour of Venice and crossed dozens of the cities 400+ bridges (Pittsburgh still has more though!) Every time we crossed a new bridge, we were on a different island.
The first big thing that was pointed out to us was the old home of Marco Polo. He was born and raised in Venice and left for China when he was 17. He was a great trader and businessman and came home from his expedition to China rich. He bought the entire square that we stood in for himself. They’re not sure which place was his, but they knew he had the whole square. Part of it burned down in a fire, but the other half of the 700-year old area is original.
Now here’s the legend behind the “Marco Polo” game. Apparently, he went blind at the end of his life, so people had to call out his name. It’s that simple.
We also saw the oldest church in Venice, built in the 1200’s. Next to the church is another structure with a white facade that is designed like a church with 2D paintings meant to look 3D. It’s actually the Venitian hospital.
The smell of salt water and the sea lingers throughout the city. A powdery white substance rests on many of the lower bricks on the walls along the roads. It’s salt.
Those roads are how people get around – again, strictly on foot. Some of them are incredibly narrow, with the skinniest passage measuring 50 centimeters (19.685 inches) wide. My entire wingspan couldn’t stretch the whole way across most roads we walked.
After our guided tour, we checked off a major Italian tourist bucket list item. We all boarded gondolas and glided around the city for a half hour in its river passageways.
The locals use the waterways to get around also, but most of the traffic on the water comes from us tourists. 
The ride was like everything I’ve always seen in movies, minus singing from the gondolier, the man who steers the boat. We were told that it’s really expensive to get a singing gondolier, though we did pass one boat with someone playing the accordion. We were also told that there are 213 gondoliers, with many of the boys in town growing up aspiring to be one. Only one of the hundreds of gondoliers is a woman (article explaining why).
The average depth of the canals is only five feet. A lot of the gondoliers actually buy their own boats for a cost of a pretty €50 thousand. 
We left the gondolas and walked around the main square of Venice and had some free time. We were told that the square closest to the main canal actually floods 150 times per year, but life goes on. Floods don’t shut down the city. Everyone just invests in several pairs of boots to match their outfits and ventures through the flooded waters. The floods aren’t dangerous, and the water usually recedes at low tide.
My last fun fact – Venice is actually built on a forest. There are tree trunks supporting the city’s buildings that don’t decay. For hundreds of years, they have held up buildings in Venice. They grow one centimeter each year, so some of the buildings are slightly lopsided and some of the roads are a tad uneven.
We took a train back to where our bus dropped us off but got delayed by a half hour. There were people protesting something on the train tracks, so rather than run them over, the trains just waited.
We arrived at our hotel in Pavoda, which is about two and a half hours away from Milan (three with a pit stop). We walked to a local restaurant that we booked for dinner and now are preparing for a 6 a.m. wakeup call to head to our next destination.
We’re touring the Duomo in Milan tomorrow, which we were fortunate to even book a reservation for, and will have a group diner in the city where we will stay for three nights.
Ciao!
