Florence - Venice (258km)

A regionale train took us the 2 hour journey from Florence to Venice Mestre, then it was only a short walk to our hotel.
We decided to stay at Mestre on the mainland instead of on the island of Venice as the accommodation was much more affordable and we were only a 10 minute local train ride from the tourist centre on the island. Our hotel was very nice and comfortable and it was great to be able to escape from the enormous crowds at the end of the day!

We arrived at our hotel at about 3pm and after settling in we took the train to Venice in the late afternoon. Our first impression of Venice was very positive as late in the afternoon all the day trippers are gone and the streets and canals are much quieter, allowing us to wander around and explore without the crowds. We had delicious aperitivo with a view of the canals and then wandered around soaking it all up before heading out for a pasta dinner.
(Photos: our room at Autoespresso Hotel; Venice in the afternoon).

The next morning we made an early start to take in some of the main sights around Venice. We started making our way on foot towards the Piazza San Marco. Along the way we admired the Basilica Dei Frari and the Chiesa di San Giacomo dall'Orio, stopping for beers and to do some shopping. Venice during the day time was absolutely packed with people, and it turns out that we inadvertently visited during an even busier than usual period due to the warm sunny weather and the Festa del Redentore taking place over the weekend.

The Festa del Redentore (Festival of the Redeemer) is a yearly festival taking place in July which celebrates Venice's deliverance from three plagues which ravaged the city in the 1500s, and construction of the Redentore Church built at the same time. There are parades of boats, fireworks, music and picnics on the water and the festival is well attended by Italians.

(Photos: Venice Santa Lucia train station on the Grand Canal; Basilica Dei Frari; interior of the Chiesa di San Giacomo dall'Orio, on our way to Piazza San Marco).

As such we found walking around Venice during the day to be much less pleasant than it had been the previous evening due to the huge crowds, which only became more intense as we crossed the Rialto Bridge into the touristy San Marco area. We considered taking a quintessential gondola ride through the canals, but at 80 euro for 30 minutes we found the price a bit steep, and with the sheer number of people out on boats we saw the gondolas piling up in traffic jams in the narrow canals and so we decided to give it a miss.

We had a free audio tour on our phones to guide us around the Piazza San Marco which we really enjoyed, although once again we decided against going inside the Basilica San Marco due to the high ticket prices and long entry lines.
The Piazza San Marco is magnificent however it is also home to a massive flock of literally hundreds of pigeons which are very tame and so other tourists were having a great time feeding them and even picking them up in apparent disregard of their utter filthiness. I had purchased a new hat only a week earlier in Pisa and had decided to wear it that day to avoid the sun, and I was extremely grateful of my headwear when a pigeon did a large shit on the front of my hat which would otherwise had landed squarely on my forehead/nose. In a hilarious twist, while I avoided getting any pigeon shit on my face, Matt, who was standing close to me in mid-sentence, managed to cop some spray off my hat right in his mouth. He really found it hard to move past the pigeon-shit-in-the-mouth incident for the rest of the day. It was pretty disgusting. He had little sympathy for the shit stain on my new hat.

(Photos: Basilica San Marco; Piazza San Marco).

By the afternoon we were exhausted from the heat and crowds and walking around sightseeing so we took the ferry back along the Grand Canal to the train station. We enjoyed the trip despite the ferry being very crowded and it was great to see a different view of Venice from the water.

Once we were back at the hotel we decided that we just couldn't face the festival crowds again to go back into Venice for dinner so we enjoyed a pizza dinner at a local restaurant in Mestre which was great and much cheaper and less pretentious than the restaurants on the island.

Next morning we had a leisurely breakfast before packing and heading to the train station at lunch time for our train to Germany.

(Photos: ferry trip on the Grand Canal).

Observations of Venice.....

Venice is a truly unique city in terms of it's history and architecture and it was something that we definitely had to see.
While we were there we took the opportunity to learn about the history of the city and the area and it was definitely completely different to anywhere that we have visited before.

Things we loved.....

Architecture: the old buildings, canals and bridges throughout Venice are well preserved due to the fact that it is such a tourist hotspot and the citizens of Venice have always been quite affluent. In the late afternoon the city was truly very picturesque and just like something off a postcard.

Things we did not love.....

Sewage in the canals: we noticed almost immediately that every now and then the canals would emit a fairly foul stench which would then dissipate. We did some research and discovered that of course a floating city like Venice does not have any kind of underground sewage system, and essentially the canals have long been Venice's very own natural sewage system. Raw sewage fortunately does not flow directly into the canals, instead each building has a sort of holding tank underneath it which connects through a small square shaped hole into the canal. The sewage from the pipes in the building is diluted in the holding tank and gradually flows out into the canals which are tidal and so twice a day all the sewage is taken out to sea. This means that at certain times of the day - around the peak of high tide before the tide changes - there is a funky smell coming off the canals. There is no denying that this information combined with the telltale smell of sewage somewhat detracted from the romantic atmosphere of Venice that the guidebooks try to cultivate.

Further to this, the foundations of Venice's very old buildings are slowly sinking and once a year the city experiences very high tides which flood most areas of the city up to about knee height. During this time many tourists will put on their bathers and swim through the streets of Venice.

They obviously have not done the same research that we have done about the water.

Lack of public toilets: closely linked to Venice's ongoing issues with sewage is the fact that the city provides very few public toilets for tourists, and the few that are available are packed with long lines and are very expensive. It was not unusual in Italy to have to pay to use a public toilet but the average cost was about 50 cents. In Venice they charge 3 euro to wait 20 minutes to use a filthy public toilet. It sounds like a petty gripe but practical things like this can really ruin your day.

Expensive: Venice has unfortunately become a real tourist trap and everything - from the toilets to the attractions to buying a bottle of water - was exorbitantly expensive. Sadly though as prices have gone up, quality of food seems to have gone down as the meals we had in Venice were unremarkable and way over priced.

Crowds: the streets through Venice are very narrow and winding with lots of small bridges to cross in order to get from A to B. With the huge crowds visiting Venice, at times on these bridges and in other particularly narrow places a bottleneck would develop and we would end up standing in a traffic jam of people jostling one another to get where they wanted to go. The infrastructure of Venice is just simply not set up to handle such large numbers of people at one time and after just one day we were over it.

It is a shame because Venice is truly very unique and well worth seeing, but the way that things are going steps will need to be taken to preserve the city if future generations are to be able to enjoy it.

(Photo: public fountain in Venice Mestre).