The Many Merchants of Venice

by Alex in Italy, Europe, Topdeck

After a brief stop in Verona, we travelled onwards on our way to Shakespeare's other contemporary Italian city - Venice.

We arrived in Venice as the sun was setting, so after settling in to our hotel, we headed out as a group to a nearby restaurant for my birthday. Oh yeah, it was my birthday. Did I forget to mention that?



The next day, we emerged from the hotel bright and early, and headed from modern Venice on the mainland to the classical city of islands and canals and gondolas. If I had to describe Venice in a word, it would be 'labyrinthine'.

'Beautiful' and 'amazing' would be close runners-up, sure, but the defining feature of Venice are its twists and turns. Streets run into squares, with a dozen tiny alleyways off-shooting in different directions, and canals turn walkways into dead ends with little to no warning.

Luckily, we had our awesome group leader Kaz to guide us to St Mark's Square with its funky astrological clock. From there, most of our group went off on a traditional gondola ride, and we split off with our new friend Carlos to find some lunch.

The Venice of Shakespeare's play is a busy port of merchants and artisans, and I'm pleased to report that in the intervening 500 years, almost nothing has changed.

The streets of Venice are lined with shops, ranging from high-end jewellery and clothing boutiques to street stalls peddling souvenirs and an almost infinite variety of Venetian carnival masks. You can also find food of almost any description - unfortunately, the rarest description is 'cheap'.

The three of us wandered for over an hour searching for somewhere to find lunch for less than €15 per head, and were about to give up when we stumbled upon a small, hole in the wall pizza place.

What originally caught our eye was the display filled with thick-crust pizza - usually considered a blasphemy in Italian pizzerias.

The pizza, however, was amazing, and more amazingly, cheap, at less than €3 per slice.

We walked out the door feeling extremely proud of ourselves for being so financially responsible - a responsibility which was almost immediately undone when we found the self-service ice cream bar across the street.

Hey, we earned it!

Finally, fed and watered, we set off to find the sights we'd marked out to see. In particular, we were looking for a beautiful spiral staircase, which is completely off the beaten tourist track, and thus, almost impossible to find.

Thanks to Tash's awesome map-reading skills, though, we did manage to find it and I'm so glad we did. The staircase is in a small cul-de-sac down three separate back alleys from the nearest street, in a cool shady little oasis away from the noise and sunshine of the city.

We ended up taking the opportunity to get off our feet for a minute and chill, and I think we managed to help more people find the staircase by doing so. While we were sitting there, no less than 5 people walked by the entrance to the square, saw us sitting looking at something and came to investigate.

Setting out again, we had one last sight to see - the church of Santa Maria della Salute. We walked halfway across Venice, getting out of the tourist district and into the artsy quarter. Before long, the stalls dried up and every store we passed was a high-end gallery or boutique store with wares that cost more than our entire 18-day tour.

At long last, we reached the church, with aching feet and tired eyes. We took our photos and chilled out for a few more minutes, then got up to head back to the bus station, and back to the hotel. Fortunately, we scored a free ride on Venice's vaporetto network, so we didn't have to walk all the way back across the city - just most of the way, to the nearest stop that would actually sell us a ticket.

But after a full day of walking the streets, our navigational skills were finely honed - we only got lost twice!

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