shewhomust: (bibendum)
[personal profile] shewhomust
I'm sure Venice is wonderful - here are Roger Doherty's photos, and here is Valerie Laws' poem about it - but when D. told us that from the Villa Saraceno we could get to Venice in an hour or so, I wasn't for a moment tempted. [livejournal.com profile] durham_rambler and I have both been to Venice, at very different times, and perhaps one day we will visit together, and spend a little time there and saunter around and enjoy ourselves... Meanwhile, I envisaged a long drive, a fuss to find parking, a struggle in to the city and the whole thing in reverse at the end of the day: I'd end up hating the place, which isn't the plan.

But one of our party needed to get to the airport (Venice airport is called Marco Polo; I wouldn't choose him as a rôle model myself), and the guidebook made the Po delta sound rather entrancing (canals! birdlife!) so we agreed that we would take J. to the airport and then cut south to the delta - and maybe we'd just pause, find some lunch in Chioggia, the little fishing port at the south of the lagoon.

Composed


I expect everyone can see where this is going? We spent most of the day in Chioggia. There was a park and ride bus service, which jolted us through narrow crowded streets and over canal bridges and dropped us by a rack of yellow bicycles. We were too late for the fish market, where a group of men were folding up their nets, but there were brightly painted houses, and shady arcades, and extensive building works, and shops selling tourist tat and unexpected sights hidden away down alleys and under arches, and I photographed all of them. We criss-crossed the town until we reached the lagoon, then turned and wandered back until we came back to the lagoon in the other direction, and followed the cycle path along its edge back to our car.

We should probably have left it at that, but instead we carried on into the Polésine, and found ourselves in a maze of roads winding between high green banks. Occasionally there'd be a place to park and scramble up the bank, and a view of the waterway, but as long as we were driving there was no real view, and if there were walking routes, we didn't find them. At one point we had a spectacular view of a storm on the far side of the water, complete with thunder and lightning but leaving us dry, which was fun. I didn't think "never again!", but I did think "not without a decent map, and maybe a preliminary call at the visitor centre" (which we passed in the neighbouring town on our way home).

As a result we were almost late back to dinner. It was our last day at the Villa, and several people had had the same inspiration, and gone out and bought ice-cream.
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