By our second full day here (Day 3) we’re getting some ideas of what we’d like to do here. There are tons of museums, churches, islands, bridges, picture opportunities, restaurants, high fashion clothing stores, history, and people (day travelers). Given what I’ve heard about how crowded it is during the summer I’d say that November is a fine time to be here. The alleyways are very narrow. There are no cars (except on a small part of the north side of the island).
Unfortunately there are also a good amount of people who are physically sick here and cough while they’re walking these narrow alleyways (some of them right on you)! K and I have pretty solid immune systems, but even we got colds by day 18. I wouldn’t change anything, just letting you all know the real scoop.
Venice is historically a horrible place to be during pandemics. They had 3 rounds of The Plaque in the medieval times which basically stunted their population for 300 years! They lost about a third of their population to The Plaque in each episode. Imagine living through seeing a third of your city dead over the course of 1 year… The alleys are narrow so it’s tough to not get caught up in expanding outbreaks. As far as I can make out Venice never really recovered from the 3 rounds of plaque. They continued to lose power up until Napoleon absorbed them into France hundreds of years later.
With that said the history of Venice is quite amazing. They were the dominate trader in the Mediterranean for several hundred years and facilitated trade between Europe and the Middle East + Asia. They even defended themselves against much of Europe and the Catholic church at one point, and won! I’ll get more into the history of the government and church of Venice in later posts.
A Church In Venice Along The Way
Piazza San Marco
