Let me set the scene: Below is a glimpse of a typical high-season day in the Venice of yore. Till last year, high season had spread across most of the calendar.
Let me state that there is nothing good about the pandemic, so don’t think what I’m about to say is to be taken as positive. Except that in its tiny little way, it is.
Over the past months, the daily armies of motorized boats of all shapes and purposes and horsepowerage roaring around everywhere — particularly in the Grand Canal — have made a forced retreat. This is bad (see above), but the side effect has been a Grand Canal liberated from the appalling turmoil that had long since become normal.
Note: Barges and their cousins are still at work, but what are missing are the approximately 39,210,443 taxis and tourist launches that had claimed the waterways as their own.
Result: Space, tranquility, and calm water for Venetian boats to return to their native habitat, which they have been doing on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Perhaps also at other times, but I’m not there to see them.
So for anyone who might want to breathe the atmosphere of a watercourse that has been unintentionally restored to many Venetians who had been effectively banished for years, here are some views of our Sunday morning row in our own little boat a week ago. There were even more on Saturday, because boaty people like to go to the Rialto market, but Sundays had long since been taken over by herds of taxis thundering along one of the world’s most beautiful streets like the migration of the wildebeest in the Serengeti.
Here are some glimpses of what the Grand Canal looks like when there are more Venetians than anybody else. Enjoy it, because yesterday the Great Reopening began here, and we may have seen the last of this.
So we have swung between two extremes — the old days entailed lots of work and craziness and also hugely damaging motondoso, then the pandemic period was marked by no work, no craziness, lots of people with no money. But I will whisper this: I never would have thought I’d have the chance to feel that the city returned somehow to its origins, and it has been beyond wonderful. Whether some middle ground between the two extremes can be found will be clear only when the pandemic is well and truly over.