Spring in Venice doesn’t usually come wafting across the lagoon in warm breezes to caress your newly-bare arms. Judging by the riotous amount of flowering trees to be seen the past few days, which all suddenly seem to be in a race toward something, spring has come more or less all at once. The chilly nights and rambunctious windy days and the unreliable sun don’t appear to add up to what I’d imagine that a flowering tree would call “spring,” but that statement just proves I’m not a tree.
So in honor of today, feast your eyes on some of the splendor to be seen here in merely mid-March. If you ever thought you might want to celebrate spring in Venice in May, all the best parts will be long over by then. So I will share some of them now (I’m sure there are many, many more which I haven’t discovered, and tomorrow may well be too late). Let the vernals begin!
The more resplendent trees seem to be found on streets which have no other redeeming characteristic. I wonder if they’re there because somebody else noticed that.These small but intrepid trees are another example of wonderful contrast to one of the most nondescript pockets in deepest Castello.I discovered them for the first time as I was coming around the corner from the other side of the grassy campo. It was quite the little surprise.This tree, on the other hand, is a faithful harbinger which I watch for every year about this time. Too bad you have to go into the hospital to see it, but it certainly gladdens the atmosphere there. I’m sorry its delicate pinkness doesn’t come through as well as I’d have wanted, but that’s just the way it is with ephemeral things. And with my cell phone camera.As my eyes were gorging on the flowers, Lino immediately noticed the bird. He called it a type of pigeon (white-collared, in translation), but it looks more like a dove to me, with a broad band of white around its neck. Any ornithological experts, please make yourselves heard.
I’ve walked countless times through this odd little stretch of structures behind the closed-up church of Sant’ Anna, so I was well acquainted with the jauntiest graffito lion in the city (the little wing is the best). But the tree was just a tree until yesterday, when it became a sort of botanical fountain-firework. I was in no way prepared for it!
