Places I Would Like To Visit Someday But Almost Certainly Never Will: An Occasional Travel Series For Non-Travellers

# 1: Venice

Venice looks very pretty. But it is also, clearly, a bit mad. I mean, look at it:

It doesn’t really seem that right for water and buildings to be that close together, does it? I mean “Come to Venice, the town that looks like the middle of a catastrophic flood in Renaissance Italy!” would be a perfect tourism slogan for the Venetian Tourist Board, as far as I can tell. But no, from what I can gather this is all very deliberate. Go figure.

So while in Venice, word has it that it’s traditional to travel by gondola:

I'm not exactly clear on how these work in a marine environment, but presumably the cables run along underwater or something. Anyway, the idea of Venice is pretty much to swan about in the gondolas  while looking at all of Venice’s wonderful architecture, just as pictured below:

Wait, no, this is a hotel in Las Vegas. We can tell because the water looks pretty clean, whereas the water in actual Venetian canals is perhaps not so much. In fact, apparently 78 percent of the Venice lagoon canals have tested positive for hepatitis A. But you don’t really want to go jumping in the canals anyway, because it seems that they’re full of sharks.

Providing you can avoid both the sharks and hepatitis (and the sharks with hepatitis), it would appear that there are many beautiful sights to see in Venice. These include:

The Bridge of Sighs:

La Fenice opera house:

And of course, Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp:

"Can you imagine how high our children's cheekbones would be?"
"Oh yeah. They'd be in the troposphere, basically."

Venice also steeped in a rich history. You might even say that the water of its canals is a rich history broth, in which it has been tastily stewing for many hundreds of years. (You might say it, but I think you’ll find you’d sound pretty stupid if you did.) As just one example, they invented Venetian blinds, and who can forget the countless entertaining and richly historical hours they’ve spent fruitlessly pulling on and trying to untangle various random bits of string to get sets of those damned things to work properly? Historical figure Shakespeare also wrote The Merchant of Venice about Venice. In it, a Jewish merchant named Othello becomes incredibly jealous when Iago buys his daughter for a thousand ducats, and ends up being saved by and then marrying and then killing his wife Portiamona before finally committing suicide by cutting a pound of flesh out of himself. Tragic, but also kind of funny.

The Renaissance also happened all over it (messy), and wealthy people were constantly strolling about like they owned the place (because they did), and patronising penniless artists - I guess rich people can be like that sometimes. Leonardo Da Vinci briefly dropped by just to show everyone how much smarter he was than them. He probably would have cleaned out that Venetian-themed casino. Machiavelli was also about, and although he didn’t live in Venice, or possibly even go there, he did exist at the same time as it did. The Venetian School of art developed, and was typified by a warm colour scale and a picturesque use of colour. Other artists were astounded to learn you could use colour in a picturesque fashion, instead of just using it to scribble notes in the margins. Many paintings of the Venetian school are still on show today in what I assume are probably the many historical and chock-full-of-art art galleries of Venice. You can see the picturesque use of colour in this one:

And this one:

But not this one:

Oh wait, I’m just being informed through my earpiece that this one in fact does have it. Maybe it was the second one that didn’t? At any rate, the important fact to take away from it all is that Venice gave birth to artists painting pictures with colours in them.

Venice also has important modern industries like shipbuilding and lace manufacture and canal-measuring, but really, you don't care about those, because no-one goes travelling to see the important modern industries, do they? Except maybe for the glass one, maybe. Oh yeah, I didn’t mention that Venice is also totally overflowing with glass beads! In fact, glass beads are the third-most commonly found material in Venetian canals, after hepatitis and water (sharks are the fourth). Here are some:

Note the picturesque use of colour.They’re nothing if not consistent, those Venetians. 

So in summary: Venice - it’s clearly insane, but awfully historic. And pretty, did I mention pretty? I did, in fact, but jeez, I mean look at it:

What with all the history and the architecture and canals with sharks with hepatitis in them and the SCENERY, glaben, Venice seems pretty cool. I’d like to go there sometime and sit where Machiavelli used to not sit at all, back in the day, when he was still hanging out with his fellow “-ian” buddies, Mephistopheles and Episcopal. Maybe I’d take a gondola to a glass bead shop. But I probably won’t.