Yep Readers, I’m back in Venice for what must be about the tenth time in the last twenty-five years. This is the city where John ‘popped the question’, although the café where it all happened was much less picturesque than this – we were sitting between two German backpackers and a Venetian lady with pink hair and the obligatory poodle, who all clapped when I said ‘yes’. But this time we’re visiting with a friend who, though a world traveller, has never been to Venice.
We flew in on a mega-crowded BA plane with two broken overhead lockers, scrambled onto the express bus and then, like proper Venetians, got the 5:1 vaporetto to our hotel on the Cannaregio canal. This time we’re trying this place:
It’s popular with tour groups, but having just been on a tour in South Africa I can’t complain! The rooms are nice and quiet and the service is good, plus it’s in a quieter, more interesting part of Venice, to my mind at least. If you’re only here for a few days and want to see all the main sites, somewhere more central is probably better, but it will also be more crowded and noisier.
We had dinner here, and while we were waiting for it to open (we wanted to eat early what with one of our party having flown in from Toronto) we went for a walk along the little canal above, and apart from someone’s terrier having an altercation with a chihuahua on the opposite bank it was absolutely serene.
There were a few little antique/glass shops along the canal, one selling 18th century Venetian tea cups, but this little fellow caught my eye….who can resist a glass hornet?
And at the end of the canal there was a rose garden with this sign.
Indeed! Enough of that picking the roses away nonsense. Let’s leave them for everybody to admire.