Venice and gondolas are inseparable – they are the horse and the carriage, the peach and the cream, the fish and the chips – well, you get my drift. They were once the main form of transport on the Venetian canals, these flat bottomed boats propelled by a standing gondolier using a long oar.

Gondoliers are really rowing their boat not pushing it along with a long pole as in punting. Gondolas were and still are useful as ferries in a city so divided by canals. Everywhere you go, you are bound to see at least one gliding along, their gondoliers using the centuries old technique that suits these waters.

I spent two weeks in Venice recently and I have grown to admire this ancient form of travel. It’s not as easy as it might look so it was interesting watching two novices practicing out there on the Grand Canal – they may have been new to this but I suspect they have gondolier blood in spite of their non-traditional dress.

Sometimes, well, it’s only human nature, the gondoliers can charge you silly money for  this most romantic of photo opportunities but you don’t have to accept the price suggestion without a counter argument even if it makes you look less in love by doing so.

After-all, there are plenty of gondolas and gondoliers in Venice, so you could always opt for a different and more reasonably priced one.

There are many reasons for taking a gondola ride but, maybe, the best one is that is is just such a lovely way of travelling on water.

It is also much kinder to this frail crumbling city than the speed boats too often seen racing their way down this ancient thoroughfare.

——————————————————————————————————–

STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

It is now available as a paperback or on Kindle (go to your region’s Amazon site for Kindle orders)

You can order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20lovefeature=mhee

COLIN BELL’S PUBLICATIONS:

Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love
Ward Wood Publishing
October 30, 2013

http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm

Genius Floored: Uncurtained Window
Soaring Penguin Press
June 15, 2013
Poetry anthology


http://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/publications/poetry/genius-floored-whispers-in-smoke/

Genius Floored: Whispers in Smoke
Soaring Penguin Press
June 6, 2014
Poetry anthology

http://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/publications/poetry/genius-floored-whispers-in-smoke/

Reaching Out
Cinnamon Press
December 2012
Poetry and short story anthology

http://www.cinnamonpress.com/product-item/reaching-out/

Tic Toc
A Kind Of A Hurricane Press
June 2014
Poetry anthology

http://www.kindofahurricanepress.com/2014/06/tic-toc-is-now-available.html

The Blotter
The Blotter Magazine Inc.
November 2009
Three pages of poetry in the American South’s unique, free, international literature and arts magazine.

http://www.blotterrag.com/back-issues/2009-11.pdf

The Fib Review
Musepie Press
My Fibonacci poetry has appeared in this journal from 2009 until the present

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/writers.html

Shot Glass Journal
Muse Pie Press
My poetry has appeared in various issues of this short form poetry journal

http://www.musepiepress.com/shotglass/writers.html

Every Day Poets Magazine
Every Day Poets
I have various poems of the day published in this 365 days a year poetry magazine.

http://www.everydaypoets.com/?s=Colin+Bell

In The Night Count The Stars
Bittersweet Editions
March 1, 2014
An “uncommon anthology” of images, fragments, stories and poetry.

http://www.bittersweeteditions.com/in-the-night-count-the-stars.html#%2EU8ZFXY1dXoo

 

The post They’re dead romantic: Venice’s Gondolas press all the right buttons. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

When I woke up the other weekend, I had forgotten that I was in Venice but the view from my hotel room soon reminded me.

On my trip round Switzerland and Italy, I had come to Venice for the weekend and found a small hotel off a back street in a part of the often very over-visited city that was definitely far from the madding crowd.

I was even able to do my early morning taichi on a nearly deserted space by the Grand Canal with a backdrop of essential gondolas.

Then, panama hat essential of course,  it was time for a wander round this wonderfully beautiful place which can also be infuriatingly complicated to navigate with its crisscross of canals, tiny alleyways interspersed by startlingly dramatic glimpses of magnificent medieval and Renaissance palaces.

This is the city of the great Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707 – 1793) whose comedies, especially  The Servant of Two Masters (Il servitore di due padroni), written in 1745, can still make us laugh in the modern theatre – well when I saw it, I loved it and laughed a lot. Goldoni’s comedies are full of intrigues, confused identity, stolen back street conversations and all the things that we can still imagine in this labyrinthine place.It is quite right that Goldoni has a very jolly statue right at the heart of the town.

This is a place for confusion certainly, intrigue too no doubt, and, as I wandered down small alleyways, over tiny canal bridges and then found that I wasn’t where I thought I was, I was quite convinced that Goldoni found his inspiration here.

It is also, of course, very beautiful but, if you are there in August like I was, it is essential to keep away from the crowded parts if you want to savour the atmosphere of the place. Venice is crowded for a reason, it is really somewhere everyone should see at least once in their lifetimes but, as I was lucky enough to have been here a few times before and seen Saint Mark’s square on a rainy November day when I was the only person there, I decided that I would keep well away from the crowds and that meant trying to make sure I was never within five minutes walk of  the main square or the Rialto Bridge that leads to it. San Marco is large enough to accommodate, or so it seems, every other visitor here at this time, except me. It is great that most tourists in Venice stick together – almost literally in this heat.

Elsewhere there were all those moody streets, some too narrow for more than one person at a time.

The play of light on water and the shadows on Venice’s wonderfully decaying bricks was always changing and alluring…

and those tempting little bridges ahead always drew me onwards, deeper and deeper into this ancient urban landscape.

Looking up at those shuttered windows or wondering what was going on behind closed doors, I often thought of Goldoni and sometimes more macabre thoughts too.

Then, seeing a church tower behind a row of houses, I decided to find out where I was.

There were two people inside this vast and awe-inspiring building which had plunged me into darkness as I stepped in from the blazing sunshine outside. I had read in my guidebook that the Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488- 1576),  better known as Titian,  had once painted an altar piece for this church but I assumed that it would have been packed off to a major art gallery centuries ago but, no, there it was. Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin Mary, in its original setting, in a church that I nearly passed by.

It is easy to get swamped by religious paintings in Italy but this dramatic masterpiece stopped me in my tracks. I, maybe for the first time, sympathised with Mary as she is whisked up into Heaven. She is leaving a panic-stricken and distressed crowd behind her lit with a lurid front light whilst she is drawn upwards to a terrifyingly golden sky with the dark clouds of her maker directly above her head. She is disturbed, confused and awe-struck. It is a frightening image of death.

Then I was outside again, walking through empty squares……

….to the sound of distant and very near bells ringing in conversation with each other over an other-wise silent car-free ambience.

There were times when I thought that Venice had really lost all of its visitors and then I came across Giorgio.

This solitary gondoliero was looking very morose until we agreed a price for a forty minute gondola trip around the Venetian canals.

He led the way down another alleyway to where he moored his gondola……

…and soon I was seeing Venice as it is meant to be seen – from the water.

Giorgio cheered up remarkably as soon as he got into action and maneuvered his gondola down various canals which were only navigable by boat.

This, I suggest, is the true spirit of Venice….even if a gondola ride is also the ultimate in tourist luxuries.

We were constantly travelling between darkness and light……

to the excitingly broad and palatial Grand Canal itself.

….and there it was, the Rialto bridge which leads to Saint Mark’s Square with its glorious Byzantine cathedral.

You follow this guy if you want to…..he was one of the hundreds of tour guides leading long and exhausted looking files of weary tourists around Venice’s main attractions.

The post Life in Venice appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.