“Sunlight glints on the Grand Canal…”

Marco Polo came from this place that was once home to small fishermen and salt workers.

Venice goes way back after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century when a Germanic tribe from northwestern Germany, the Lombards, drove mainlanders to the islands.  It later held a thousand-year economic and political autonomy, peaked as a global trading power in the late medieval period of the 1400s, and carried a history laden with political rifts and wars with various enemies throughout the centuries.

Venice had always elected its doges (dukes), but by the mid-1100s, enriched with territories and its own political power, Venice styled itself as a republic.  It then declined economically when its eastern territories fell to the Turks and the discovery of new lands in the west and new trade routes to the east freed Europe from dependence on Venetian merchants.  After the French Revolution, Venice fell as a republic in 1797 and was turned over to Austria.  By 1866, it was ceded to Italy which had already become a united kingdom.

Venice (Venezia to Italians) was built on an island in northern Italy.  It expanded to neighboring islets, sand banks and mud flats for a total of three kilometers long and 1.5 kilometers wide beside a lagoon, with an addition of 10 principal islands and the industrial districts of Mestre and Maghera on the mainland.

Historic Venice’s role as the greatest seaport in Medieval Europe may be long past, but it is still a major Italian port, is the capital of the province of Venezia and the region of Veneto, and is one of the world’s oldest cultural centers.

From a global player of the medieval period Venice today has become one of the world’s most popular artistic centers, a unique city with a framework of canals, its chief means of  transport, and very narrow streets on which automobiles are banned. It owns a wealth of structures, often built on pilings or stone fill, dating from the medieval period.  Its Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque, Italian and Arabic architecture reveals centuries of historicity.

More than tourists and its famed mask balls, Venice is for the serious student of classical art.  The city center could be a museum, with some 500 significant palaces and old houses, the most number of old bridges in any city in the world, and canals that follow the watercourse of the original 118 isles.

The artist Titian is synonymous with Venice.  Among its must-see churches, the 13th century church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari has Titian’s mausoleum and his famous works, the Assumption and Pedaro Madonna, besides other works.  Venice also speaks of the works of Giovanni Bellini and Paolo Veronese.

The city too is known for music.  Many celebrated operas had their first performances at Teatro La Fenice, including the first opera ever performed in Venice, Proserpina Rapita by Claudio Monteverdi, one of opera’s chief pioneers.

The Grand Canal, the grand dame of the city’s many canals, follows the original main water stream of the city, with a width of 39 to 67 meters and a main depth of 2.7 meters.  Palaces and churches line the Grand Canal.

The most famous of Venice’s 400 bridges is the Bridge of Sighs (Ponte dei Sospiri), a short passageway between the Doge’s Palace and the former Venetian Republic’s prison.  The name was popularized by the 19th century poet Byron who referred to the sighs of the condemned of long ago as they crossed the bridge on the way to jail after sentencing at the Doge’s Palace.

Another city landmark is St. Mark’s Square (Piazza San Marco), one of the most famous squares in the world.  The Campanile, the golden San Marco Basilica, and the Doge’s Palace surround the square.  For centuries the square was the social and political center of Venice.

Venice is cold and wet in early autumn.  Nearby Padua (Italian Padova; yes, of San Antonio’s fame) on the mainland is a wiser choice for hotels since Venice’s famous hotels, converted from historic houses, are priced skyhigh.  Besides, the ride to and from Venice on a very long causeway was a bonus.
True enough, Venetians (diminishing in number within the city through out-migration) who are not in the tourism industry are tired of too many tourists.  They may be identified as the ones who glare at groups of tourists who seem to be everywhere, clogging the city’s streets and probably contributing to the city’s slow sinking, a situation that is now a concern of world scientists and structural engineers and the UNESCO.

The husband and I were resting at St. Mark’s Square, seated on top of unused tables on the outdoor part of a restaurant, when we met a US-based Filipino family who took our pictures and was gracious enough to mail us copies.
We spent hours walking to churches and exploring the city’s principal museum, the Accademia on the Grand Canal that houses the works of famous Venetian artists, and highlighted the day with the must-do gondola ride around the city’s network of canals.  It was a sensual experience of history-laden antiquity one can almost hear the echoes of medieval power and intrigue and smell the musty mystery of a time when half the world was still uncharted territory.

Today’s gondoliers may no longer sing the poems of Cato or Catullus as the gondoliers of old, but they still astonish.  Curious, I requested that our gondolier sing (‘Signore, cantare!’  I said in what I thought could pass as Italian) to the laughter of fellow tourists and the husband’s surprise.  He whistled a song.  The tune was unmistakably Eternally, a 1950s song revived in the 1970s by our own Victor Wood with his brand of tight vocal chords.  Only then did I conclude that, like the Visayan song Ang Gugmang Gibati Ko, that song’s original is Italian.

(2005