Click on the picture to see a larger version.
In the heart of the city. Photo by Gribayedoff.

A small footbridge crossing one of Venice's canals. Venice is built on 117 mostly artificial islands separated by about 150 canals totalling about 45 km (28 miles) in length.

Source:
Outing magazine, vol. LI no. 6, March, 1908, p. 645.

Vance Thompson's Cab Drivers / 41

The Gondolier of Venice / 2

"The Gondolier of Venice" by Vance Thompson
Outing, vol. LI, no. 6 (March, 1908) pp. 129-138.
Photos by Gribayedoff

I had come over the Alps – out of gray storms – into Venice. I had not come to see this Venice, which is not a city, but a seduction. All that belongs to another mood. One should be purposeless as a butterfly in order to appreciate the charm of Venice – the grace of dead things and the living marvel of the sea. One should have no will of his own, drifting, he cares not whither, past houses of gold and onyx and oriental alabaster – the loot of Damascus and Heliopolis – over the brown-barred, silver lagoons, seaward. I had come to see Giuseppe Penso, gondolier, number 283, a Castellano of the Traghetto of San Barnaba – to shake his hand and live for a few days his life and the life of the men of his craft, to eat and game with them and play at bowls, to stand with them at the cradle and go with them across the Dead Lagoon, on the last silent journey. Other things I saw not at all. A cosmopolitan world thronged the piazzetta, stared down on by the bronze horses of Byzantium – American women with splendid hair, calf-like brides from Germany, Spanish girls, all eyes and ankles, barons of blood or the Bourse, idlers from every corner of the earth; but I marked them not. It had been pleasant to idle there in the moonlight, for only in Venice do you find a reasonable mode of night-life. The noctambulists of Paris are a dreary lot. They prowl like cats. They go furtively, pausing now and then to shrill aloud their amours. Your Venetians are the true viveurs de nuit: calm, awake, indolent, they sit in the piazzetta or on the chiaja, sipping their sorbets and counting the stars – the only wise way of life. But this is neither here nor there.

Alla barca!