Venetian Dreams: Water Buses and Islands

Part 1 is here: Venetian Dreams: An Introduction

Venice Waterbuses, Otherwise Known As Vaporettos

In winter, the waterbuses, or Vaporettos, are warmer than the museums. They offer views, transportation and the gentle buzz of people. Instead of covering chairs and benches with rope, or shooing relaxed bottoms away, the buses invite you to sit. In most of Centro storico, the price for sitting includes an expensive drink. By expensive, I mean normality times four.

Vaporettos are welcoming and most of Centro storico is not. Once sitting comfortably, and embracing the warmth, the wide berthed water boats provide an optical feast, with sights to assimilate with the finest of visual memories. Views in Venice are as striking as those of an Austrian village, with homely fairytale houses and a backdrop of mountainous snow, or of the Norfolk Broads, with its reeds, birds and dragonflies, on a bright and lonely day. In Venice, tall, shabby buildings defy nature and tell of history, expansion, merchants and whim.

Used well, a 72-hour travel card, at the high price of €32, is a recommendable purchase. You can sit inside. You can sit or stand outside. Outside you can see more. Sometimes there is no room in the warm. On busy Vaporettos, the indoor seats prompt polite competition. Bags hold seats for imaginary friends and commuters move reluctantly. Resentfully, they mumble their displeasure, only to brightly request likewise, when their turn comes around.

Outside provides the perfect opportunity to take photographs and capture images in your mind. Medieval buildings, immersed in water, caught as a memory, can merge with real life, literature and film. Held in place, the images provide high-grade fuel for the subconscious and dreams. Even in the cold, jostled by others, and impeding the onboard staff, the Vaporetto provides for a slightly otherworldly experience.

Tied on and tied off, they move from one water platform to the next, traversing the Grand Canal and the islands and lagoon.

You can buy a travel card at the airport or ticket booths, and stamp it on the Vaporetto platform before your first trip. The platforms show timetables, routes and, frequently, an electronic board that displays how many minutes you’ll have to wait. They are remarkably easy to use, and the real world has its place.


The Lagoon Islands

The travel card takes you far. So, instead of looking at churches, badly broken statues and ancient columns, we visited the lagoon islands, via the public waterbuses. I recommend doing this, even in horrible weather. We had no option; it was wet every day. Perhaps sleet is better than rain.


San Michele (Cimitero)

One of the striking aspects of the historical city centre (Centro storico) is that it is full. There is little green and there are few public places. There are more churches than I would care to remember, and never a graveyard attached. If half of the churches were torn down and transformed into parks, it would be a vast improvement for the city, its people and wildlife. No one can need so many churches. Fitting more worshippers into fewer churches would be far cosier. There would be more space to enjoy natures own creation.

Where do children play ball? Where do the old, the lost and the lonely sit and soak up a little of mother earth’s offerings? Where do lovers go at sunset? Gondola rides are expensive, waterbuses are very public and standing on a bridge will eventually give you sore feet.

Where you may wonder, do they place their dead?

Words cannot articulate the sheer humbling beauty of San Michele, the cemetery island. Only minutes from the Fondamente Nove vaporetto stop (bus route 42 or 52), you can see it from the Centro storico. The Venetians created the walled cemetery island in 1807, when they had no place for graves, tombs and those without breath.

Perhaps Venetian lovers, the old, and the lonely, go and sit with the dead. Instead of placing their deceased in a series of small oases in a bustling city, the Venetians give them their own island. I have never seen a place so respectful for the dead, and if it were possible, I would wish that everyone was buried, or remembered, on such a cemetery island. It’s hard to believe that it was once a prison. It’s a place of stirring tranquillity.

Fields and fields of small white crosses found us, dressed with flowers, photographs and telling inscriptions. They were warm and welcoming, not cold and obsolete. For ten years or so, the dead live in such shallow graves. Then their bones move to a dedicated space or communal ossuary. While the remains may move elsewhere, the dead stay on the island in commemorative form and leave their mark on a world that’s lost them.

There are walls and walls of plaques that host the names of the dead, and a place to fit a photograph and flowers. Couples sit together, families have plots, and those that died young still look young. There are chapels, tombs, and flowers, so many pretty flowers.

It was quiet on the island. Barely seeing a soul, we ambled along, thinking of the people in the photographs that once laughed, cried and died. The sleet gently fell onto our hoods, and even it seemed respectful.


Murano

From San Michele we boarded the number 42 Vaporetto once more, and alighted at Murano. Murano is an island famous for its glass. In Venice’s main historical centre, there are shops that specialise in Murano glass. They mostly sell trinkets for the tourists. There was such a shop right by our hotel.

To be on Murano island (or the series of islands that comprise it), made one realise, or at least believe, that the brash sales technique and the commercialisation of its glass is not of Murano’s own making. Murano is beautiful and well presented. It appears to be much more loving of its populace and public space than the city’s shabby heart.

For the most part, the buildings do not sit at the water’s edge. Instead, there are wide pavements that run along the canals, public squares and places for residents to keep their own boats. Chairlifts help the elderly or infirm to travel from one land mass to the next. It feels considerate and kind.

To celebrate their glass-based history and present resurgence, the island hosts glass art in public spaces. We saw a glass lady, a glass Christmas tree, and what appeared to me to be a wonderful clump of sprawling blue Marram Grass, glass, swaying in the breeze. The island has been famous for its glass since the thirteenth century, and for some five or more centuries before then, glassworks lived on the neighbouring island of Torcello.

Murano’s children are probably sick to death of stories about glass. There is a glass museum, which they probably have had to visit on school trips since 1861. The museum has been there that long. They have glass works there that go back to 1BC/1AD, in the form of small and dainty glass jars and fanciful bowls. 2008 years later, they demonstrate remarkable skill.

There were some delightful seventeenth century vases, with swirling colours running through them, but I was more impressed by the later works. For example, a duck designed by Toni Zuccheri in 1979 and then made by Venini in 1982, and some amazing detergent bottles designed by Maria Grazia Rosin, executed by Vittorio Ferro, and ground by Eugenio Rizzi, in 1992. I had no idea so many people are involved in making one item of glass. You can view the bottles and the duck on these websites:

Maria Grazia Rosin – Detersivi

Toni Zuccheri – Duck

It is hard to imagine someone with the space and desire for the centrepiece in the last room. It was six times the size of our dining room table and consisted of a glass ornate garden with an intricate fountain. If we had it, I think our friends would be both shocked and impressed. It would fill our living room and you’d have to view it through the window or door.

The most fascinating aspect of the Murano Glass museum wasn’t really the glass, but the history. In the past glassmakers held reverence, and were ‘treated like nobility’. In the fourteenth century, they had immunity from prosecution, they were allowed to carry swords and their daughters could marry into affluent and blue-blooded families. They weren’t allowed to leave the Republic, because they, and their skills, were so treasured, but sometimes they risked all and did. They were the only people in Europe that knew how to make glass mirrors and the price of seeing oneself is high.

I bet the Swansea copper makers wished that they’d enjoyed the same privileges.

The museum receptionist played solitaire on the PC and whiled away the sleety day.

At Murano, our trip started at the lighthouse at Faro. We would have liked to have gone up the lighthouse, but it was closed. After the Glass Museum, we got back on the Vaporetto at the Museo stop. It was still sleeting. We opted against another Murano walk, although it would have been lovely in the dry.


Burano

Next stop, Burano. Here the winds were harsh and the driving sleet was bitterly cold to walk through. All the same, in any weather, this is a stunning island. We rested our legs for some 40 minutes on the way from Murano. From the boat, we saw strange small islands, some as small as a building, with the ruins of a building on them. Imagine living in a building the size of the island it sits on.

Burano doesn’t offer a glass museum or a cemetery. It offers lace. We opted not to see the lace, apart from in the shop windows, which we swiftly passed by.

Lace is not for us.

Instead, we ambled through the brightly coloured streets, where each house glowed with a vivid rainbow colour. Without a shabby home in sight, the paintwork stands in stark contrast to Centro storico and its sorry flaky buildings. We imagined that it was warm and the wind was still. Neither was the case. All the same, Burano is enchanting and delightful and this is the memory that will stick. Taking a stroll on the residential streets and over the tidy bridges raised many a smile and a little dance or two. The latter may have been to warm up.

Burano also sells reasonably priced drinks, and, at last, we found an open cafe that we could sit in without feeling like we’d suffered the royal tourist rip off. Okay, a plate of chips cost €5, but we stuck to drinks and all was well. It was cosy and wonderful, apart from the toilet, which had a concertina style door and was not so pleasant.

It was so very windy and cold, and the driving sleet was so relentless, that we ended our lagoon island tour there. I would have liked to see Torcello, the island that has a Basilica, Bell Tower and Archaeological museum, but no details on Multimap or Google Maps. It’s lack of mapping is sad considering that in 5AD it was the largest settlement in the lagoon. Silt and malaria had their way. Across the grey skies, it looked rather bleak.

Part 3 is here: Venetian Dreams: The Obligatory Museums


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