Venice Canal Quotes

We didn't stow away!" Dan protested. "You sunk our boat and pulled us out of the canal!" "Good point," Ian agreed. "Return them to the canal. Roughly, please.

I imagined myself a bird, looking down on our city, the Grand Canal like a snake slithering through stone, the city on either side like two hands clasped in prayer

It's temples and palaces did seem Like fabrics of enchantment pil'd to heaven.

We stood for a moment, the brackish canal water teething at the stone,the last of the stars fading as the sky transformed from black to indigo. A pair of swans like large white clouds floated on the water, their heads tucked under their wings, as a gondola pulled up, a lantern on the prow, the gondolier on the stern, rubbing his sleepy eyes.

She leaned against the bridge’s warm marble balustrade, and looked as far down the darkening canal as the setting sun would allow. She wondered if others appreciated Venice’s beauty and fragility as deeply as she had come to or if, like a raging fever, the city infected some while avoiding others. She sighed at the grandeur and at the resilience that surrounded her, and she promised herself she’d try to be more like Venice.

He was aware for the first time of how quiet the city had gotten. After dark the streets and canals seemed to empty out. As if Venice felt less of an obligation to pretend to be part of this millennium at night, and had reverted to its medieval self again.

By day it is filled with boat traffic - water buses, delivery boats, gondolas - if something floats and it's in Venice, it moves along the Grand Canal. And by daylight it is one of the glories of the Earth. But at night, especially when the moon is full and the soft illumination reflects off the water and onto the palaces - I don't know how to describe it so I won't, but if you died and in your will you asked for your ashes to be spread gently on the Grand Canal at midnight with a full moon, everyone would know this about you - you loved and understood beauty.

In Venice, things not always as they first appear. I contemplate this observation from my post on the aft deck of one of Master Fumagalli’s gondolas, taking in the panorama of bridges, domes, bell towers, and quaysides of my native city. I row into the neck of the Grand Canal, and, one by one, the reflection of each colorful façade appears, only to dissipate into wavering, shimmering shards under my oar.

And now come with me, for I have kept you too long from your gondola: come with me, on an autumnal morning, to a low wharf or quay at the extremity of a canal, with long steps on each side down to the water, which latter we fancy for an instant has become black with stagnation; another glance undeceives us, --it is covered with the black boats of Venice. We enter one of them, rather to try if they be real boats or not, than with any definite purpose, and glide away; at first feeling as if the water were yielding continually beneath the boat and letting her sink into soft vacancy.

She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn’t a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile.

Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer’s plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway station; the Grand Canal in twilight; the Rialto bridge; the Piazza San Marco; the shimmering, rippling wonderland; the bustling water traffic; the fish market; the Lido beach and boardwalk; Teeny in the launch; the singing, gesturing gondoliers; the bourgeois tourists drinking coffee at Florian’s; the importunate beggars; the drowned girl’s ghost haunting the Bridge of Sighs; the pigeons, mosquitoes and fetor of decay.

Magnus threw the curtains open and stepped onto the balcony of the hotel room. "Ah, Venice. There is no city in the world like you." Alec trailed him outside and leaned over the railing. His gaze followed a gondola snaking along the canal and disappearing around a corner. "It's a bit smelly." "That's the ambiance." Alec grinned. "Well, the ambiance is pretty strong.

I don't know why--there are no brick gables,' said Mrs. Prest, 'but this corner has seemed to me before more Dutch than Italian, more like Amsterdam than Venice. It's perversely clean, for reasons of its own; and though you can pass on foot scarcely anyone ever thinks of doing so. It has the air of a Protestant Sunday. Perhaps the people are afraid of the Misses Bordereau. I daresay they have the reputation of witches.

I've always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don't sleep - some don't - but they live there. Everybody else is just a tourist. Venice, Italy, for instance, pulls in a millions tourists for their own Carnival season but the actual local population is only a couple of hundred thousand. Lots of empty canals and streets at night, especially when you get away from the big hotels, and the residents pretty much have it to themselves when tourist season slows during the winter. Jude has character - everybody agrees on that. It also has that thing I like best about a city: You can never own it, but it you treat it with respect it will eventually invite you in and make you one of its true citizens. But like I said, you've got to live there. If you're never around after the bars close, or at the other end of the night as the early workers get up to start another day and the coffee shops and news agents raise their security gates, then you don't really know the place, do you?

By the 1680s, Venice’s canals were freezing solid in winter, something no one alive had ever witnessed.

The swans have returned and so have the dolphins to the Canals of Venice. Nature creates the most beautiful art!

Now this greatest tent staled out hot raw breaths of earth, confetti that was ancient when the canals of Venice were not yet staked, and wafts of pink cotton candy like tired feather boas. In rushing downfalls, the tent shed skin; grieved, soughed as flesh fell away until at last the tall museum timbers at the spine of the discarded monster dropped with three canon roars.

Whilst in the process of losing all his money, Cardano noticed that his opponent had marked the cards. Whereupon he leapt up, slashed his opponent across the face with his dagger and grabbed the money. Outwitting his host's spear-wielding servants, he fled into the night-shrouded maze of the streets, eventually falling into a canal. [Footnote: It is interesting to note that Cardano may well have been rector of the University of Padua at the time.]

I began to feel that the old Venice of song and story had departed forever. But I was too hasty. In a few minutes we swept gracefully out into the Grand Canal, and under the mellow moonlight the Venice of poetry and romance stood revealed.

Wells?” Someone was prodding his arm. “Hey, Wells?” Wells’s eyes snapped open, draining the last droplets of a dream from his mind. He’d been floating down a canal in Venice. No, wait, he’d been riding a horse into battle alongside Napoleon. Kendall

In Venice, Grant let slip a remark that would provide fodder for many satirists: he told a young woman what a fine city it would be if only the canals were drained. Henry Adams adduced this as damning evidence of Grant’s philistine nature, but he may only have meant that the canals should be cleansed of sewage.

I’ve been around the world, and I thought I’d seen everything it had to offer until that night, until I saw you. In all my life, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful, not standing in the Blue Mosque or the Taj Mahal. Not in the streets of Rome or canals of Venice. Making you smile gives me life. Making you laugh gives me hope. Making you happy is all I want, other than to keep you

The fortnight in Venice passed quickly and sweetly- perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless. On some days life kept pace with the gondola, as we nosed through the side canals and the boatman uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days with the speed-boat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sun-lit foam; it left a confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool, marble interiors; of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light on painted cielings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might have known, and another Byronic night fishing for scampi in the shallows of Chioggia, the phosphorescent wake of the little ship, the lantern swinging in the prow, and the net coming up full of weed and sand and floundering fishes; of melon and prosciutto on the balcony in the cool of the morning; of hot cheese sandwiches and champagne cocktails at Harrys Bar.

Anyway, it will give me something to brew about. And there is still a Jerusalem story* to do, and that story about a husband and wife in Venice† that I told you I wanted to do, where the husband suddenly sees his wife passing in one of those vaporettos on the Grand Canal, and yet he knew he had seen her off to fly home to England that morning! I might get about six longish short stories, that would fit into a book, and be sold separately to Journal or Good Housekeeping, in America.

Aboard the gondola, Giacomo Foscarini sat facing Mathias. They were crossing the Canal Grande, then they would navigate around San Marco and return. Foscarini loved to travel around Venice this way. They stopped briefly at a mooring near the bridge to the Rialto, and Foscarini had a servant fetch green olives, fresh Piacenza cheese, a few sausages from Modena, and wine that had just been delivered from Crete. The nobleman often dined aboard his gondola, looking out over the city, watching his world. "Seen from this vantage point, Venice doesn't seem like it's in any of its terrible troubles at all magister," said Foscarini.

It was the perfection of a Venice evening, with silver waves lapsing and lulling under a rose and opal sky; and the sense that it was their last row on those enchanted waters made every moment seem doubly precious. I cannot tell you exactly what it was that Ned Worthington said to Katy during that row, or why it took so long to say it that they did not get in till after the sun was set, and the stars had come out to peep at their bright, glinting faces, reflected in the Grand Canal. In fact, no one can tell; for no one overheard, except Giacomo, the brown yellow-jacketed gondolier, and as he did not understand a word of English he could not repeat the conversation. Venetian boatmen, however, know pretty well what it means when a gentleman and lady, both young, find so much to say in low tones to each other under the gondola hood, and are so long about giving the order to return; and Giacomo, deeply sympathetic, rowed as softly and made himself as imperceptible as he could,—a display of tact which merited the big silver piece with which Lieutenant Worthington “crossed his palm” on landing.

IN THE fifteenth century, a swampy parcel of land in the sestieri of Cannaregio was set aside for the construction of a new brass foundry, known in the Venetian dialect as a geto. The foundry was never built, and a century later, when the rulers of Venice were looking for a suitable spot to confine the city’s swelling population of unwanted Jews, the remote parcel known as Ghetto Nuovo was deemed the ideal place. The campo was large and had no parish church. The surrounding canals formed a natural moat, which cut off the island from the neighboring communities, and the single bridge could be guarded by Christian watchmen. In 1516, the Christians of Ghetto Nuovo were evicted and the Jews of Venice were forced to take their place. They could leave the ghetto only after sunrise, when the bell tolled in the campanile, and only if they wore a yellow tunic and hat. At nightfall they were required to return to the island, and the gates were chained. Only Jewish doctors could leave the ghetto at night. At its height, the population of the ghetto was more than five thousand. Now, it was home to only twenty Jews.

The Venetians catalogue everything, including themselves. ‘These grapes are brown,’ I complain to the young vegetable-dealer in Santa Maria Formosa. ‘What is wrong with that ? I am brown,’ he replies. ‘I am the housemaid of the painter Vedova,’ says a maid, answering the telephone. ‘I am a Jew,’ begins a cross-eyed stranger who is next in line in a bookshop. ‘Would you care to see the synagogue?’ Almost any Venetian, even a child, will abandon whatever he is doing in order to show you something. They do not merely give directions; they lead, or in some cases follow, to make sure you are still on the right way. Their great fear is that you will miss an artistic or ‘typical’ sight. A sacristan, who has already been tipped, will not let you leave until you have seen the last Palma Giovane. The ‘pope’ of the Chiesa dei Greci calls up to his housekeeper to throw his black hat out the window and settles it firmly on his broad brow so that he can lead us personally to the Archaeological Museum in the Piazza San Marco; he is afraid that, if he does not see to it, we shall miss the Greek statuary there. This is Venetian courtesy. Foreigners who have lived here a long time dismiss it with observation : ‘They have nothing else to do.’ But idleness here is alert, on the qui vive for the opportunity of sightseeing; nothing delights a born Venetian so much as a free gondola ride. When the funeral gondola, a great black-and-gold ornate hearse, draws up beside a fondamenta, it is an occasion for aesthetic pleasure. My neighbourhood was especially favoured this way, because across the campo was the Old Men’s Home. Everyone has noticed the Venetian taste in shop displays, which extends down to the poorest bargeman, who cuts his watermelons in half and shows them, pale pink, with green rims against the green side-canal, in which a pink palace with oleanders is reflected. Che bello, che magnifici, che luce, che colore! - they are all professori delle Belle Arti. And throughout the Veneto, in the old Venetian possessions, this internal tourism, this expertise, is rife. In Bassano, at the Civic Museum, I took the Mayor for the local art-critic until he interupted his discourse on the jewel-tones (‘like Murano glass’) in the Bassani pastorals to look at his watch and cry out: ‘My citizens are calling me.’ Near by, in a Paladian villa, a Venetian lasy suspired, ‘Ah, bellissima,’ on being shown a hearthstool in the shape of a life-size stuffed leather pig. Harry’s bar has a drink called a Tiziano, made of grapefruit juice and champagne and coloured pink with grenadine or bitters. ‘You ought to have a Tintoretto,’ someone remonstrated, and the proprietor regretted that he had not yet invented that drink, but he had a Bellini and a Giorgione. When the Venetians stroll out in the evening, they do not avoid the Piazza San Marco, where the tourists are, as Romans do with Doney’s on the Via Veneto. The Venetians go to look at the tourists, and the tourists look back at them. It is all for the ear and eye, this city, but primarily for the eye. Built on water, it is an endless succession of reflections and echoes, a mirroring. Contrary to popular belief, there are no back canals where tourist will not meet himself, with a camera, in the person of the another tourist crossing the little bridge. And no word can be spoken in this city that is not an echo of something said before. ‘Mais c’est aussi cher que Paris!’ exclaims a Frenchman in a restaurant, unaware that he repeats Montaigne. The complaint against foreigners, voiced by a foreigner, chimes querulously through the ages, in unison with the medieval monk who found St. Mark’s Square filled with ‘Turks, Libyans, Parthians, and other monsters of the sea’. Today it is the Germans we complain of, and no doubt they complain of the Americans, in the same words.

I barely remember drawing this." Daniel sounded disappointed in himself. "I don't know what it is any more than you do." "I'm sure that once you get there, you'll be able to figure it out," Gabbe said, trying hard to be encouraging. "We will," Luce said. "I'm sure we will." Gabbe blinked, smile, and went on. "Roland, Annabelle, and Arriane-you three will go to Vienna. That leaves-" Her mouth twitched as she realized what she was about to say, but she put on a brave face anyway. "Molly, Cam, and I will take Avalon." Cam rolled back his shoulders and let out his astoundingly golden wings with a great rush, slamming into Molly's face with his right wing tip and sending her lunging back five feet. "Do that again and I will wreck you," Molly spat, glaring at a carpet burn on her elbow. "In fact-" She started to go for Cam with her fist raised but Gabbe intervened. She wrenched Cam and Molly apart with a put-upon sigh. "Speaking of wrecking, I would really rather not have to wreck the next one of you who provokes the other"-she smiled sweetly at her two demon companions-"but I will. This is going to be a very long nine days." "Let's hope its long," Daniel muttered under his breath. Luce turned to him. The Venice in her mind was out of a guidebook: postcard of boats jostling down canals, sunsets over tall cathedral spires, and dark-haired girls licking gelato. That wasn't the trip they were about to take. Not with the end of the world reaching out for them with razor claws. "And once we find all three of the relics?" Luce said. "We'll meet at Mount Sinai," Daniel said, "unite the relics-" "And say a little prayer that they shed any light whatsoever on where we landed when we fell," Cam muttered darkly, rubbing his forehead. "At which point, all that's left is somehow coaxing the psychopathic hellhound holding our entire existence in his jaw that he should just abandon his silly scheme for universal domination. What could be simpler? I think we have every reason to feel optimistic.

La Serenissima keeps her secrets from most of those who tromp through on a one-day pass, those tourists who never get off the crowded main calles and complain about the canal’s fragrance on warm days, but if you wait, if you’re patient and very lucky, Venice reveals her plans and her reasons in her own good time.

Piazza San Marco might seem like the one place in Venice that is always busy, but I can tell you it’s not so. As it grows later, the crowds thin and the cafés empty; the tourists go back to their hotels, footsore after a day of walking the calli; the street hawkers disappear too, the music stops, the chairs and tables are packed away. That doesn’t stop you dancing, however, not if that’s the mood you’re in and your partner won’t admit to tiring. It wasn’t a warm night but our bodies had heat in them. We made our own music, like Coco and Silvio once had, dancing past the bell tower and beside the Doge’s Palace right to the banks of the Grand Canal. We stepped together until my feet felt bruised and my shoulders ached. We danced when everyone else was sleeping and there wasn’t a soul to see it. We continued until Angelo decided it was time to be still.

Venice was a woman, la bella donna, elegant in her age, sensual in her watery curves, mysterious in her shadows. The first sight of her, rising over the Grand Canal with her colors tattered and faded like old ballgowns, called to the blood. The light, a white, washing sun, would sweep over her and lose itself like a wanderer in her sinuous veins, her secret turns. Here

ugliest bridge in the city. It was made from iron, did not have a graceful arching form like the famous stone bridges prevalent throughout Venice, and had been placed too low over the water, making it difficult for gondoliers during high tide. Around us, the canal was crowded with boats, the only method of transport in a place with no streets. I’d already decided I didn’t miss them. I much preferred the sleek gondolas, with their singing boatmen, to the clatter of horse and carriage.

The most [...] literal proposal to solve the problem of congestion comes from Harvey Wiley Corbett [...] Ultimately, Corbett calculates, the entire surface of the city could be a single traffic plane, an ocean of cars, increasing the traffic potential 700 percent. "[...We see] a very modernized Venice, a city of arcades, plazas and bridges, with canals for streets, only the canals will not be filled with real water but with freely flowing motor traffic, the sun glistening on the black tops of the cars and the buildings reflecting in this waving flood of rapidly rolling vehicles. From an architectural viewpoint [...] the idea presents all the loveliness, and more, of Venice. There is nothing incongruous about it, nothing strange..." Corbett's "solution" for New York's traffic problem is the most blatant case of disingenuity in Manhattanism's history. Pragmatism so distorted becomes pure poetry. Not for the moment does the theorist intend to relieve congestion; his true ambition is to escalate it to such intensity that it generates -- as in a quantum leap -- a completely new condition, where congestion becomes mysteriously positive [... Corbett and the authors of the Regional Plan] have invented a method to deal rationally with the fundamentally irrational. [They know] that it would be suicide to solve Manhattan's problems, that they exist by the grace of these problems, that it is their duty to make its problems, if anything, forever insurmountable, that the only solution for Manhattan is the extrapolation of its freakish history, that Manhattan is the city of the perpetual flight forward.

all” is what we don’t want to hear. We only want to hear some. What made his trip different from everybody else’s? What can he tell us that we don’t already know? We don’t want him to describe every ride at Disneyland, or tell us that the Grand Canyon is awesome, or that Venice has canals. If one of the rides at Disneyland got stuck, if somebody fell into the awesome Grand Canyon, that would be worth hearing about.

You are the visiting students from abroad,” he said. “I should like to invite you, my foreign visitors, to a small soirée at my house tonight to make you feel welcome in Venice. Eight o’clock. It’s the third floor, number 314, on the Fondamenta del Forner in San Polo, not far from the Frari. You know the Frari?” I didn’t. Neither did a couple of the others. “It’s the big church called Santa Maria Gloriosa—but to us it’s the Frari,” the professor said. “You will learn in Venice nobody calls anything by its real name. The vaporetti stop is San Toma. If you are coming from the other side of the Grand Canal, you can cross by the traghetto at San Toma. All right. Good. See you tonight.

rode the gondolas in Venice, eaten cannoli for breakfast, and gotten lost in the maze of canals as we tried to find Saint Mark’s Basilica. In Paris, we strolled hand in hand down the Champs-Élysées, eating croissants and watching the sun set over the Eiffel Tower. I saw the Mona Lisa, walked beneath the Arc de Triomphe, and kissed Lucian at the top of the Ferris wheel.

Venice, California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad. It had fog almost every night and along the shore the moaning of the oil well machinery and the slap of dark water in the canals and the hiss of sand against the windows of your house when the wind came up and sang among the open places and along the empty walks.

During the golden age of the Most Serene Republic, the Doge used to perform an elaborate yearly ceremony, tossing a gold ring into the waters of the Grand Canal to solemnize the wedding of the city to the waters that gave it life, wealth, and power.

The Basics: The canals of Venice are a wonder to behold. There are no cars in Venice. There are no roads. Want to get somewhere? Walk, take a boat, or swim. Just kidding. Don't swim. The water's disgusting.

At least the two beds looked normal enough, with their crisp white sheets, and there was a desk and chair in the front window, which looked out on to the garden, with a sliver of a view of the Grand Canal beyond. I went over to the window, opened it and gazed out. The scent of jasmine rose to greet me.

Into the darker regions of Venice I traveled, the mist hanging thick over the canals, to those dimly lighted places where ruffians abound.

In Venice, money changers had started storing gold for people in the fourteenth century—and lending that gold out to other people. The money changers sat on benches on a busy bridge over the Grand Canal, so they were called banchieri, which translates as “bench-sitters,” and which is the root of our words banker and bank.

Cape Coral is the largest city between Tampa and Miami, in terms of square miles, which was 120. Of greater note are its 400 miles of canals, more than any other city in the world, including Venice.

accepting death folds the soul, tempers and layers it like a Damascus blade. When I’d thrown myself into the canal in grief, only to be pulled out by the Moor, I’d become colder, more durable.

Venice took on the feeling of a city paved with black glass, the odd lantern, torch, or candle reflecting in the canals like distant windows into hell, the crescent moon throwing silver scythes across the water where it could find its way between buildings.

Tourism Tourism is the largest segment of the Italian economy. Millions of Italians work in the tourist industry. They work in hotels and restaurants. They drive taxis and lead tour groups. Tourists flock to Italy for its gorgeous scenery, beautiful weather, and incredible art. Italy if the fifth most visited nation in the world, welcoming about forty million tourists each year. One major destination is the Italian Riviera, which draws visitors with its beautiful beaches, sunny days, and cool nights. Many tourists head to Rome to see its ancient ruins and magnificent art. Tuscany is also rich in art and appealing landscapes. Twenty million people travel to Venice every year to experience the charms of a city that has canals instead of roads.

The city's canals outnumber those in Venice,

Have you heard anything about the murder?” she asked Luca. “Dreadful, that poor maid floating up in the canal.” Luca had the crumbling dessert halfway to his lips. He placed it neatly back on his plate and rubbed both hands on his napkin. His whole body seemed to tense up. Cass set her fork down. She stared at Luca as she waited for him to speak. “I have actually heard rumors,” he said slowly. “There was some gossip in the city about it. There is talk of a gang roving the cemeteries at night…” The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees. Agnese finished the second half of her pastry and chased it with a big swallow of wine. “Satanists, if you ask me,” Luca added. Agnese bobbed her head in agreement. “The girl was strangled and then cut up like a chicken, they say. I’m not even sure San Domenico is safe anymore.” “I don’t see why everyone is suddenly so concerned,” Cass said. Even to her own ears her voice sounded strained. “Venice has always had more than her share of murders.” “Drunken brawls and knife fights,” Luca said. He stared back at her. Was it her imagination, or did she see a challenge in his eyes? “But not murders of this kind. And of innocent women.” Cass’s throat felt as though she had swallowed a chicken bone. “Why so interested, Luca? Don’t you have other, more important duties to which you should attend?” She downed half a glass of wine in one swallow. Her mind flooded with terrible thoughts. Did Luca somehow know about Falco? Had he been spying on her?

They passed by the docks that ran along the back of the Palazzo Ducale, home to the Doge of Venice. A pair of flat-bottomed peàtas were tied up here, and coarse-looking men walked up and down gangplanks, unloading crates and barrels. Cass blushed at the language they were using. She rarely heard such foul words, but then she had never paid much attention to commoners before. Maybe everyone in the working class spoke crudely. Falco had practically invited her to spend the night with him. She remembered the way his eyes had worked their way over her whole body, like he could see straight through her clothing. She felt her face growing hotter and turned quickly away from Siena. Cass was going to throw herself into the Grand Canal if the girl inquired about her health one more time.

My parents often talked about how beautiful a city Hamburg was. We had coffee table books with beautiful glossy black and white photographs showing the city prior to the heavy Allied bombings and subsequent firestorm. It showed the famous harbor, the lakes and canals. Hamburg is sometimes referred to as the Venice of the north. As our train pulled into the huge covered station I really did not know what to expect. None of us were aware of the tremendous amount of damage the city had sustained, however we had been informed that two of my father’s sisters and their families had died in “Operation Gomorrah” the hellish fire that had all but eradicated the city. Although I was quite young at the time I vividly remember my parent’s tremendous grief when they learned from the scarce, intermittent correspondence they received via the Red Cross, that many members of our family had died and much of what they remembered of Hamburg was gone.

Among other things, he [Thomas] insist he will perish if he cannot take me to Venice and watch me fall into a canal.

Sorcery and Cecelia, Book 1 'Among other things, he [Thomas] insist he will perish if he cannot take me to Venice and watch me fall into a canal.' The Grand Tour ( Book 2; after Kate falls into a canal): When he was sure I was unharmed, Thomas indulged in a bit of scolding.'' I've seen you fall in the duck pond at St.James Park. I've done all mortal man can do to keep you from falling in the English Channel, I bring you all the way to Venice and this is how you thank me? You fall into a canal behind my back? Kate, you are a monster of inconsideration.

It’s like San Francisco,” Paige breathes at our incredible first view of Venice. Which breaks the spell for a moment. We wrench our eyes away from the Grand Canal and turn to gawk at her instead. “San Francisco?” I ask. “Really?” I mean, I haven’t been to San Francisco, but I’ve seen it in lots of films. Amazingly steep streets, cable cars, Alcatraz Island out in the bay, a huge red bridge they call Golden for some reason. Does she mean Venice is like San Francisco because of the bridge? “Never a dull moment with Paige,” I mutter to Kelly as an aside.

In 1997, the Brooklyn Museum staged an exhibition, Monet and the Mediterranean, which included seventy-one paintings Claude Monet created during trips to the French and Italian Rivieras (in 1884 and 1888) and to Venice (in 1908).7 Instead of single, signature works, the exhibition showcased how Monet experimented, changing one variable at a time. For instance, for his Grand Canal series, Monet painted the same church from the same location but at different times of day to study changes in lighting. He also painted the Doge’s Palace for another series, showing the same building from different perspectives. Monet used this method of painting the same subject with small variations to perfect his technique.8 This illustrates the aspect of incrementalization in Layer 1, isolating and iterating the novel parts of the problem from what is considered already developed, tested, and validated

We are forever changed, inspired by Venice and by its way of life, its serenity, and its sense of community. Troubles will visit us in life, as the Acqua Alta visits Venice, but as all Venetians know, the tides have a natural ebb and flow, and life soon returns to normal. As we learned each time we walked out of our Venetian apartment, it’s not the destination that’s important, it’s the people we meet along the way that make all the difference. And no road, no calle, no canal seems too long, no tide too high, when friends line the way.

Life is what you make it, and what we learned today in that magical little canal bookshop is that books are there for you when you need comfort, and they’ll always be there. Their pages might be yellowed with age, dog-eared, with notes in the margins, or a birthday scrawl in the front, but that’s what makes them special.