JULY 6 - Head into Venice to get lost again in the multitude of narrow alleys. Never have I seen so many people walking around, glued to their google map app, trying to figure out where they are. Take a ferry taxi and disembark at a random dock.
At this point we enter the tourist maelstrom of Piazza San Marco. This is the subject of each and every tourist brochure of Italy, and deserves a good explanation. However, we plan to spend more time here tomorrow, so for now I will just show a few pictures.
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One might be curious as to how Venice got, and is getting, its water. Unlike almost every other city, Venice is built out on marine tidal mud with very little actual land base. Drilling down into the underlying rock formations (which are surely quite deep) will not yield fresh water anyway. Of course, 13th Century Venice would been only able to rely on diverting a river for water, but none was available. The solution was to design the town with numerous plazas, most really not that large, but sloping toward the centers to collect rain water in strategically placed drains. Runoff from rooves around the plaza was also funneled inward to maximize collection. Once the water drained into the collection points, it moved underground in pipes filled with sand, coming to rest in wells like the marble one shown below. Bells were run twice a day, to notify people that it was time to pull water from the wells, otherwise they were supposed to be left alone.
It worked well until the 1800’s, when neglect caused this delicately maintained system to collapse. Eventually water pipes were run from the mainland and this is what Venice uses today.
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Head back to Mestre in late afternoon. The downtown portion is a relaxing stroll, with a long pedestrian mall.
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