In the days of the European Grand Tour, travellers would abandon their coaches at Chioggia to the south of Venice and complete their journey by boat, watching the spires and palazzos of the impossibly beautiful city emerge from the glassy lagoon. Recently, on a cold, bright weekend, my wife Ann and I did more or less the same.
We picked up a four-berth penichette houseboat at Chioggia and sailed – or rather, motored – to Venice. It was Ann’s first time and my third in this amphibious trading post between the Eastern and Western worlds, where commerce historically fed art, science and architecture. Looking at Venice from the water, rather than vice versa, was a revelation.
Starting out on Saturday morning, after a late-arriving Friday flight, we chugged past the euphonious villages – Pellestrina, Portosecco, Alberoni, Malamocco – that occupy the strip of land separating the lagoon from the Adriatic. The able and informative Marcello from Locaboat Holidays explained the rules of the water as we went. They are fairly simple: give way to anything bigger or faster than you, take care of anything smaller or slower, and pay attention to the briccolas (channel markers) or you’ll find yourself beached on a sandbank.
Before long, the campanile tower on Piazza San Marco – the square that Americans think all European squares should look like – hove into view. We moored opposite the Doge’s Palace, in the shadow of a magnificent Palladian church on San Giorgio Maggiore, one of the smaller of the 118 islands upon which Venice is built. Marcello shook my hand and disappeared. Bingo – I was skipper of my own ship and all Venice’s Renaissance treasures and winding canals were open to me.
Well, up to a point… The stately, broad-beamed penichettes are commodious and comfortable. You can stand upright, sleep at full length, shower and drink from the freshwater tank, and cook properly on the gas range. Unfortunately, this means the boats are too big to navigate the shallow internal canals and low bridges of central Venice, to which access is – like most moorings in and around the city – strictly limited. I confess, too, that the nuanced business of steering proved difficult for a virgin sailor like me to master fully in a weekend. For 95 per cent of the time, while cruising along the Lido coast, sailing the penichette was an effortless and relaxing business. Once near the centre of Venice, though, you find yourself suddenly surrounded by lumbering cruise ships and car ferries, darting speedboats and the reckless river buses, one of which has a captain nicknamed Black September, thanks to his habit of swamping boats that get in his way. Put it this way: if Giacomo, the photographer with us, had not been both an experienced captain and a native speaker happy to negotiate with voluble harbourmasters, I think we might have been sunk. Metaphorically, at least.
Which is not to say our Venetian voyage wasn’t a fabulous experience. From the word go, it was. Mooring our houseboat at San Giorgio felt like insouciantly parking a camper van in front of Buckingham Palace and, within seconds, a vaporetto banged up against the nearby pier to take us to Piazza San Marco. Napoleon called this the finest ‘drawing room’ in Europe, a description I’d be hard pressed to better. Despite the hordes of tourists feeding hordes of pigeons, the overpriced cafés with their competing string quartets and the almost cartoonish opulence of the cathedral, it remains a public space of unimpeachable, carefully proportioned loveliness.
To the immediate north and west are shopping streets that put London’s Bond Street to shame. Step one street away to the east, into the Castello district, and you are immediately in a warren of absurdly romantic waterways, paths and buildings that seem to have been made more attractive by decay. Slightly rocky on our sea legs, we felt morally superior to the landlubbers in this waterlogged city.
