Venice is the Venice of Italy

Last week we spent a very enjoyable two days staying in Venice between the olive wwoof farm and our 6 days in Vienna.  After doing Florence thoroughly (1 week) and Rome aggressively (3 days) several weeks earlier, we had a different plan for Venice: no research beforehand, just walking around, and nothing that required paying for admission.  It turned out to be a good city for this kind of lazy plan. 
With no cars or scooters on the islands, walking around was a pleasure.  It has to be the only city where every 4ft wide alley shows up on the map as a street of its own.  And there were plenty of  beautiful and free churches to sit in when we needed a break from walking.  The old medieval island itself was small enough that by the end of two days we started stumbling upon places that we had already been and actually knowing which 4 ft “street” to take without consulting a map.

In a city completely served by boats, Cari and I managed somehow to not set foot in a boat one time- we stayed exclusively on dry ground (and bridges).  We saw garbage boats, mover’s boats, DHL mailboats, and ambulance boats (after which we decided it would be better not to have a medical emergency right then).  We learned from a Venice guide podcast that the city is experiencing rapid depopulation and may soon cease to be a city at all- it will just be a place for tourists to come and ogle.  But I think it could be a great place to live, provided someone started a ‘zipboat’ boat sharing company

One strange thing we noticed among all the alleys was that, contrary to our expectations, the city smelled… good.  The water looked clean and you could always smell the sea, of course. No matter how dark and twisted the alley, there was never once a pee or garbage smell - we actually noticed bakery and restaurant smells wafting out of the back doors more often.  The garden of the museum on the North side of the Accademia bridge (we had to walk by it many times, there are only 4 bridges across the Grand Canal) smelled like roses at all times.  And with the tourist/local ratio all out of whack, there was much less smoking than in all the other Italian cities.