No cars allowed in Venice.  No trucks.  No motorcycles.  No e-bikes. Only the very young and the very old get to go around on wheels.  Makes sense because the streets are often narrow enough to allow bi-wall touching as you creep along with a slice of blue directly overhead.  Plus curvy.  If you dropped a giant handful of spaghetti from the heavens onto a flat surface below, the result would look like the map of Venice which you whip out and unfold to find your way from the hotel to the osteria that some fellow traveler recommended.  As you twist your map this way and that your partner may try GPS, but the tightly packed architecture messes with the signal.  When one of you relies on the map and the other of you relies on the cell phone, the only destination you can expect to achieve is a noisy street spat.  This way!  That way!

So how does Venice manage its commerce?  Scores and hundreds of restaurants require daily deliveries of fish and veggies and bread and wine and beer and oil and fresh napkins.  Multitudinous tourist shops need to refresh thotchke supplies.  Lumber and steel and concrete and rivets for the new buildings going up here and there.  Clothes.  Groceries.  Light bulbs and buckets and brooms and the whole magillah of the stuff we all live by.  Stuff in.  Garbage and trash out.  Mainland commuters in and out every day.  Tourists!  Thousands and thousands of tourists coming and going.  None of it transported on streets; all of it transported on canals.  Boats.  Everywhere, boats.

We all have a mental picture of the Grand Canal stashed somewhere in our noggins, Venice’s wide, curving Broadway/Main Street, flanked by restaurants and gondola stands and hotels and palaces and museums, and spanned by the crenelated arch of the Rialto Bridge .  .  .  the aorta of the city.  Side canals branch off from the Grand Canal, and re-branch and re-branch, kind of like the arteries in your body. Every address in the city has a capillary canal nearby, close enough for the delivery bargeman to wheel your cargo from deck to door. Oh, I forgot to mention .  .  . in addition to baby strollers and wheelchairs, they permit two wheeled hand trucks here, huge suckers that the delivery guys pile high with cartons and boxes and cases of beer. Maybe, just maybe, when I was 20 back in the mists of the Pleistocene, I could have wheeled a fully loaded Venetian hand truck a block or two. OK, maybe next door. When these guys, with their backs of steel and haunches of titanium, stoop and grunt their load onto two wheels, I fear their innards will spill out.  Hard way to put bread on the table

Cop car

limosine

Ambulance

UPS truck

Family sedan

Training wheels

Delivery trucks, various.

Bus

Normal tourists here photograph the Doge’s Palace and Saint Mark’s.  Me, I photograph the boats and other water related stuff.  For example.

Here and there around the town you see stacks of what look like maybe picnic tables or police barriers. Neatly heaped piles of what? No idea. No idea until high tide on our last day in Venice. Now, I suppose some minuscule fraction of you readers may dismiss the disastrous effects of global warming and rising sea levels as hysterical nonsense (in which case you are on the wrong blog), but those rising waters occupy the worry brains of people who live in the Maldives or Miami or lower Manhattan or pretty much every port city in the United States of America or, and especially, Venice. In the winter months here, at high tide the drainage works in reverse. That little drain in mid street flows .  .  .  upward. Saint Mark’s Square goes awash. In restaurants you notice a red line painted on the door jamb marking the knee high limit of the 2019 flood.  So, when the streets go underwater, crews materialize to convert those mystery stacks into elevated walkways. That’s what they are. Stashed walkways. Thanks, guys! Instead of sloshing along in the high water, you walk above it. Or maybe you do what Jane and I did – – find some very sexy pink plastic galoshes to keep our socks dry.

When I first visited Venice a quarter of a century ago, eleven-year-old son Tucker peered over the gunwale of a gondola and said, “Dad, that’s a turd.” Sums it up for me. For good. For ill. Venice is about water.