Venice in Winter

There can be no better time to live in Venice or to visit Venice than in December, January and February (Carnival, New Year's, Befana excepted). The weather now is cold and crisp. The water is low, so no threat of acqua alta. The tour groups and cruise ships are elsewhere. At night, when the delivery boats are long gone, and when walking down a narrow calle or crossing a small bridge, you could easily be back in time, whether 1595, 1795 or 1895. The mask, jewellry, and glass shops are empty and/or closed. Venetians are out and about enjoying their city with the small amount of tourists who wisely come at this time. Vaporettos and traghettos are never crowded, people have longer fuses, mountains of garbage are not seen, and shorts,T-shirts and sneakers are gone from view. "Students" don't congregate outside bars till 2AM making a racket.

With the exception of New Year's Eve, when 35,000 inebriates and fellow-travellers crowd S Marco, the winter here brings home to me Pound's lines and James's thoughts about Venice:

"O God, what great kindness have we done in times past and forgotten it, That thou givest this wonder unto us, O God or waters?" (Night Litany)

"It is a fact that almost everyone interesting, appealing, melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another... to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, settling in it, treating it, cherishing it, as a sort of repository of consolations; all of which today, for the conscious mind, is mixed with its air and constitutes its unwritten history. The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give."

Happy New Year