Not the best time of the year here... Ferragosto

The August holiday in Italy is called Ferragusto, a contraction of ferie (holiday) and August. It centres on the Feast of the Assumption (15 August), the day we honour the Virgin's attainment of Heaven before the Last Judgement (a process we mere mortals must await). But I should say it used to centre on Our Lady, but now it's a holiday week: cities empty out, roads are jammed for 40 kms, beached get packed, businesses shut down tightly. In Venice, for example, all hardware stores close, as do most shops whose customers are Venetians. Designer, glass, mask, and similar useless shops, of course, are always open.

But Venice suffers the reverse. The city is invaded. Even more than usual as the local Italians, those living anywhere within 80 kilometres away, swarm into Venice for the day with the kids, the grandparents, the cousins, the uncles, aunts, the dogs, too. And they bring their lunch. This is in addition to the 100,000 Americans and others who are here as per normal. The Venetians who remain go into hiding. This period also sees a continuous stream of cruise ships which sail into town with 3,000-4,000 holiday makers each, disgorge their passengers, and collect another 3,000-4,000 for the next cruise. Venice has berths for five to seven liners. Within 2 or 3 hours of the docking at the maritime terminal those people are in S Marco. The city is at breaking point: garbage mounts, tourists picnic everywhere, streets impassable.                                                                                                                                                            

So what's to be done? Escape. Next year for Ferragosto we will be in Ireland or in the country.

Postscript relating an amusing thing that happened two days ago: I was crossing the Grand Canal by a traghetto at S Toma. We were almost to the other side but we had to wait to pull into the dock because a gondola carovana tour (6 full gondolas and a god-awful singer) was about to unload at the same dock as ours.  So the gondolier on my traghetto starts remonstrating loudly in Venetian dialect to the gondoliers of the tour, whom he knew, but it was all in fun. One of the unmistakable words he loudly pronounced was "Americani". So, in one of the tour gondolas floating about 2 metres away there is a couple of 50 somethings, and the Mrs, apparently thinking our traghetto driver is criticising Americans, pipes up, "Not us, we're Australians!"  Well, heaven forfend that anyone would mistake them for...Americans!

By the way, the Calatrava bridge has been successfully put in place. Will open in December or January, they say.