Venice, the Enchanted City

Venice is one of Italy's most enchanted cities. Your first view of the city rising out of the wide spread of the lagoon is so breath-taking, it is a site you will never forget.  I literally gasped!

Venice's small, traffic-free streets along the winding canals make for great walking. Venice actually consists of 117 bodies of land connected by more than 400 bridges over its 150 canals. Each footstep, each turn around a corner, bring a new experience: magnificent old churches, grand palaces, awe inspiring basilicas, shops, open air markets and busy, lively squares.

Odes to Venice

Taken from Fodor's Guide to Venice

Since the early 19th century, Venice has been a stop on every sensitive scribe's Grand Tour, and the result has been a centuries-long serenade sung by some of English literature's greats. Lord Byron, for one, was so enchanted that he moved to Venice in 1817. Charles Dickens seems to have fallen head over heels for the city; in an 1844 letter he wrote, "The gorgeous and wonderful reality of Venice is beyond the fancy of the wildest dreamer; it is a thing you would shed tears to see."

Among the other literary giants entranced by Venice were Edith Wharton, George Eliot, Henry James, and Marcel Proust -- who came on a visit with his mother and refused to leave.

Mark Twain arrived in 1867 but failed to be seduced. In Innocents Abroad he dismissed the fabled gondola and gondolier as "the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it, and the other a mangy, barefooted gutter-snipe."

In the 20th century, such varied talents as Ernest Hemingway, Erica Jong, and Ezra Pound all adored the place.

Venice's literati have for the most part been tourists like the rest of us, inspired by the traveler's Venice that you can see every day. Pound was moved by nothing greater than the play of light on an evening gondola ride: "The prows rose silver on silver, taking light in the darkness."

If you find that words fail you, you won't be alone. Dickens wrote to a friend, "With your foot upon its stones, its pictures before you, and its history in your mind, it is something past all writing or speaking of -- almost past all thinking of." On the other hand, Shakespeare set two plays in Venice without settiing foot here -- proof that for some, the Venice of the imagination is inspiration enough.