!!!Venice

by Stanislav Sedov and Dmitry Moiseenko,
members of the [AirPano Team|Geography/About/Consortium/AirPano,_Team] that is a member of the [global-geography Consortium|Geography/About/Consortium]. \\

3 August 2012

with kind permission of [AirPano|http://www.AirPano.com]

A millennium and a half of Venice history had a lot of exciting events:
countless wars and crusades, booming trade and banking. Overall Venice
has always been independent, rich, and successful city.

Located in the center of Europe, which means in the middle of main
European events, Venice went through several periods of prosperity and
downfalls. Today it is one of the most famous cities in the world: 15
million tourists visiting Venice every year is a solid proof of this
fact.

[{Image src='01_Cruise liner in Venice.jpg' caption='Cruise liner in Venice' alt='' width='900' popup='false' height='501'}]

Venice is called the "city on water". It's worth mentioning that there
are several other cities in Europe that have a lot of canals. For
example, Belgian town Ghent was built atop of 26 small islands connected
by 207 bridges; capital of Holland was also built atop of 26 small
islands. But they could never compete with Venice and its 118 islands,
150 canals, and 400 bridges.

As one can imagine, Venice transportis quite peculiar. There are no
roads, cars, taxis, buses, trams, nor bikes. You either walk on foot or
use water transportation: boats, motorboats, or gondolas. Tourists use
the latter as a romantic adventure rather than means of transportation,
which cost them 100 Euros for half an hour ride.

[{Image src='02_St Marco square.jpg' caption='St Marco square' alt='' width='900' popup='false' height='321'}]

Every detail of a gondola is thoroughly designed and has some kind of
symbolic meaning. Its size and shape hasn't changed in centuries and it
is protected by law: the length is 11 meters, the width is 140 cm. It
has a flat bottom and an asymmetric shape with left side longer than the
right side by 24 cm. A straight line divides gondola in half lengthwise,
and a gondolier has to stay on one side of the boat to operate it. At
full load (1200 kg) gondola can go at a speed of three knots, which is
about 4 km per hour.

At the end of XV century Venice had 15 to 29 thousand gondoliers.
Together with their families they comprised one quarter of the city's
population. In modern days there are only 425 gondoliers in Venice. This
number always stays the same regardless of how many gandoliers retire or
how many new people join the ranks.

Of course there is more to Venice beside gondoliers and buildings on
water. You will definitely want to see other Venice landmarks, such as
St Mark Cathedral, St Mark's Square, Doge's Palace, Bridge of Sighs, the
Grand Canal, and others.

[{Image src='03_The heart of Venice.jpg' caption='The heart of Venice' alt='' width='900' popup='false' height='644'}]

Alexander Herzen gave a remarkably accurate description of Venice:
«Venice is the most wonderful nonsense in the world. It is crazy enough
to build a city where no city could ever be built; but to build one of
the most elegant and distinguished cities in the world could only do
crazy genius."

It was however a real challenge to build such a beautiful city. An
uninhabitable area — not even of land, but of water! — has been turned
into a miracle. For many centuries construction workers tediously
re-routed rivers away from the site, fortified the coast, and drove
millions of waterproof larch piles into the ground.

[{Image src='04_Planet Venice.jpg' caption='Planet Venice' alt='' width='900' popup='false' height='747'}]

Nevertheless, with passing centuries, it became clear that they couldn't
beat nature entirely. Slowly but surely the Adriatic claims its
territory: during XX century alone Venice has "sunk" 23 cm. It is
predicted that by year 2028 the city will completely go underwater.

It means that we have very little time left to admire and remember an
elusive beauty of the famous Italian landmark...

\\ \\
[16 Panoramas of Venice|Geography/Europe/Italy/Pictures/Panoramas_of_Venice]










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