Venice left us speechless.  Its history, art, architecture, music, canals—they are so rich, colorful, and plentiful.  How on earth do I capture all this in a blog post that will not bore my friends?    The words I choose are human ingenuity.

Modern technology is simply amazing.  We carry, on a little phone, detailed maps of any city and complete dictionaries and translation programs for relevant languages.  But I am not sure this is any more remarkable than the structures and art humans created here nearly a thousand years ago.  Venice, full of enormous stone buildings, busy canals, and cobbled alleys, was built upon a marshy lagoon! How is this city supported?   Early Venetians drove wood pilings fifteen feet into the mud, sand and clay, laid down wood platforms, then built their magnificent city.  Somehow they knew the submerged wood would not rot.  Somehow they obtained, transported, and milled enough wood to float their city.  Then they built a system of canals for drainage and transportation.  And those canals still function as streets today, illustrated by a busy transportation system of bus boats, ambulance boats, garbage boats, even yellow and red DHL boats that efficiently navigate those canals. I love that humans figured all this out so long ago, and that their work remains today.

As if the bare bones of a floating stone city were not enough, Venetians used their minds to make their city beautiful.  Palaces are topped with lacy carvings.  Ordinary structures sport random sculptures.  The colorful marble columns and detailed mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica defy description.  The glow and depth in Bellini’s paintings are fantastic.  Again, I admire the human minds that discovered how, without computers or engines, to locate, move, and carve mass quantities of heavy materials.  How to spin and weave beautiful tapestries.  How to paint shades of every color bathed in light (I learned that Bellini used vegetable oil to create his heavenly pigments). 

Ingenuity.  It’s on full display in Venice, and there is so much more I could write!  I’ll stop here because even those of you who’ve read this far are probably ready to stop.   But I’ll add one more of my favorite examples of ingenuity:  CORTISONE!  One shot of this lovely discovery has assuaged my arthritic feet and made my Venice discoveries possible.  Once again, hooray for human ingenuity!

Sally

P.S.  Thanks to Rick Steves’s book Italy and Audio Europe App for my Venice and art history lessons.