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Venice was the first of four stops over ten days in Italy. We caught an overnight train from Vienna to get here, not that I got a lot of sleep. It was at about this point I started fall ill with a bad cold (courtesy of being run down from lack of sleep in noisy fucking hostels), and spent half the night bloody coughing and spluttering! Anyway, I eventually made it alive. In short, Venice is an amazing place! It's 7km off mainland Italy built on 117 tiny islands with over 150 canals and 400 bridges. As such, there are no roads and no vehicular traffic; it's all pedestrian pathways and water traffic - very cool! To walk from one side to the other takes around 30 minutes, except at night when you get hopelessly lost like we did, then it's more like an hour (good thing I had a compass!). You can easily spend hours wandering the streets, checking out the shops and the sights, and relaxing somewhere along the Grand Canal (the biggest canal of the lot, winding through the middle of the city).

If nothing else, make sure you have a bloody good map handy before you start exploring, else chances are you won't find your way out again hehe. The whole place is like one huge maze.				Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (usually just called the Frari), one of the greatest churches in the city. Construction took over a century and was completed in the 1400s.

Canal Grande (the Grand Canal), Venice's largest and most important waterway. There are only four bridges crossing the canal, or if you can't be bothered you can catch one of the hundreds of public gondolas that meander around the canals.		Many of the canals are quite narrow and get very packed with traffic. Just because there are no cars doesn't mean there aren't traffic jams hehe.

All emergency services rely on the canals to get around the city. Note the boat full of fruit and veg in the background.		Carnevale is an annual 10-day street party in February during which people wear costumes and masks such as these, which can be found for sale throughout the city. Most are constructed of paper mache and are incredibly detailed and impressive!

Suits me huh!		Would you like Spaghetti with that?
This is the Basilica di San Marco (St. Marks Basilica) in the stunning Piazza San Marco (St. Marks Square). The basilica was mostly completed in its current form in 1093 and is the most famous of the churches in Venice. Its exterior has many impressive mosaics such as the one shown here.

Piazza San Marco is not just popular with the tourists - the pigeons can't get enough of it either hahaha!				Venice by night. Remember to take a map (and a compass)!

The piazza by night. Incidentally, the piazza is the lowest point of Venice and regularly floods when the tide rises.		The Grand Canal by night from the Accademia bridge.

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