(Italy)…News comes in of Venice, which in the week beginning Nov. 30 is suffering from its worst flooding in 22 years. The height of the water in some places has reached 1.56 metres above its normal level. I was in Venice last month, and on two days when the moon was at its fullest, the streets were covered with a foot of water. It is quite entertaining to the tourist, but to the residents and the city itself, such continual attacks are a threat to this beautiful city, which was settled, it is thought, by refugees fleeing from the Germanic horde. I was staying at the home of good friends, Francesco and Ivana, the former a Sardinian, the latter an Italian of Slovenian descent. Much walking is required of this place in order to have at least some of it remain with you when you leave. There are some major thoroughfares (narrow ones) that visitors troop along to get to the Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge, and if you want to avoid these, then a detailed map is needed, along with the idea that you will walk and walk and not get very far. Often a street will look like a dead end, only for the smallest of arches to appear that leads to a small bridge and…etc, etc.
I loved everywhere here, but one special, beautiful spot is the Ponte Chiodo on the Fondamenta di San Felice, in Cannaregio district. It is one of only two bridges in all of Venice, including its lagoon isles, that does not have side railings. It leads only to a door of a private house, the Palazzo Chiodo (whose residents no doubt were teetotallers, or walked very carefully).
The other example is the Ponte del Diavolo, on the island of Torcello, which has two attractions: a Cipriani restaurant and the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, in which are the relics of Croatian Saint Heliodorus and a very faded, hard-to-decipher plaque dating from 639 that is the earliest mention of Venice. The walk back to our friends’ home from the Ponte Chiodo would take us past the imposing church of the Fondamenta Madonna Dell’Orto, near to where are four statues of moors, one of which over the long passage of time has had his nose rubbed down to a grey shine. Not surprisingly, this is called the Campo dei Mori, and the artist Tintoretto lived here. Indeed, he is buried in the Madonna Dell’Orto. One excellent bar in the area is Al Timon, on the Fondamenta degli Ormesini, which serves excellent tapas, known here as cicchetti. 
Another hot spot for these is the Do Mori, on the Calle dei do Mori, which is not near Campo dei Mori but next to the wonderful Rialto Market, which sells fruit, vegetables and fish. Francesco has been going to the same fishmonger here for years and calls him “maestro,” which is a touch I like, for the man surely picks out scallops and cod like Giuseppe Verdi picked out notes to suit the seasons. Do Mori purports to be the oldest bar in Venice, and its patrons come in for two or three cicchetti and a glass of house white before tackling the crowds again. And there are crowds: 60,000 residents and some 25 to 30,000,000 tourists per year. Back at Al Timon, the walk home would be then across a small bridge with a guard turret, which was closed at night to keep the Jews inside their ghetto (spelt gheto in the Venetian dialect, in which John is spelt Zwane, the slangy derivation possible here if you say Giovanni very fast without too much care to pronounce each syllable).
The ghetto—founded in 1516, the Jews were not subject to the curfew only after Napoleon invaded La Serenissima in 1797—has five synagogues, some of which it is difficult to spot. On one corner is an office run by the Jewish Chabad Lubavitchers community who are the latest arrivals and perhaps its most vocal one, in which every time I passed I saw a video playing of its dear Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who I remember seeing once in Brooklyn in 1993 driven in a limousine. I was also in Venice, apart from sightseeing, to run the 23rd Venice Marathon. Jokes abound of how it is possible to run 42.2 kilometres in a city that ostensibly has no streets.
The course starts outside of the city (a-ha!) at the 18th-century Villa Pisani, which through a gap in the wall I could espy its maze, whose labyrinth of hedges lead to a small tower wrapped by a circular staircase and on top of which is a statue. The race runs along the Brenta Canal, through some quaint towns and the not-so-quaint Maghera and Mestre industrial areas, in which some of the largest boats and cruise ships are made, and out into the Parque San Giovanni. By this time, runners are tired, but soon coming into view is the skyline of Venice. The last five kilometres are in Venice itself, and over the top of 14 bridges are placed ramps so that steps are not required to step up. There’s even a special pontoon bridge to get competitors over the Grand Canal, and this can only be run—actually, by this stage of the event, walked—by official marathoners, which is a delicious sense of entitlement if you’re a traveller. It was the day after that I visited Torcello and the other Venetian islands, letting the vaporetto water taxi do the work, not my hamstrings.
Murano is famous for its glass, which on the rare occasion can be seen in its manufacture, the blowers preferring the cool that comes in through open doors to the gawks and stares that also enter. Of the sellers of these expensive creations, Venini is the most expensive and has a beautiful shop right where the vaporetto stop is. Wandering far away from what is certainly a touristy spot, we found the sterling Ai Bisatei osteria, on Campo San Bernardo, where we ate a local, hard-to-find specialty, spleen seasoned in lemon and pepper.
Burano is famous not for glass, but for lace, as well as for its colourful houses. A local told us that this is a relatively new concept and that the bright colours actually harm the brick buildings, which would originally be whitewashed only. The penultimate island—before Torcello itself—was Mazzorbo, which is the quietest by far and is connected to Burano by one bridge. Right on the far corner is the 8th-century Chiesa di Santa Caterina, which has the most wonderful worn marble floor. Within a roadside shrine, on the way to the church I saw the small painting of Christ that is the subject of the photo above.