Venice is huge

To whom it may concern, Venice is huge. Doesn’t fit on cameras or texts, inside the Italian boot or in just one island. Not in vain, decided to live unattached from the continent, ruling a lagoon of the Adriatic Sea, with more than 450 bridges and 118 portions of land. Among them, we see Murano and Burano, famous by colourful glasses and houses. In times of pixels, this place at northeast of Italy is a compliment to everything made by human hands instead of machines. It’s an invitation to contemplate life rather than live in auto mode, flash by flash, without paying attention on the details that the city might reveal.

La Sereníssima bobs softly on millions of wooden piles. They are there to support a capital that is, above all, a masterpiece of art. It’s a portrait of human abilities to get used to the most atypical surroundings. It’s a landscape that has remained the same for centuries. Venice doesn’t change nor grow. It’s a city without cars and traffic lights. Without hurry. Where everything slides on boat: the police, the ambulance, the firemen, the new furniture, the containers of trash, the express mail service, the rumours that one day all will disappear.

The precision, typical of european cities, seems to be out of service here. Distances are measured in bridges. Corners are very scarse. Species of streets are abundant: strada, via, crocera, ramo, ruga, sotopòrtego, fondamenta, piscina, canale, calle. By the way, the streets don’t start on number 1 and the houses can go until 6828, they obey a property numbering common to the whole district.

The public transport timetable, in turn, obeys its own time numbering. Sometimes a minute lasts thirty seconds, sometimes it lasts ninety. Rare times, a vaporetto arrives or departures according to the same minutes adopted in London. Although it acts as if had got the moves like Jagger. Drives making banked turns and parks drawing straight lines: goes in a diagonal way, hits the station’s boundaries, the shock calmly pulls him back, the conductor calmly leads him forward, then shift to reverse, then shift to first gear, then shift to reverse, then first gear, then reverse, then first, then rever, then first-re-almost-there-verse and done!

The labyrinth of streets, canals and colors asks us to let the city guide, to create mental and affective maps, to invent our own postcards, to start no matter how it'll end up.

To whom may concern, Venice is huge. More in depth and intensity than height or width.