Dangerous Elegance at La Fenice, Tonight

It's generally agreed that the most elegant way of arriving for a performance at La Fenice is by the water entrance at the back. But with tonight's extremely low tide--that left the theater's wood pier beyond the reach of any boat and the slimiest and most slippery of its steps exposed--it became easily the most hazardous.

Which I suspect makes La Fenice the only opera house in the world where a familiarity with the evening's tidal chart is at least as important as a familiarity with the night's libretto.