Five Views Back at the Winter Now Ending

Over this past weekend we had, first, frigid bora winds from the north, then, the next day, the balmy scirocco from the south. Contrary to what one might first be inclined to think, the latter are actually more of a problem for Venice, as in the course of blowing water up the Adriatic coast they're a major factor in the worst instances of acqua alta. And we were hit with two spells of acqua alta over the weekend, but both arrived in the wee hours of the morning and turned out to be not so high as first feared (120 cm instead of 140 cm, in the latter instance).

In spite of the storms over this past weekend, though, there's a sense that winter is pretty much finished here, though February is just ending. For the second winter in a row, there was no snow in the city. There's never very much, but each of our first three years featured at least one day of it, as is (or was) typical. 

What we had instead was fog, which is not unusual. But because we went a number of weeks at one point without a drop of the usual winter rain, the fog seemed the dominant motif of this past winter, to an extent it hasn't before in the years we've lived here.

So, with signs of spring already visible, and Marzo Pazzo as it's called here (Crazy March) just hours away, here are five last looks back at the past winter.

   

The Canale delle Vignole