Tourists from within Italy began showing up in Venice about 10 days ago--at least that's when I started to notice them--and now with hotels beginning to re-open and free movement allowed within the Schengen Area the city is busier than it has been since the end of February. And though the number of tourists is a small fraction of what had become the horrific norm, the contrast to lock-down mode is, nevertheless, rather jarring.
The four-day national holiday weekend that concluded yesterday with the Festa della Repubblica certainly had everything to do with the latest influx of visitors and today's local newspaper headlines all trumpeted the crowded conditions on trains, vaporetti, and beaches, and the absence of face masks (which are no longer required in public, though today I noticed that a majority of people, myself included, continue to wear them).
Unprepared, or at least unused to the foot traffic, we thought to escape from it yesterday into the lagoon--only to find, as you can see in these three images--that plenty of other people had the same idea. Gusting wind and water traffic (usually in excess of posted speed limits) made for a choppy afternoon, and even our usual refuge in the barene pictured just below resembled a parking lot. While the crowds of both people and boats at the bacan (or long sand bar extending roughly perpendicular from Sant' Erasmo's beach), a favorite local summertime destination partly pictured in the last picture below, were so extensive as to exceed the capabilities of my camera's panorama mode. What you see at the bottom of this post is just a small fragment of the scene.
I was worried that the reopening might be something like this...I'm sorry to hear it.
ReplyDeleteThe city is nowhere near over-run as it had been before the lock-down, but the number of people without masks on crowded vaporetti is certainly worrisome (we are fortunate to be able to avoid them). The water traffic in the lagoon is, unfortunately typical--it had already become so bad in recent years that even in a small traditional Venetian style boat (such as a sanpierota) fitted with an outboard motor one was frequently in danger of being swamped by the steady flow of speeding motorboats. If one was rowing, of course, it was (and is) even worse. And the weird thing is, it's this bad already and the very boats I used to imagine were the main cause of all this moto-ondoso--the taxis--are yet hardly in use: the current moto-ondoso is caused by locals in their private pleasure boats.
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