Venice - KM. 110

Venice is the queen. There are no words adequate to describe it. The philosopher Nietzsche wrote, ‘If I had to look for a word to replace “music”, I could only think of Venice’.

Visitors, even those staying for a short time, are inevitably ravished by its beauty, its works of art, and especially its music.

San Marco Square, heart of the city and an important architectural and urban complex, takes its name from the famous Basilica, the Basilica d’Oro (Golden Basilica), so called because of its glittering mosaics surrounded by five Byzantine cupolas. The large square opens at one side towards the lagoon and is bordered on the others by the High Bell Tower and prestigious historical buildings like the Procuratie Vecchie e Nuove and the Palazzo Ducale.

Not far from here, there is the elegant Ponte dei Sospiri, a must-see stop on a romantic gondola ride, which traditionally goes up the Canal Grande, the city’s most important waterway, crossing the Ponte di Rialto, one of the city’s most vivid and interesting places.

Venice has to be explored on foot, forgetting about maps and directions, and getting lost in the tangled lanes, in those bridges going up and down, to discover treasures of the Baroque such as the Madonna della Salute and the Gallerie dell’Accademia, hosting the masterpieces of Venetian painters from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries and from the School of San Rocco, with the extraordinary cycle of paintings by Tintoretto.

In the last few years, Venice has become more and more a city of modern and contemporary art like the work you will find in the renovated Punta della Dogana, or at Palazzo Grassi, or in the latest artistic exhibits at the Art Biennale at the Giardini and the Arsenale.