“Everyone has to be moving in the right position with the right timing.” It’s a novel way of looking at it, but there’s not a lot of gracefulness to our current situation – sat in kayaks, tiny specks of orange plastic being tossed about on the choppy open waters of the Canale delle Navi, a busy shipping lane on the edge of Venice, waiting for a break in the traffic. Cargo ships, luxury yachts, leisure cruisers and construction barges surge by, each of them sending out waves that rock us nervously on the water.
We see our opportunity and take it, paddling vigorously between water taxis and speedboats driven by rich old men with young women sunbathing on their decks. There’s a saltiness in the air as we enter the city. Immediately inside, we come across a gondola workshop, a behind-the-scenes look at the work that goes into maintaining the view of the city tourists see. We glide down narrow, shaded canalways where local people have hung washing out to dry between the buildings, and pass groups of old men sitting in cafes drinking espresso and wine.
As we head further into the city, we share the water with gondolas, water taxis and cargo ships. One boat is unloading goods at a supermarket, another with a crane is doing construction work on a canal-side house. The canals of Venice have been described as the veins of the city – they’re not just pleasant places for tourist cruises, but working waterways, and to be on them is to see daily Venetian life in action. “All goods and materials are moved on water,” Rene tells us. “If you live here and order a fridge, it will come by boat. The canals are the main roads. If you’re on the canals, you’ll see Venetians at work. If you’re on land, you’ll see other tourists.”
The tourist crowds can be overwhelming during the summer months – kayaking around the city, even near the tourist hotspots, has a relaxing feeling of being detached from all that. “It’s the only way you can get away from all the other tourists, to be in a boat that isn’t a gondola,” says Rene. “On a nice sunny day like this, there are probably half a million tourists, plus another 60,000 people living here. It’s hard to find anywhere that 1,000 tourists haven’t found before you.”
We pause in the water outside San Pedro, a white church with one of the city’s three leaning towers, while Rene tells us about the tension between commerce and religion in Venice’s history. “There was a clash between the republic of Venice, as a state, and the church organisation. Venice made its livelihood trading with Muslims. And at times, during the Crusades, for example, there was antagonism between Muslims and Christians, so the church wanted to ban trade with Muslims, but Venice couldn’t and didn’t want to.” One of the troublesome church leaders demanded a church be built for him – the city obliged, but wisely built San Pedro for him out here, on the outskirts of the city, too far away for him to bother them.
We paddle on. Outside the Campo Arsenale, we duck down against the kayaks to squeeze under an incredibly low bridge behind two lion statues, a tunnel not even gondolas would be able to make it through. It leads us deeper into the undiscovered nooks and crannies of the labyrinthine city. “We can go to places you can only get to by boat: 80% of the canals are off limits to non-authorised motorised traffic. We can go anywhere,” says Rene, likening kayaking here to cycling in any other city.
We weave in and out of quiet canals, the buildings a jumble of architectural styles. Venice was an important trading centre for 1,000 years up until the 1500s or 1600s. Jewish, Greek, German, Armenian and other merchant populations lived in their own neighbourhoods, helping create the city’s cultural mix.
The view from the water means being able to take a close look at the grand facades of buildings designed to face the canal. “The old facades of the buildings and major palaces are all towards the canals,” says Rene. “In the old days, nobles used to travel by water and enter by water. Only poor people and servants would walk and go in from the land sides.” We also see the abandoned lower floors of buildings that have been lost to flooding
Rene calls out as we approach blind corners, announcing our presence and position to other “road” users. Still, it pays to be on the ball. “You don’t want to turn a corner and have a cargo ship coming straight at you. There’s no way they could stop, even if they did see you.”
We park our kayaks for lunch on the steps of the Campo di SS Giovanni e Paolo. As we restock our energy supplies with foccacia, fresh mozzarella, tomatoes and olives, an accordionist plays O Sole Mio (also known as the Just One Cornetto song). “Now we’re going to go down the Grand Canal and play with some gondolas,” says Rene as we set off again. Our route takes us behind the dauntingly leaning tower of Campo S Stefano. The builders realised it was leaning halfway through construction, but instead of starting again, they kept going, buttressing the tower at the back. Usually tourists only see the front, but from our canal perspective we get a close look at the unusual piece of engineering at the rear that keeps the tower standing. It must be difficult to get insurance on surrounding buildings.
We emerge on to the Grand Canal, just outside the Guggenheim Museum. There’s a real sense of history paddling up the Grand Canal of Venice. Gondolas, motor boats, cargo ships and the occasional ambulance or police boat are out on the water, but it feels more like a scene from the days of old, when the city was a busy trading centre.
We paddle towards the iconic Rialto Bridge, which spans the Grand Canal. It’s covered with tourists watching the daytime traffic who look at us with bemusement, their cameras at the ready to capture the unusual sight of kayakers on the Grand Canal. We must appear on hundreds of holiday snaps. Rene chooses this moment to tell us: “We had a woman capsize last night. Someone filmed it from the bridge – she’s expecting to be on YouTube soon.”
The next afternoon, we head out again from the Lido, just across the water from Venice, to explore deserted islands and abandoned buildings, before crossing another shipping lane into the city. After a light dinner of seafood antipasti, we begin a night tour of the city from the Jewish ghetto, paddling along peaceful canals as darkness falls.
The night in Venice has a different character altogether from the day. Historian Peter Ackroyd wrote in Venice: “The night and silence of Venice are profound … It has a quality of stillness that suits the mood of time preserved … The doorways seem darker than in any other city, lapped as they are by the black water. The little lamps still flicker before the statues of the Virgin on the corners of the calli. There are no drunkards roaming through the street into the early-morning hours, no raucous shouts. One contemporary acoustics engineer has measured the level of nocturnal sound in Venice at 32 decibels; the night of other cities is approximately 13 decibels louder. There is no “background’ noise.”
Occasionally we pass a gondola carrying a couple on a romantic cruise, but mostly we’re alone. I follow the purple glowstick on the back of Rene’s head as we float through empty canals. “At night, all the daily work traffic disappears,” says Rene. “A lot of the private boats disappear. There are very few taxis or gondolas. ”
Paddling at night feels like the Venice of old that Ackroyd described. “You don’t have the waves or the noise from the traffic,” Rene agrees. “I find it very nice, but some people find it spooky. Some of the darker canals at the back of the city, behind St Mark’s, have no illumination – light from the windows comes through the iron grills casting shadows on the walls.”
We arrive again at the Grand Canal. By day, it’s impressive, but by night it’s something else altogether: grand, romantic and incredibly atmospheric, orange and white lights reflecting off the black water, architectural wonders (Baroque, neo-Classical, Gothic…) to either side. We dodge the occasional vaporetto (water bus) but otherwise have it all to ourselves. It feels like we’re paddling through an ancient deserted half-flooded city.
The last stragglers of the day’s tourists watch us pass under the Rialto Bridge as we travel down the Grand Canal, past the City Hall. We stop to take in the famous, and unusually quiet Saint Mark’s Square at night, the lights from the square shining on the water. Across the canal is the grand illuminated dome of the Madonna della Salute.
Lights start to flicker behind the red and white tower of San Giorgio Maggiore, then metallic drum-rolls of thunder sound as a storm builds and the entire sky strobes with lightning, as if the scene wasn’t quite dramatic enough already.
Getting there
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