The Big Getaway - Part four - Venice, Verona, & Lake Garda

Not being that well travelled my expectations of Venice were based entirely on what I'd read and the odd Cornetto advert. I expected the streets to have narrow footpaths with lots of flooded roads in between. Well, canals I suppose, but shallow ones. I expected to have to pay an Italian man to punt me around in a flat bottomed gondola. Hence it came a a bit of a surprise to find Venice was no different from any other city really. The architecture was spectacular, and yes there were canals but not so many as you might expect, and you could walk a long way without seeing one. Other than that it wasn't so very different from say Copenhagen, or Brugges.

Venice is reached by water bus. This is basically a boat which operates like a bus. Not an ordinary bus, granted, but an Italian Bus, so naturally there are no stablest, and it has no health and safety regulations.

Some years back I had a very pleasant evening cruise on a boat on the River Ouse at York, with a bar on board and a meal at a riverside restaurant. Immediately we left the dockside there were safety announcements, with advice giving the location of life jackets, fire extinguishers and evacuation procedures. All this on a river you could probably stand up in.

In Venice there were no such safety procedures. In fact on a river bus which held probably 200 passengers, the only staff I saw was the guy who controlled the gangplank. Logically there must have been a captain in charge of the engine and steering, but he remain anonymous. You simply got on and off like a bus, although no one ever checked you ticket.

Italian buses run largely on trust, with the threat that if an inspector gets on board you will get a hefty fine. We never saw an inspector. The system works on a cashless basis, were by you have to walk probably further than your intended journey to a "tobbachi" which is a newsagent cum tobacconist which is closed for Siesta. When they eventually re-open they sell you a bus ticket, which in our case was a day rover ticket allowing us to travel on the water buses as well. You then walk back to the bus stop and wait for a bus on which you stand all the way to your intended destination. No one else, it seems, buys a ticket, which explains why you, as the only fare paying passenger pay 23 Euros. You validate your overpriced ticket by stamping it in the ticket machine on board the bus or boat. The bus or boat is driven by a frustrated wannabe racing driver, and in both cases neither have any mechanical sympathy or indeed any knowledge of what a clutch is, or what it dos. At one point on the river taxi I swear I saw the gearbox floating alongside us, such was the ferocity of the gear change.

Verona was a beautiful city, and a place I would rather like to revisit when they have got rid of all the tourists. It is built up on the ruins and remains of the old town, such that cellars of modern buildings are the old buildings beneath, so there is living archeology going on. We visited Juliet's house (of Romeo and Juliet fame) and were only slightly disappointed to fin d the whole thing was fake. Shakespeare never visited Italy, effectively making up the whole story loosely based on some facts he had heard, presumably in the pub. The Italians, keen to cash in on the tourist pound, found a house owned by a family with a similar name, added a balcony and shoved in a statue of Juliet based on what we thought she ought to have looked like and have been reeling in the Euros ever since. Yes, it's s cynical as that - there was never a balcony for Juliet to hang about on waiting for Romeo, so they bolted one on just to satisfy Shakespeare's whim.

Lake Garda has to be this area of Italy's jewel in the crown. Lido de Jesolo is nice, but artificiality so. Lake Garda is what the English Lake District would be if we had control of the weather. It has a beautiful lake, surrounded by stunning mountain ranges and clear blue cloudless skies with unrelenting sunshine. It peaked at 44 degrees the day we visited, meaning ice creams even at 3 Euros a pop were essential. A small ice cream for 3 Euros seemed extravagant, however the small ice cream seemed to be about a litre, balanced on a cone. I did see one guy trying to eat a large cone, but I presume he was there for a week rather than just a day trip.

We took a boat trip on the lake in which an Italian man spoke English in a Manwell Fawlty Towers unrecognisable manner pointing out the sights, one of which was hot water springs which heated the lake, making it a very popular holiday destination both with the locals and foreigners alike.

Whilst I didn't have the chance I would imagine Lake Garda to be a very nice place to watch the sun go down whilst sampling the local wines and food, although you'd need a thick wallet to stay there any length of time.