She is a charming lady walking on high stilts. She is timeless and when meeting her for the first time the eyes strive to believe so much beauty can exist, all senses start questioning if it is real and the soul is full.
She is a carnival of cultures and her ancestors came from any land and sea on Earth.
She loves the sea more than anything else and she marries it every year. That's why sea is everywhere: around, below and sometimes above. She welcomes it when wind and high tide decide it's time and she breaths the salt from the breeze.
Her view is water and sky blurring in the horizon line.
She is alone but close enough to be seen by everybody: the mainland is stitched with a long tread raising from the sea, to stress the transition between reality and dream.
She is not a city, she is a concept. The best that the nature and humans could shape together: beauty, engineering and culture.
The stilts are fossils of trunks that in the salty water became stone. Thousands of them supporting a city: an heritage giant on toothpicks.
Since it was born from more than 100 islands, the urban pattern is still divided by canals and connected by bridges.
Like the melody of a sonata, walking around is an up and down, a wave of notes of a melody played day and night.
The houses are extended in height and are narrow like the passages to reach them. There are no streets, no squares, no bikes and cars. Instead you will find "calli", "campi" and people walking only: citizens walking very fast, almost running and tourists walking slowly with their heads up and mouths open. Different speeds, different languages and cultures, both attracted by the same inevitable lure.
It is an open-air museum, welcoming the strangers from any corner of the planet.
It is not by chance that priceless treasures are kept there, but the treasure chest is the real masterpiece. Beauty inspires and generates beauty, whether it is on canvas, plaster, stone, iron or bricks.
Residents are in love and it is the only way to survive: high water, bitter cold in winter, hot weather in summer, frozen blowing wind, humidity in the bones and moist on the walls. In return they have the gem of the Mediterranean sea to leave in. They learn architecture by getting a coffee, they learn art by going for grocery and they breath history at any corner.
Creativity there is inspired by legends, by a magnificent past and by nature, after being exposed for hundreds of years to any country in the world. Most of the nations on Earth bought or sold goods there. Almost any culture in the world had the privilege to step on the rich soil of the island on stilts. Visitors left there something and took something else back. That's why when living in the city the feeling of inhaling the whole world is so strong.
A place that welcomes the stranger learns differences and works them out to get the best out of them.
That's why Venice is the most beautiful city in the all world.
Comments