Venetian Vehicles

As long as I am on the subject of vehicles, I thought that a quick survey of Venetian vehicles might be interesting. The most common means of transportation in Venice is some kind of boat. First, I will talk about the old fashioned way--the gondola, complete with gondelier, dressed in the traditional stripped jersey and white straw hat. Most of the gondolas are quite fancy, with carpets, and fancy furniture. Some even have musical entertainment, singing or accordian.
Since the streets are mostly pedestrian only, the business of the city is conducted by boat. There are delivery boats, beer delivery boats and garbage boats. There are vapparettos, the equivilent of busses, and water taxis.



The main drag is the Grand Canal. There are secondary canals and smaller feeder canals. Some of them are only wide enough for two gondolas to pass each other. We saw a few traffic jams in the little canals, and boats had to back up to let someone get by. There doesn't seem to be any type of traffic regulation on the Grand Canal--no speed limit, no stop lights, no "rules of the canal." It gets comical. Traffic is slow, the slowest boats are the gondolas, because they are powered by the human gondolier. I guess that the taxis are the fastest. I don't know for sure, because we stuck to the vaparetto.
Of course, I can't forget the biggest vehicle we traveled in--the Crystal Symphony.

The "taxi stand" next to the Rialto bridge.

The "delivery boat" complete with a German Shepard!