Venice's Grand Canal charms Italy's visitors

VENICE, Italy -- Some travel truths are self-evident. As the Great Wall of China is great indeed, so Venice's Grand Canal is grand beyond compare.\nFor two and a half miles, this watery Champs-Elysees winds down a fantastic architectural canyon lined with rococo palaces and Moorish mansions. It passes by splendid Baroque and Gothic churches adorned with the frescos and paintings of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, and here and there the everyday shops, markets and banks of this still very vibrant maritime metropolis.\nThe vaporetto, the colorful, inexpensive but crowded water bus, is Venice's rapid transit system. From its decks one can drink in centuries of glorious history, when Venice ruled the world of commerce, and still rub shoulders with a stockbroker bent over his morning newspaper while commuting to the business district near the Rialto bridge. This is Venice's waterlogged Wall Street.\nLord Byron swam the length of the canal after a liquid night on the town. One of his spurned mistresses threw herself into it. The husband of George Eliot, the British novelist (alias Mary Ann Evans), fell into it from a hotel window.\nThe legendary Venetian lover Giacomo Casanova courted contessas and courtesans in his private love boat before winding up in "The Leads," the attic prison in the Doge's Palace, from where he dramatically escaped through a hole in the roof.\nGilbert and Sullivan in "The Gondoliers" made merry light opera music with these ballad-belting boatmen, but Mark Twain couldn't abide "their constant caterwauling." \nThe straw-hatted troubadours rowing Venice's venerable and most pricey transportation used to warble a full repertoire of Neapolitan love songs. Now they are more inclined to post-Presley rock, Broadway show tunes "Man From La Mancha" resonates nicely off the wooden Accademia bridge _ and have been known to substitute "O Danny Boy" for "O Sole Mio" when Irish and American passengers recline on their Turkish bordello-style upholstery. But be forewarned: A ride in a gondola will cost a lot more than a vaporetto $75 for 50 minutes, compared to just a few dollars a ticket.\nTied up to colorfully striped barber poles along the canal, the locally built, highly lacquered, black gondolas, with their high steel prows suggesting a seahorse, prance and rear on the tide like a corral of wild stallions.\nFruit and vegetable boats ply their trade near Ca' Rezzonico, the palazzo where Robert Browning polished poetic gems like the lines engraved in a plaque on the moss-draped wall:\n"Open my heart and you will see, Graven inside of it, Italy."\n"This best of all noble waterways," as Henry James wrote of the Grand Canal, "begins in glory" at the magnificent octagonal church of Santa Maria della Salute and "ends in abasement at the railway station," an eyesore exceeded in ugliness only by the nearby parking garage.\nVaporetti down the Grand Canal seem to be patronized at all hours by knowledgeable, back-packing college students from almost anywhere, eager to point out to you the house where Henry James labored over "The Aspen Papers" or Thomas Mann wrote "Death In Venice" or Marcel Proust argued with his dear mother for 17 pages in "The Sweet Cheat Gone."\nThe Grand Canal is 76 yards at its widest and 13 feet at its deepest stretch, near the Rialto bridge. It is never less than 40 yards wide and maintains an average depth of 9 feet. On each bank loom grand palaces with pink- and gold-tinted facades that are variously ornate with tall, arched windows, Gothic and Moorish cornices and columns. Many are green-stained from the lapping waters, and sadly blotched and bruised by time, the wind and weather.\nAs the vaparetto zigzags its way, one notices here and there a lovely garden, an odorous fish market, a copper-domed church flanked by a Romanesque bell tower, a cozy pensione with laundry fluttering from window poles, then two enormous but breathtakingly beautiful buildings built as warehouses for German merchants and Turkish imports that have since been converted, respectively, into the main post office and a natural history museum.\nOn any given day, life and death pass down the Grand Canal: religious processions, carnival pageants, men and ladies gondola regattas, dinner boats and party boats twinkling with Japanese lanterns, sleek launches zooming celebrities and politicians to posh hotels, merchant barges loaded with TV sets, Pepsi-Cola and new carpeting for a refurbished palazzo; garbage scows towing a cloud of screaming gulls and fishing boats with furled nets bringing mussels, cuttlefish and delicious tiny clams from the Adriatic to dockside restaurants.\nThe same tide can carry a gala gondola wedding barge with a pulsating rock band or a funeral cortege bound for the graveyard isle of San Michele, the death boat draped in black and gold, heaped with flowers and followed by a slow-rowing gondola entourage of mourners, clutching black hats or veils against the wind off the lagoon.\nVenice is laced together by some 450 bridges, but only three cross the canal: first the simple arched Ponte dell 'Accademia leading to the Accademia Gallery, that magnificent temple of Venetian art; next the Rialto, crowded with tiny shops and stalls and, at the end of the final reach, the heavily traversed Scalzi bridge near the railroad terminal. Like John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, James McNeil Whistler and Winston Churchill, artists still set up their easels on or near these spans, while visitors armed with camcorders and digital cameras seem to favor the only traffic light along the canal, hanging where a smaller canal intersects.\nIn price or priceless wonders to behold, no sightseeing bus anywhere can match the vaporetto.