Tag: venice

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Venice #50newplaces2026

So I did something mad, I did a day trip to Venice.

Actually as day trips go to Venice, I have done a fair few, but this time was the first day trip to Venice from the UK. I have been to Venice before.

My first visit to Venice was way back in 1982 whilst on a Scout Camp to Slovenia in Yugoslavia. I also went there in 1985 when we did another camp to Yugoslavia. That was a three coach drive.

My next visit was when I stayed with a friend in Padua. I think this was the summer of 1995. I visited again a number of times in the late 1990s, usually during February to coincide with carnival. Then I was catching the train from Padua to Venice.

It was 1999 (or possibly 1998) that I did my last trip to Venice. So, it had been at least twenty five years since I was last in Venice and also the last time I had been in Italy.

What I love about Venice is that it is one of those places which every time you turn a corner or cross a bridge you feel immersed into the fabric of the city. There are obviously no cars or roads (yes there are canals), but the streets are narrow and I love the almost random squares that appear out of nowhere.

One of the advantages of going off-season is that the place is a lot less crowded than at the height of carnival or in the heat of the summer. I was very lucky with the weather, it rained the day before, and the day after, on the day I was there I had sun and blue skies. I did a few tourist things, but what I really wanted was just to walk around and explore the city.

I had a fantastic lunch for €17 at a trattoria, sitting outside on the “pavement” watching the world go by.

You know when you’ve had a good day, when you don’t want to leave.

I might go again, but I won’t leave it twenty five years this time.

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Buongiorno Italia

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Back in the mid to late 1990s I visited Italy quite a bit, usually going twice a year, once for the carnival and once in the summer. I initially would take my 35mm SLR film camera, but in later years replaced this with the first HP PhotoSmart Camera. These images are from my 35mm camera, which were developed and then scanned into the computer.

On many of those visits I went to Venice, but I have very few photographs of that place from my 35mm collection, though I have some digital ones from the PhotoSmart camera. I really liked Venice and though it was full of tourists, one of the advantages of having a friend who was  a local, was finding those really nice places for coffee, cake and pasta, that were frequented by locals. So yes you could spend €4 for a coffee in St Marks Square, the places we went to, you paid €1 for an espresso.  This photograph is one of the Grand Canal.

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The local restaurant in Venice we went to, was more of a cafe then a restaurant, but served some delicious food, the seafood pasta I had was great with clams, prawns, squid and lobster.

Another place in the area I visited was Verona.

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This is Piazza Bra in the heart of Verona.

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This is the Arena di Verona, which is a Roman amphitheatre in Piazza Bra in Verona. Back in Roman times, nearly 30,000 people could sit inside, despite its age, today 15,000 people can sit inside.

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The one place where I spent most of my time when visiting Italy was Padua.

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An early morning walk with the mist slow rising before the hot summer day.

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Interestingly from a technical perspective, the prints from those trips are still with me (in a box) however the original digital images seemed to have gone missing, they were probably backed up to a series of floppy disks that I discarded many years ago when moving house (this was in the days before cloud storage became ubiquitous and a quick and easy way to backup and store digital photographs). What I do remember from those images was how awful the quality was, 0.3MP or similar if I recall correctly.