CITY GUIDE GO WITH THE FLOW

Discover Venice’s long-held culinary and artisan traditions, doggedly preserved by a cast of characters, from vineyard-owners to glassblowers, even as overtourism threatens to eclipse ancient ways of life on the lagoon

- Julia Buckley

From the top of the bell tower at San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice looks different. Hidden are the bridges straddling cutesy canals. Instead, all I see is a single, man-made mass, squeezed by the water all around. Terracotta roofs play Tetris with the skyline; hangar-sized churches erupt upward; bell towers thrust towards the sky.

Hidden, also, are the outré waterside mansions whose pastel marbled, hand-sculpted facades were once signifiers of wealth and status—the Porsches of the past. Hidden is the elegant squiggle of the Grand Canal. Hidden, even, is St Mark’s Square, its Byzantine basilica obscured by the candy pink Doge’s Palace. Also gone are the 30 million tourists who flood this city of 50,000 every year. Up here, humankind is negligible.

From on high, Venice is all about the shimmering, shapeshifting lagoon: flashing silver in the sun near the Lido; a deep blue along the Giudecca Canal as a vaporetto (water bus) chugs silently along; a petrol-sheened pink near Murano as the sun sinks.

Life for Venetians has always revolved around the water—ever since the fifth century, when inhabitants of nearby Altino, fleeing enemy invaders, took to their boats and settled on the mudflats offshore. Today, although that water can feel designed for tourists—gondolas sliding up and down canals, the photogenic fish market at Rialto—the lagoon is still the city’s pulse.