Click on the lists below that describe and illustrate our travels and adventures. Request free brochures email us with questions or for quotes on a customized trips. Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of flood and ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily intercourse, must have been done away with. The streets of the city would have been widened, its networks of canals filled up, and all the peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice.
Nobody arrives in Venice and sees the city for the first time.
Depicted and described so often that its image has become part of the European collective consciousness, Venice can initially create the slightly anticlimactic feeling that everything looks exactly as it should. The water-lapped palaces along the Canal Grande are just as the brochure photographs made them out to be, Piazza San Marco does indeed look as perfect as a film set, and the panorama across the water from the Palazzo Ducale is precisely as Canaletto painted it. The sense of familiarity soon fades, however, as details of the scene begin to catch the attention - a strange carving high on a wall, a boat being manoeuvred round an impossible corner, a window through which a painted ceiling can be seen. Recommended Books about Venice Order CD's with these images and hundreds more All images on these pages are Copyright 1995-2001, Cascoly Software, or otherwise licensed for use on this site. All Cascoly images are available for other uses, usually at no charge other than a credit or web link - please send email for further information.