Many people claim Venice in winter is the real Venice.
Since the 1950s, when people fled to the mainland in search of jobs and houses with roofs that didn t leak, the population has dwindled to just over 100,000. With this small of a community comes a slow, even sleepy pace, which is obliterated in the summer, in the press and pull of visitors. Venetians are very open people. They like to go out, to meet people from all over the world, mostly because of their seafaring history, when Venice served as the doorway between the East and the West, and Venetians became a people made up of the world s people. It s hard to see this openness in the summer, because the sheer number of visitors forces them to retreat to locals-only places.