✿     Piazza San Marco is the city's main public square and contains its most famous buildings such as St Mark's Basilica and the Doge's Palace. Napoleon called it 'the world's most beautiful drawing room'. Piazza San Marco is in the heart of Venice. Piazza San Marco, often known in English as St Mark's Square, is the principal public square of Venice, Italy, where it is generally known just as la Piazza. All other urban spaces in the city are called campi. The Piazzetta is an extension of the Piazza towards San Marco basin in its south east corner.

✿     The gondolier is a big part of Venetian culture. You will see them all over Venice : in the summer dressed in the easily recognisable straw boater with jaunty ribbon and the stripy vest; in winter not quite so colourful as, along with most other Italian people, they cover up in fleeces at the first sign of a cool breeze. The first mention ever of an Italian gondola was in Venice in 1094 and, of course, there have been gondoliers as long as there have been gondolas - so it's one of the oldest professions in the world. Until August 2010, there had never been a single woman gondolier in Venice. The licence had always been passed down male family members and the physical strength needed was thought to be too much for any woman. She is the only woman ever to have completed the rigorous training and was given her licence despite reservations not only from the Gondoliers' Guild, but from her father who commented that he was not sure whether it was a 'suitable profession'. But the age of chauvinism is not dead amongst gondoliers. Giorgia is only allowed to drive gondolas as a stand-in for a fellow male gondolier.

✿     After a long absence, the Carnival returned in 1979. The Government decided to bring back the history and culture of Venice, and sought to use the traditional Carnival as the centerpiece of its efforts. The redevelopment of the masks began as the pursuit of some Venetian college students for the tourist trade. Since then, approximately 3 million visitors come to Venice every year for the Carnival.

✿     Venice Carnival The Venice Carnival became extremely popular during the eighteenth century, when aristocrats from all over the world would attend the annual festival. The royal families and nobility of other neighbouring countries would also come and dress up with elaborate masks and costumes. For centuries, it was one of the only ways the citizens could escape from the control of the Venetian government. When Napoleon invaded Venice, the Carnival was banned for fear of the citizens conspiring against the French troops. The festival was not to come back officially until the Italian government decided to promote the Venetian culture and history in 1979. The banks of the Grand Canal are lined with more than 170 buildings, most of which date from the 13th to the 18th century, and demonstrate the welfare and art created by the Republic of Venice. The noble Venetian families faced huge expenses to show off their richness in suitable palazzos; this contest reveals the citizens' pride and the deep bond with the lagoon. Amongst the many are the Palazzi Barbaro, Ca' Rezzonico, Ca' d'Oro, Palazzo Dario, Ca' Foscari, Palazzo Barbarigo and to Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, housing the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The churches along the canal include the basilica of Santa Maria della Salute. Centuries-old traditions, such as the Historical Regatta, are perpetuated every year along the Canal. Because most of the city's traffic goes along the Canal rather than across it, only one bridge crossed the canal until the 19th century, the Rialto Bridge. There are currently three more bridges, the Ponte degli Scalzi, the Ponte dell'Accademia, and the controversial Ponte della Costituzione from 2008, designed by Santiago Calatrava, connecting the train station to Piazzale Roma, one of the few places in Venice where buses and cars can enter. As was usual in the past, people can still take a ferry ride across the canal at several points by standing up on the deck of a simple gondola called a traghetto, although this service is less common than even a decade ago. Most of the palaces emerge from water without pavement. Consequently, one can only tour past the fronts of the buildings on the grand canal by boat.

✿     February 25, 2020 Tara Isabella Burton In Venice, where I am attending the festival known as Carnevale, the streets swarm with would-be revelers, and it is impossible to see out of the windows at Café Florian on Piazza San Marco for all of the Instagram photographers who stand outside them, taking pictures of costumed masqueraders, rapping on the glass to get their attention or to get that perfect shot. It's easy to forget, amid all the chaos, that this holiday is of course a religious one: the two or so weeks before Fat Tuesday (or Mardi Gras, as it is often known). And then Ash Wednesday: the beginning of the penitential season of Lent. Carnevale is a period of excess before fasting, of chaos before quietude. The old bonds fostered by a church or synagogue or mosque — the official rites of passage as well as the more social sides of our communities of faith — are increasingly weakening. But in an age of spiritual uncertainty, more and more of us are finding our spiritual 'tribes' within these existing religious traditions, be they pagan nature worship or medieval Catholicism. For me, it was Carnevale. A few years before I returned to conscious Christianity, I started attending the Carnevale here on the recommendation of a close friend I knew through the international vintage clothing scene. About 200 or so people, mostly Italian and French with a smattering of Germans and Americans, came annually not to attend the publicly sanctioned parties of Carnevale, which can run easily up to 1,000 euros per ticket, but to attend smaller private parties at people's homes or expressly rented palazzos. These parties are not commercial propositions — the entry fee generally just about covers the cost of catering staff and copious amounts of prosecco — but, rather, gatherings of like-minded friends: people whose love of history, of beauty, of historical costuming or poetic nostalgia or dressing up or theatricality brings them back, every year, into the group that has become known as 'the family.'

✿     Pierrot is a stock character of pantomime and commedia dell'arte whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne; the name is a diminutive of Pierre (Peter), via the suffix -ot. His character in contemporary popular culture—in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall—is that of the sad clown, pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse with large buttons and wide white pantaloons. Sometimes he appears with a frilled collaret and a hat, usually with a close-fitting crown and wide round brim, more rarely with a conical shape like a dunce's cap. But most frequently, since his reincarnation under Jean-Gaspard Deburau, he wears neither collar nor hat, only a black skullcap. The defining characteristic of Pierrot is his naïveté: he is seen as a fool, often the butt of pranks, yet nonetheless trusting. It was a generally buffoonish Pierrot that held the European stage for the first two centuries of his history. And yet early signs of a respectful, even sympathetic attitude toward the character appeared in the plays of Jean-François Regnard and in the paintings of Antoine Watteau, an attitude that would deepen in the nineteenth century, after the Romantics claimed the figure as their own. For Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, Pierrot was not a fool but an avatar of the post-Revolutionary People, struggling, sometimes tragically, to secure a place in the bourgeois world

✿     The Vaporetto is the only real public transport in Venice. It is a passenger ship, which is similar to a bus used in other places. There are about 20 water-bus-lines in Venice. The ferries are used within the island of Venice. But they also connect the main island with other islands and Venice with the mainland. Some Vaporetto lines go in both directions, other lines run in a kind of roundabout. As a tourist you should be careful not to go in the wrong direction. At larger stops there are several piers side by side. The ferries operate where are no roads, but wide channels. In summer you often have to wait long to get on a crowded ship. In winter you often get a seat by the window. The ships are heated in winter, as a rule there is no toilet on the vaporetto. You can also sit outside. In smaller ships you will find about 50 seats. The size of the water buses in Venice is therefore comparable to a regular bus, but there is more standing room. On some lines you can also find larger ferries, some of them are also big car ferries. These also have a toilet. High waves are rare in the well-protected lagoon of Venice, but other ships sometimes produce waves. Especially when standing you should watch out. There are hardly any ferries to Mestre on the mainland because there is a bridge for buses, cars and trains. Vaporetto means translated steamer. The plural is vaporetti and not, as many tourists believe, vaporettos. The Vaporetti run until late in the evening. There are even three night lines.