Throwing stones at glass bridges...

Venetians are notoriously suspicious of change, and doubly so of anything that's suppose to improve their lives here in the city. Venice is gorgeous, but it's absolutely not an easy city to live in full time, and Venetians have heard such promises before. That doesn't mean that they can't be pleasantly surprised... It just means that they take a lot of convincing, and they tend to find talk really cheap.

Case in point, the Glass Bridge (from "Viator's odd Chronicles of Venice") over the Grand Canal.

For a good chunk of Venetian history, there wasn't any bridge over the Canal Grande at all. Then, during the Middle Ages, they constructed a wooden one at the commercial center of town (as you can see in Carpaccio's famous painting The Miracle of the True Cross at the Rialto) and when that fell down, they eventually built a stone one (which is the famous Rialto bridge that you can see today, above left).

And that was the only bridge across the Grand Canal from the sixteenth until the nineteenth century, when two more would be built (one at the train station, and another at the Accademia museum).

That is, until today... They are now building a fourth bridge across the Grand Canal, to link the train station on one side with the bus depot on the other. Like you can see here, most of the Venetians I've talked to seem very skeptical that this bridge will turn out to be anything other than an enormous failure and a tremendous waste of money.

But, like I said, that's nothing new... They're always so optimistic! :-)

Only time will tell who's right... (And Venetians have always typically believed that time will inevitably be on their side eventually!)

Categories: Venice