Part Three

We awake early in the morning only to find it's not so early in the morning as I'd forgotten to change the time to +1 hour GMT on my mobile phone and it's in fact 10am, not 9am. So after berating myself for being such a dingbat we enjoy a comprehensive continental breakfast at the hotel before heading out to see what daytime in Venice holds for us.

We've been incredibly lucky with the weather - it's sunny with barely a cloud in the sky, and so don't have to worry about buying wellies to combat any potential flooding. Only three weeks previous I noticed pictures in a celeb magazine of Julia Roberts wandering around in St Marks' Square ankle-deep in water.

As we walk around the back streets, soaking up the atmosphere in a meandering way (surely the best way to enjoy the city), I start to understand the house numbering system in Venice. If only I'd have read the Rough Guide more closely then our life would have been made significantly easier when trying to locate our hotel last night. Although there are numerous roads and alleyways all named differently, there's only one universal number for a house, building or shop. So in fact there's only one number 10 in the entire city and so on. It's not quite as simple as that though as one side of the street might be numbered in the five hundreds, but the opposite houses might be in the high one thousands. Even so, once you begin to walk extensively around things do start to make a bit of sense regardless of the apparent randomness of the numbering. Later on we were able to find a restaurant mentioned in the Rough Guide in a general area by following numbers through streets.

Also, things are made a bit easier by there being quite a few signposts pointing you in the general direction of the nearest river bus station, bridge across the Grand Canal, or various other important landmarks. Although these signs (generally yellow and twenty feet off the ground on the side of a building) are not on every corner, they point you in the general direction of your destination and another should pop before being totally lost and enveloped in the maze.

Being a Saturday, all the small shops are open, markets running and bars open. All the shops are excellent for browsing, many dedicated solely to selling masks for classical Venetian balls ranging from the elegant basic Amadeus style to the garish glitter and infested. Actually pretty much all the shops are tiny and jostling for space among the space-deprived streets. Some of the bars and cafes seem to have no room whatsoever and seating for only a couple of people. Great for the summer when you can soak up the weather in a courtyard, but they do provide some lovely intimate atmosphere for people watching inside.

One thing is very clear - Venice feels like an absolutely safe city, and to be frank it'd have to be. Some Italian cities are notorious for bag snatchers and the like, but by all accounts Venice has been thoroughly cleaned up. If it weren't, the tourist trade would be completely stagnant as it's just not possible to walk around without ending up down some extremely thin, darkened and deserted alleyway. Anywhere else and I'd feel very intimidated, yet here we don't give it a second thought and it's very refreshing, and we regularly saw unaccompanied women walking through the streets at night, which is just how it should be. It's likely that things change a bit during the summer months with the increased tourist population, but to be honest I now could not think of a more perfect time to visit Venice.