Cindy steps out the doors of the Santa Lucia railway terminal in Venice, and what does she see?

The Grand Canal, right over there.  Great introduction to the city.

Bill has done this before, but he's happy to be back.  He's not too fond of the Calvin Klein billboard, though.  What's up with that?

Never mind.  Just look: Venezia.  The most beautiful wreck of a city in the world.

That's a vaporetto pier over there.  We need to go buy a ticket to ride -- a vaporetto, you see, is the Venice city bus.

Looking back at the railroad terminal.

Waiting for the vaporetto.  And look who Patty has run into -- the woman with the backpack is Kathy, one of Patty's new acquaintances from Florence.  Kathy is from New Zealand and she's in Italy to study mosaic design.

Patty is pleased to see our bus has arrived.

Cindy and Patty and Bill and Kathy and about 100 other tourists crowded aboard the poor, overloaded vaporetto and headed off down the Grand Canal toward Piazza San Marco (St. Mark's Square), the heart of Venice.

Bill was squeezed behind the pilot house.

The glory days of Venice lasted quite a while -- the 12th to 18th centuries -- and during that time the world's richest merchants tried to outdo each other building fabulous structures facing the Grand Canal.

Bill takes it all in.

Fabulous palazzo after palazzo.

Look, up ahead!  It's the Rialto Bridge.

And under those red awnings is what looks like a very nice restaurant.  I wonder if we might come back here?

The Rialto approaches.  I hear it's filled with shops.  I wonder if we might come back here too?

Vaporetto and gondolas pass beneath the Rialto.  I wonder how many movie theaters in the USA were named for this thing?

This is the Ponte dell' Accademia, a wooden bridge across the Grand Canal.

Just look at all the fancy old homes with first floors under water. 

Look Ma, tourists!

See way off in the distance the famous Campanile bell tower that presides over Piazza San Marco?  Bill says we need to stay on the vaporetto until we get there.

Stupid Bill.  That wasn't the Campanile of San Marco.  That was something that just looks like it from a distance.  Besides, according to the very nice map in Bill's Fodor's guidebook, the name of the stop we're looking for is Vallaresso.  Turns out they'd renamed it San Marco.  So we missed the vaporetto stop we wanted and had to ride down the canal to the next one.  No problem though.  We didn't go too far out of our way and the walk back up to San Marco Piazza was very nice.  Here we are crossing a bridge overlooking the Grand Canal and lots of gondolas just waiting to take tourists for a ride.

Piazza San Marco at last with the real Campanile in the background.