The Sunday I Never Made It to Murano
July 19, 2026
The list said Murano, glass factories, back streets. My legs said something else entirely. So I stayed on the mainland with the actual Venetians and drew all day instead.
My last full morning in Venice, and this time the boat did not leave without me. After Sunday, when I let the boat sail off while I sat on the edge of the bed with one shoe on, I was not about to waste the last one. Out the door in the Mestre dark, over on the early train, and standing at the Rialto by half past five with the city still asleep. The gondolas were tucked up under their blue covers like a row of shoes by a door, one little water taxi nosing the pilings, and behind them the bridge was going pink before anyone else was awake to see it.
The plan, written in my own hand weeks ago, said climb the Fondaco dei Tedeschi for the rooftop view. The Fondaco is the old German merchants’ warehouse right at the foot of the bridge, trading since the 1200s, and for years you could go up the top for the best look down the Grand Canal. Except it has been shut for over a year now, terrace and all, with no sign it is coming back. So I did the obvious thing and climbed the Rialto itself instead. Same water, cheaper ticket. The canal ran off into a soft pink morning, the palaces leaning over their own reflections, and I had the top of the bridge to myself.
From there I let myself get lost, which in Venice takes about four minutes. Somewhere in Cannaregio a lane opened onto a small canal and a church I did not know, wrapped top to bottom in pale marble like a jewellery box left out in the weather. This is Santa Maria dei Miracoli, built in the 1480s by Pietro Lombardo, who was architect, sculptor and site foreman all in one, working with his own sons. The whole front is thin slabs of coloured stone framed in carving, and it sat there in the grey light being quietly perfect while a delivery boat idled past. I stood on the little humpbacked bridge longer than I meant to.
By seven I was in Piazza San Marco, and here is the thing nobody tells you: get there early enough and the biggest drawing room in Europe is empty. No queues, no selfie sticks, nobody flogging plastic gondolas. Just the campanile going straight up into a flat grey sky, a lone iron lamp post, and the paving stretching away wet and clean. I have seen that square so thick with people you could not cross it. At seven in the morning it belongs to the pigeons and one Australian standing in the middle of it feeling like she has got away with something.
On the way back to the boat something in a window stopped me dead. A wire sculpture behind glass, a whole little scene made of bent rod and cut black metal: two whales hanging in mid air, a small sailing ship up in one corner, a crescent moon perched at the top of a ladder that went nowhere. The whales were just flat black shapes, no detail at all, and they read completely as whales purely from the way they hung. That is the exact thing this trip keeps hammering into me. Movement without the subject spelled out. Take everything away and leave only the shape that moves. I photographed it through the reflection and walked off with it rattling round in my head.
Then Venice did the other thing it does best. The sky went from grey to serious and the rain came straight down, and every narrow calle turned into a mirror laid flat on the ground. A figure went ahead of me under a black umbrella, doubled perfectly in the wet stone, the whole lane shining. A minute later a woman in a pink coat walked two small dogs through it all, both stepping high and unimpressed the way little dogs are about weather. I stood in a doorway grinning. Reflections and dogs in one wet lane. You could not order a better last morning if you tried.
The last thing I photographed in Venice was not grand at all. Down by the water, where a step went green and slick, a beetle sat on a wet stone catching what little light there was, its back all hammered copper and green like something a jeweller made and lost. I crouched there in the drizzle a good while, camera almost on the ground, while the magnificent version of Venice carried on somewhere over my shoulder. Six days of domes and canals and Biennale pavilions, and I leave holding a beetle the size of my thumbnail. That is usually how it goes with me. Turin tomorrow, and a whole new set of streets to get lost in. More soon.
The list said Murano, glass factories, back streets. My legs said something else entirely. So I stayed on the mainland with the actual Venetians and drew all day instead.
Before Redentore’s fireworks fill Venice, an artist walks the empty Grand Canal and Castello’s quiet campos at dawn, sketching a rowing boatman, a hidden Baroque church, and a dog asleep in a moored boat.
Before dawn, Venice belongs to nobody. A solo walk from the Grand Canal to colour-drenched Burano, caught between a sudden lagoon shower and a single white brushstroke that said everything the photographer had been chasing all week.