Kayaking in Venice

Most visitors to Venice experience the famed canals in a gondola. That is, when they’re not walking along the canals, crossing bridges over the canals, or having dinner at a canalside table. But David Kocieniewski wanted a more authentic experience, so he and his girlfriend spent some days paddling the canals of Venice in their own kayak, an experience he then wrote about for the New York Times.

They helped fleeing Romans evade Attila the Hun and held a glittering city aloft for more than 1,500 years. But the wooden pilings rising out of the Grand Canal in Venice are so decayed that as we clung to them one afternoon it wasn’t at all clear whether they would be sturdy enough to prevent us from capsizing into its murky waters.

It was rush hour in Venice, so the canal’s usual tumult of crosscurrents and tides was churning with the wake of water taxis, ferries and delivery boats. Each volley of waves slapped against the side of the inflatable kayak we were using to cross Italy’s most storied waterway; the pilings were our best chance to avoid being immersed in it.

This probably wasn’t quite what my girlfriend, Audrey Lynn Gray, had in mind when we first started thinking about a trip to Venice…But as novice canoers, we were intrigued by the thought of exploring the waterways ourselves…

And for a traveler seeking a sense of place, there is little to compare with the sensation of drifting through the same waters as Renaissance princes, past 17th-century palazzi with mollusks embedded along the waterline, while a parade of delivery boats putt by and gondoliers shout “Oye!” as they approach a blind turn to warn other boaters they’re tilting around the corner.

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