Travelling Fletchers

Our last day in Venice didn’t quite start as peacefully as the one before. When travelling, I often get a bit confused with time zones, and I hadn’t yet manually changed my watch. To keep things simple, I’d also left my phone on airplane mode. You can imagine David’s surprise when I suddenly shot out of bed, muttering frantically that we had to leave in twenty minutes or so!

Thankfully, David was much more sensible than me. He had already switched his phone over and calmly reminded me that we actually still had plenty of time. My confusion came from a perfect storm of events: the clocks had gone forward overnight both at home and in Italy, and my brain was busy adding two hours to my watch instead of one. I also hadn’t realised that a digital watch still updates itself even if the phone is in airplane mode. Once the panic subsided and the time maths finally settled, I realised we weren’t in a race against the clock after all.

​Today was a classic case of needing to be somewhere on time, having plenty of time, and yet somehow feeling like we had none at all. We strolled through Castello and onwards toward St Mark’s Square, noticing the volume of people increasing with every block we covered. Turning off through an alleyway, it became immediately evident where the tourist areas were.

St Mark’s Square was a different world today; there were more people in it than we had seen just two days before. We wondered if more people had arrived on a cruise ship, for the start of the school holidays, or perhaps as part of the growing popularity of the “extreme day trip.”

As we navigated the crowds, we noticed something else: many people were carrying palm and olive branches. It turns out today is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. In Italy the tradition is to take the branches to the local churches for them to be blessed, and then to keep them in the home for the rest of the year as a sign of peace. Seeing so many people clutching these little symbols of greenery as they walked through the ancient, stony square added a lovely, traditional layer to our final morning.

It was a striking final image to take with us – the vibrant local tradition holding its own against the rush of the modern crowds. As we headed for our final journey out of the city, we left the “green house” and the quiet call of Castello behind, carrying with us the memory of a Venice that is as much about quiet vineyards and glistening glass as it is about historic squares and ticking clocks.