By Anita Draycott

Enjoy the local morning market at the Rialto Bridge where you can bargain for Carnevale masks, leather goods and admire the catch the day. Then allow yourself to get lost in the maze of narrow passageways, bridges and canals in this oldest part of town.

Keep in mind as you stroll around Venice’s 400 bridges and 117 islands, you’re actually walking over a petrified forest. The thousands of wooden poles pushed into the mud to create foundations over time have become petrified and are stronger than steel. In Venice, truth can be stranger than fiction.

Where else could Charles Dickens write, “The gorgeous and wonderful reality of Venice is beyond the fancy of the wildest dreamer? Opium couldn’t build such a place, and enchantment couldn’t shadow it forth in a vision…it has never been rated high enough. It is a thing you would shed tears to see.”