Diane Snider Photos

A single Grand Canal photo can tell you so much. A daily delivery of food stuffs arrives, by boat of course, for the waterside market. That boat "parks" between pilings which throughout the city provide specific places for tying up - and remember those pilings came all the way from Scandinavia to form the bottom support for platforms which in turn hold the houses and palaces. Sadly, the viscious tidal waters through the centuries have forced abandonment of the first floors of many of these centuries-old structures and some are even totally empty because of rot.