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By Root 334 0

Venice, of course. The city has charms piled sky-high one on another, but a delight that has sharply increased in recent decades has been its place as a cloister away from the car. As soon as you leave the car parks of the Tronchetto, or the bus depot at Piazzala Roma, you step into a parallel world where the car has evaporated as if it never existed. And not just the physical vehicles themselves, but their plentiful paraphernalia too: the signs, road markings, traffic lights, junctions, noises, smells, the background levels of angst and anger, all joyously absent. You don’t even much register it at first, for the city layers on the intoxications with such relish that the absence of cars doesn’t compete with the milky turquoise canals, crumbling courtyards and dazzling light of the Serenissima. You notice it when you leave, though. The dream shatters, the bubble bursts as you are spat rudely back into the real world and its slavish addiction to the internal combustion engine.

To a tourist, the lack of cars in Venice is one of its most thrilling ingredients, though we’re not, of course, prepared to live without the conveniences cars bring. For the dwindling number of Venetians (the population has now fallen below 60,000, a third of the number who lived there in 1950), it looks far from easy. Get up early, before the daily acqua alta of tourists surges through the squares, and you see the gristle and bone of the city flexing itself with a spare efficiency rarely thought of as a particularly Italian trait. Chugging up to the quayside will be flotillas of boats, each stacked with sacks of aubergines and lemons, whole sides of pig and calf, boxes of wine, beer and luminous Aperol, vats of olive oil and vinegar, fridges, cookers and gas bottles, before a small army of men whisk their bounty away on trolleys and carts into the still-drowsy streets. Like a well-choreographed ballet, just seconds after the last one has left, the first tourist parties of the day arrive on gondolas and vaporetti, laughing and pointing their cameras at everything that moves, and everything that doesn’t. Another Venetian day is born.

The daily physical struggle to oil the wheels of this capricious machine has some distinct benefits. People-watching over a coffee or a glass of prosecco is one of the finest sports offered by any Italian city, but in Venice you are rewarded by the sight of some of the finest, fittest specimens around. Young Italian stallions, surgically removed from their beloved scooters and cars, display all of the same swaggering bravado that they employ behind the wheel, but here it is forced out in the open, into a far grander arena, and they rise magnificently to the occasion, manhandling carts, barrows and vast boxes with an effortless panache. Young women too: lissom dark-eyed lovelies flick back their hair as they glide carts of laundry five times their size across piazze and campi – there is no need for gym membership in Venice. Even the older folk keep up, as they must. Over a quarter of the city’s population is elderly, a higher proportion than across Italy as a whole, and it’s easy to spot the lifelong inhabitants. I admired two grey-haired denizens bouncing a boxed 42-inch plasma TV up and over a bridge, even though it overhung their tiny trolley by a foot and a half on each side. The typical Venetian old lady is elegantly coiffed, immaculately turned out and with legs as thin as a sparrow, save for her knotted calves of pure muscle from 70 years of step aerobics.

These tiny little oases in the petrol fumes are a gorgeous anachronism now, turning their very carlessness to an advantage, but for some places it’s been their lingering death knell. What happened when the tarmac never came? When the rutted byways, bridleways and age-old footpaths spoking out from every village somehow missed metalling and transformation into brave new roads? This was a more common phenomenon than you’d imagine, and it happened on some pretty substantial routes: the old Oxford–Cambridge main road, for example, was only sporadically tarmaced, and