I feel like I have no words to describe how utterly bewitching Venice is and how it's beauty completely caught me off guard.   I simply had no idea.  I mean I did... but no....I didn't really.  You see pictures of it and you see it in films, but nothing can prepare you for the breath taking panoramas that greet with every turn in every canal.   It is a sparkling city - a place for dreaming and letting your mind melt into the scene you behold.   I think Jan Morris' description says it all "It is very old, and very grand, and bent-backed.  Its towers survey the lagoon in crotchety splendour, some leaning one, some another.  Its skyline is elaborate with campaniles, domes, pinnacles and a big red grain elevator.  There are glimpses of flags and fretted rooftops, marble pillars, cavernous canals.  An incessant bustle of boats passes before the quays of the place; a great white liner slips towards its port; a multitude of tottering palaces, brooding and monstrous, presses towards its water front like so many invalid aristocrats jostling for fresh air.  It is a gnarled but gorgeous city: and as the boat approaches through the last church-crowned islands......so the whole scene seems to shimmer - with pinkness, with age, with self-satisfaction, with sadness, with delight.  The navigator stows away his charts and puts on a gay straw hat; for he has reached that paragon among landfalls, Venice." (exact from 'Venice' by Jan Morris 1963).