Grand Canal is grand beyond compare

VENICE, Italy — Some travel truths are self-evident. As the Great Wall of China is great indeed, so Venice's Grand Canal is grand beyond compare.

For two and a half miles, this watery Champs-Elysees winds down a fantastic architectural canyon lined with rococo palaces and Moorish mansions, past splendid baroque and Gothic churches adorned with the frescos and paintings of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, and here and there the everyday shops, markets and banks of this still very vibrant maritime metropolis.

The vaporetto, the colorful, inexpensive but crowded water bus, is Venice's rapid transit system. From its decks one can drink in centuries of glorious history, when Venice ruled the world of commerce, and still rub shoulders with a stockbroker bent over his morning newspaper while commuting to the business district near the Rialto bridge.

Lord Byron swam the length of the canal after a liquid night on the town. One of his spurned mistresses threw herself into it. The husband of George Eliot, the British novelist (alias Mary Ann Evans), fell into it from a hotel window.

The legendary Venetian lover Giacomo Casanova courted contessas and courtesans in his private love boat before winding up in "The Leads," the attic prison in the Doge's Palace, from where he dramatically escaped through a hole in the roof.

Alighting from a lurching gondola, New Yorker magazine humorist Robert Benchley wired home to the wits at the Algonquin Round Table: "Streets Full of Water . . . Please Advise."

Richard Wagner, at his grand piano in the Palazzo Vendramin, now Venice's winter casino, heard the warning cry of gondoliers making a quick turn and was inspired to compose the shepherd's pipe song in his opera "Tristan."

Gilbert and Sullivan in "The Gondoliers" made merry light opera music with these ballad-belting boatmen, but Mark Twain couldn't abide "their constant caterwauling." Yet the former Mississippi River pilot on a busman's holiday down the Grand Canal described the gondola as "free and graceful as a serpent in its gliding" and the "gentlest, pleasantest locomotion we have ever known."