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Veronica Simpson takes a trip to Venice and despite all the tourists declares it a very liveable city

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There are few cities more famous than Venice – as photographed or filmed, as painted, as written about in poetry and prose. So, in these days of mass global tourism and celebrity obsession, one approaches a holiday there with some trepidation. Rumours of Venice being so awash with tourists that you can barely see the buildings, preceded our trip there in July. But what we found was that the medieval urban plan, largely unaffected over the centuries, was perfectly designed to accommodate these marauding, selfie-stick wielding hordes, while also allowing the locals a fine quality of life and the more discerning tourist every opportunity to soak up the city’s unique, water-logged atmosphere.

Modern Venice is a bitter-sweet beauty parade: as you round the lower corner of the main island in the airport Vaporetto (public water taxi) you can’t help that excited inner yelp of recognition as you are delivered straight into a Canaletto painting: there is the Doge’s Palace, the famous bell tower and preview). As we wandered through the Danish pavilion, listening to interviews with the nation’s great champion of public space for people, Jan Gehl, demanding that every citizen has ‘rights to space’, it seemed the city around us was distinctively Byzantine with the profile of St Mark’s Basilica, its pigeon-festooned piazza, and the sleek, black contours of the gondolas. But yes, there too is the thick crust of tourists swarming over streets and bridges and, all around the waterfront, the buzzing of fat Vaporettos chugging from pontoon to pontoon, and the swish of glossy speedboats as they zoom the more spendthrift visitors and high-net-worth residents about the canals.

Spend five minutes in the more crowded tourist hotspots and this elegant, 1,500-year old city begins to feel like Disneyland. What is it about fighting your way over ancient bridges and up narrow medieval streets bristling with global brands and tourist tat shops that reduces the ruins around you to something cheap and theme-park tacky, as if these walls – richly stained by time and weather and witness to nearly 10 centuries of human intrigue – are just so much artfully painted Florida fibreglass. It may be that everyone there is in shorts and sunglasses, brandishing tourist maps (just like we are). There are no real locals going about their business – except, of course, those serving behind the bars, and in the shops and restaurants.

But there’s a trick to the design of Venice, however accidental or serendipitous, that makes living in a global icon possible: just two or three winding streets away from the main tourist thoroughfares, all is calm and as it ever was. Schoolkids and students study and play; washed clothes dangle from high-strung wires and balconies; secret gardens offer cool and shaded havens; Venetian parents push prams and the elderly walk their dogs and exchange pleasantries in the many small and ancient campos (public squares) that pop up every few streets along. Because Venice has never had cars, this street plan has never changed, and it makes for multilayered living in a way no other, traffic-riddled modern iconic city I can think of does.

And how does this quality of life for the locals manifest? In the fact that people – once you venture off the tourist-beaten track – are lively and engaging, happy to swap tips and pleasantries in either tourist Italian or broken English. Spend a few days watching the Venetians at work and play in the more out-of- the-way quarters, and you really get a sense of their pride in this city, their love of the waterways, and their ongoing enjoyment of its riches. The last time I was in Florence – about a decade ago, having visited the city 20 years earlier – no matter where I trudged in search of ‘hidden’ squares and neighbourhoods, I found every waiter, street-vendor and shop-owner seemingly utterly sick and tired of the tourists, from whom there seemed to be no escape. Venice, it seems, is a living lesson in humane, people-friendly and egalitarian urban design, which beautifully underpins the one delivered by the current Venice Architecture Biennale – for which I had coaxed my husband and two (not unwilling) teenagers to this watery destination.

Medieval planning has served Venice well into the modern day

Curated by Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, this year’s Biennale, titled ‘Reporting From the Front’, was less about what intellectual and aesthetic arenas the profession wanted to reclaim, or an exploration of fabulous new shapes, formats and materials, and more about what architecture can do to improve the human condition. As we wandered through the Danish pavilion, listening to interviews with the nation’s great champion of public space for people, Jan Gehl, demanding that every citizen has ‘rights to space’, it seemed the city around us was delivering exactly that vision, in spades. Whatever the wealthy come here to enjoy (outside of the seven-star hotels, casinos and palazzos of the super-rich) it is pretty much available to everyone else. Yes, the premium tourist experience of Venice (which we politely declined) is that gondola ride along the Grand Canal, for which you will pay the princely sum of around €200 – more if you want a gondolier to bellow operatic ditties at you as he poles along. But, as we joyfully discovered, our local Vaporetto back to the island of Giudecca, where we were staying, took the same route up the Grand Canal, by day or – most romantic of all – night as the gondoliers and cost us less than €5 apiece.

But what lessons can be drawn from Venice, when most of the world’s cities cannot turn their car-riddled highways into pedestrian experiences, or opt for water transport as opposed to road, or afford to create or reinstate their medieval grids of squares and alleys? Options is what it comes down to – a multiple layering of routes and open spaces that facilitates the full range of lifestyles within the same plan: from high-speed routes for those who want to be fast-tracked to the economic fleshpots, to meandering lanes for those who prefer a slower, more leisurely amble to their destination.