Choggia is amphibious.  Parallel with its broad main street, with an arcade and cafes under awnings on one side, and in the roadway such weird and unfamiliar objects as vehicles drawn by horses, and even motor-cars noisy and fussy, is a long canal packed with orange-sailed fishing boats and crossed by many little bridges and one superb broad white one.  All the men fish; all the women and children sit in the little side streets, making lace, knitting, and stringing beads.  Beside this canal the dirt is abnormal, but it carries with it the usual alleviation of extreme picturesqueness, so that Chioggia is always artist-ridden.

The steamer gives you an hour in which to drift about in the sunshine and meditate upon the inferiority of any material other than water for the macadamizing of roads.  There are sights too:  Carpaccio’s very last picture, painted in 1520, in S. Domenico; a Corso Vittorio Emmanuele; a cathedral; a Giardino Pubblico; and an attractive stone parapet with a famous Madonna on it revered by fishermen and sailors.  The town is historically important, for was not the decisive battle of Chioggia fought here in 1379 between the Venetians and their ancient enemies the Genoese?

But I cannot pretend that Chioggia is to my taste.  To come to it on the journey to Venice, knowing what is in store, might put one in a mood to forgive its earthy situation and earthy ways; but when, all in love with water, one visits it from Venice, one resents the sound and sight of traffic, the absence of gondolas, and the presence of heat unalleviated.

At five o’clock, punctually to the minute, the steamer leaves the quay and breaks the stillness of the placid lagoon.  A few fishing boats are dotted about, one of them with sails of yellow and blue, as lovely as a Chinese rug; others the deep red that Clara Montalba has reproduced so charmingly; and a few with crosses or other religious symbols.  The boat quickly passes the mouth of the Chioggia harbour, the third spot at which the long thread of land which divides the lagoon from the Adriatic is pierced, and then makes for Palestrina, surely the narrowest town on earth, with a narrower walled cemetery just outside, old boats decaying on the shore, and the skin of naked boys who frolic at the water’s edge glowing in the declining sun.  Never were such sun-traps as these strips of towns along this island bank, only a few inches above sea level and swept by every wind that blows.

Hugging the coast, which is fringed with tamarisk and an occasional shumac, we come next to Porto Secco, another tiny settlement among vegetable gardens.  Its gay church, yellow washed, with a green door and three saints on the roof, we can see inverted in the water, so still is it, until our gentle wash blurs all.  Porto Secco’s front is all pinks and yellows, reds, ochres, and white; and the sun is now so low that the steamer’s shadow creeps along these facades, keeping step with the boat.  More market gardens, and then the next mouth of the harbour, (known as Malamocco, although Malamocco town is still distant), with a coastguard station, a fort, acres of coal and other signs of militancy on the farther side.  It is here that the Lido proper begins and the island broadens out into meadows.