NOW STREAMING: VENICE LIVE!
See absolutely nothing (much) happen! The Venice cams, a phenomenon of the pandemic, are still on…
Even though some tourists are making their way back to the Gilded city, it is still, by its standards, eerily sparse. And the various cams set up all over the city are still giving us a 24/7 live look.
In September 2018, the Hotel American Dinesen started live streaming the canal and street outside one of its rooms (see above). Now, eerily, that shows the emptiness of one of the most trafficked places on the planet. Watch the wind blow! Seriously. It’s oddly mesmerizing.
Other hotels in Venice (and around the world by the way) started doing the same thing. After the pandemic took hold and travel to (and in) Italy was curtailed, we in the rest of the world could see what Venice looked like absent the rolling sea of visitors.
Here are some examples of the dozen plus still streaming:
The Grand Canal from Ca’ Angeli Hotel
There’s the positively giddy street activity of the Ponte delle Guglie, from the Hotel Filù Venezia
And the riveting Campo Santa Maria Formosa streamed from the Ruzzini Palace Hotel, a normally teeming square just around the corner from St Marks Square, now empty except for solitary individuals, appearing suddenly from the wings, criss-crossing it with purpose and haste, like figures running the gauntlet in old video games.