The commentary piece by Robert Sykes comparing the Minneapolis skyways to the bridges of Venice brought my mind back to the lovely city on the Adriatic. Though I haven't set foot in Venice for 20 years, the city remains as vivid for me as ever, and I'm not just talking about the smell of the canals, whose waters are tinted a suspicious green. Professor Sykes was responding to Eric Roper's story Sunday about changing attitudes about skyways.

While I appreciate Professor Sykes' suggestions of establishing common gathering spaces and naming the bridges, they apparently haven't made the city more attractive to everyday Venetians. In fact, the permanent population of the old city of Venice has been shrinking for years, and by 2009 stood at about 60,000 - or less than one-sixth the population of Minneapolis, or about as many people who now live in Blaine. Then again, they may be scared away by the estimated 21 million tourists who visit the city each year.

Sykes also describes the "Bridge of Sighs" (ca. 1602) as the first skyway, but I'm not sure it's the kind of skyway most Minneapolitans would have wanted to traverse in its original form. It connects the interrogation rooms in the Doge's Palace with a prison, so enemies of the regime - once a confession was tortured out of them - would walk over it on their way to imprisonment or worse. As Byron wrote in "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage": "I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs/A palace and a prison on each hand..."

The poem continues to lament Venice's fall from greatness (and this was 200 years ago):

In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear: