As a child I never understood why people said an octopus had tentacles. Surely they’re octacles? An octopus’s tentacles are multi-function. Just imagine having something you can eat, move, hunt, taste and mate with. No, perhaps best not to imagine it. The fish market in Venice has a fabulous array of fresh produce. This octopus caught my eye, with its large suckers and central beak. Octopus have copper in their blood rather than iron, so their blood is blue rather than red. Copper isn’t quite as efficient as carrying oxygen as iron, so octopus have to keep their blood pressure high, helped by ..read more

‘Trilobite con pista’, it says. No, it’s not an item on the Italian menu in the restaurant at lunch time, but the label on a fossil in the Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia. The Italian for Trilobite is clearly Trilobite, but what does ‘con pista’ mean? ‘Con’ must mean ‘with’ and ‘pista’ must mean ‘track’, like piste is a skiing track. It’s a Trilobite with its tracks. Sometime in the distant past, in the Cambrian era (it’s the Cambriano in Italiano), a Trilobite scurried across the muddy sea bed, leaving its tracks and then met a catastrophic death which preserved every outline of its body ..read more

You may know Peter Tatchell best for his views on reducing the age of consent and on sexual relationships with children. He’s more frequently referred to as a ‘veteran LGBTQ campaigner’. His views on inter-generational sex mean I don’t think he should be on the mainstream media so frequently. His latest post on X (formerly Twitter) shows his new-found but profoundly misguided interest in basic biology: The article he links to from Gay Times by Fran Tirado is deeply embarrassing to anyone who isn’t a religious convert to Gender Identity Theology. So is Peter Tatchell’s understanding of it. Try ..read more

Six floors, eighty steps, 28 metres and €9. That’s the spiral staircase named after snails, ‘del Bovolo’, in Venice. The Palazzo was built in the 15th Century and clearly wasn’t dramatic enough, so they added the external spiral staircase in 1499. Lord Byron and John Ruskin visited, so that’s good enough for us. We spent well over an hour looking over the city of Venice from the top, and then climbed down again, like snails ..read more

Gondoliers in Venice appear to earn a top salary of €100,000. For that I’d expect some adherence to uniform standards. We saw several who clearly weren’t taking their status seriously, and wearing white trainers or baseball caps. If you’re going to pay them €80 for a brief trip out, it’s the least they can do to wear black shoes and a proper boating hat with a flowing ribbon. Wandering around the maze of tiny canals, we see a beautiful scene, as a couple has hired a singer and a guitarist and are being serenaded from the back of their gondola. It sounds so beautiful echoing around the high wa ..read more

I’m astonished every time I see detail in fossils. Their age, the heat and the pressure they have been subjected to, and the often random nature of their discovery make it extraordinary that we can see exactly what they were when they were living. Here’s a great example from Venice’s Natural History Museum: On the left is a fern and on the right is a horsetail. Or, as the Italians have it, ‘Fronde di felci e equiseti’. Ferns: Ferns, mosses and liverworts Horsetails: Horsetails from the Palaeozoic ..read more

A visit to the natural history museum in Venice can be a bit of a shock for those unprepared for a full-on trophy room. These are the trophies of Count Giuseppe de Reali, a passionate ‘big game’ hunter. He lived from 1877-1937. His ‘trophies’ didn’t ..read more

A tale of two bridges. One is the Ponte dei Sospiri, the Bridge of Sighs, built in 1600. It’s the bridge between the prison and the interrogation rooms. It’s named after the idea that prisoners would sigh at their final view of the beauty of Venice through the window before being taken to their cell. The second is a bridge I call the Bridge of Sightseers, the Ponte dei touristi. Just look how crowded it is. I must be in every one of their photographs ..read more

It’s a foggy early morning in Venezia and the low cloud gives an eerie feel to the place as we wander around the streets. Just off Piazza San Marco are some of the best views of the sea, with the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore visible faintly through the shifting fog. I love the street lamps here. Their pink glass is a perfect decorative colour. I suspect that it’s pink because of the gold they added to the glass. Even the tiniest of amounts of the metal gold turn glass red. Selenium also turns glass pink. I wonder which metal was used in Venice’s glass? Given the luxurious nature of every a ..read more

A trip to Venice isn’t complete without at least two hours visiting the Museo de la historia natural. As well as dinosaur fossils, taxidermy, and a bizarre hunting-trophy room there is this example of a Chimera: Title: Chimera Catalogue number: MSNVE-16723 Dating: presumably XIX° century I love how badly this mermaid is done. Some parts are wood, some mammalian and some fish. I hate to think of the excitement of the person who paid a high price for such a rarity, believing it to be real, and the joy of the faker at their subterfuge. A Chimera is a mythical beast from Ancient Gr ..read more