Wednesday, March 10: Today is a snowy day in Venice--an event that isn't typical for March, and which we've chronicled in this photo essay:

When we woke up this morning and looked out the window, our back yard was already covered with snow.

 
The corte in front of our small apartment house also had a layer of snow, although some of it had turned to slush during a lull in the storm.

A few blocks away, in the Campo San Barnaba, commuters were leaning into the wind and fighting to keep their umbrellas under control.

Other Venetians and tourists braved the salted but slush-covered steps of the Ponte dei Pugni.

 
Later in the morning, Cheryl photographed these sanitation workers as they shoveled and swept snow from a fondamenta. (Normally the workers collect garbage during the morning hours, but snow removal took priority during this late winter storm.)

Cheryl and Maggie, our celebrity-sniffing service dog who identified Johnny Depp's Venice digs this morning, also saw how the sanitation workers scatter ice- and snow-melting salt on Venice's streets and bridges.

As they walked around Venice's sestiere of Sorsoduro,  Cheryl and Maggie noticed that the gondolas at the local squero, or boatyard, had a layer of snow.

On the other side of the Rio di San Trovaso, a group of pedestrians in matching hooded ponchos looked like characters from a Dan Brown novel.

Not far away on the windy Zattere, which faces the Giudecca Canal, a broken umbrella (one of many seen today) lay abandoned next to a public trash container.

Undeterred by the snow, a gabbiano (seagull, or cocal in Venetian dialect) surveyed the Zattere from its perch atop a snow-clad bricola or wooden piling.

Addendum: Around 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, we took our dog for a walk and found a pupazzo di neve in the cold, dark, and deserted Campo San Barnaba. 

The snowman was still there on Thursday morning, when the photo above was taken, although the sun was out and the layer of snow covering the campo had started to melt. (You can see life returning to normal after the March snowstorm in our video clip, A Snowy Morning in Venice.)