Our garden was mentioned in a book published a few weeks ago in the US! First Spritz is Free, edited and published by Kathleen Ann González as ebook and printed edition, contains a chapter written by me. In total, 35 contributors (experts, bloggers, chefs, historians, writers, Venetians and frequent visitors) were asked to tell their personal stories about discovering Venice. Why they love living here, or why they keep coming back as often as they can. It’s the first book telling more about the Venice Community, whose numbers I totally underestimated.
But then, I’ve been watching the Venetophiles communities closely ever since I started “blogging”: When I first published A Garden in Venice on the Blogger Platform (blogspot) in summer 2011, I was one of five bloggers writing about Venice. Three blogs were French, one was American, and there was another Venetian (remember the informative Alloggi Barbaria blog), and me with my A Garden in Venice Blog. Interesting that I was the first Venetian writing a blog in English at that time … I did it just for fun, at the beginning, and because I was curious. I wanted to test the effects of blogging, and then I was really surprised that people were reading the blog. Inadvertently, I must have chosen the right key words for SEO, although back in 2011, I didn’t even know what SEO was.
Since 2011, the Venice community has been growing immensely. If I were a tourist / traveler, looking for information on Venice in the internet, the choice to choose a blog to follow would be really hard 🙂
That’s also why I want to confer a different twist to La Venessiana, narrowing in a bit more our niches. I counted them all: There are currently 147 sites owned by residents in Venice and Italy, that either focus on Venice, or dedicate a major part of their work (=articles) to it. Many come as “Five best tips for xyz”-type posts, and for some time, I was doing exactly that. In a way, the blogs become repetitive, and readers have a lot of opinions to choose from (why not).
Writing blog posts based on this scheme, and in a way, diluting our main message. So publishing this Garden in Venice Blog is returning to our roots and thus, our USP. There is only one such garden, and it’s been only grandmother Lina and I doing research on certain parts of Venetian history and recipes, and that means, these topics are ours.
To initiate this transition, I decided to contribute the story of the garden to First Spritz is Free, so in a way, the story I’m telling here is the debut for this blog, a relaunch of our first Garden in Venice Blog published back in 2011.
I have decided that blogging is not for me. But, I love writing newsletters, and online magazines, like this one. the difference is that I totally focus on this niche, there are no ads (we did have a few questions, but we refuse when they don’t contribute. Should I put a link to a third party in the sidebar of this blog, it’s not paid but my own opinion, and I put it here because I would like to contribute a little to further a certain cause/initiative/Venetian business, book, etc. I do make a few exceptions, as I work with international travel agencies, the Venice Tourist Office, Hotels, magazine editors and book publishers, and Lifestyle Magazines, providing text and images.
Now here’s the garden story, and the secret story of San Zaccaria: Click here and download the book – it’s a free ebook, just click the button to immediately download pdf publication, it’s free and you don’t need to register. If you prefer reading the First Spritz is Free Stories in print, click here to order it on Amazon. Enjoy 🙂
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