“There’s only one difference between Venice and Corfu,” says my taxi driver, while slipping down narrow streets lined with multistory stone houses and arched colonnades, church towers with Venetian belfries and buildings stamped with the Venetian Lion of St. Mark. “Can you guess it?” Racking my brain for a piece of historical data I may have missed in my research, the driver puts forth the obvious answer: “The canals.”
The white-walled, blue-roofed houses of other parts of Greece give way to the oranges and yellows, the scrubby greens and brick reds of the Italian coast. A mix of British, French, and, most prominently, Venetian architecture covers the island, which sits off the northwestern coast of Greece, just shy of the Albanian border, and about 60 miles from Puglia, the very tip of the heel of Italy's boot.
