We wake and find that the U.S. Congress has acted on a Trump Executive Order requiring all overseas US citizens to undergo DNA tests before they can return to the loosely affiliated states of Donald.

Just kidding. But …

We hop on a vapo after brekky and join tour guide Michael for part one of a six-hour private tour designed to give us the history — rise and fall — of Venice’s mercantile empire.

We start in the tidal sandbars and swamp when early settlers were mightily vexed by Huns and malaria and lack of potable water, and finish with 17th century plague, Portugal’s emerging oceanic power and early 19th century French dominance of the city.

Cliff notes version: The making and distribution of salt by land and, especially, by sea, attracts wealth that eventually subsidizes fleets of cargo ships protected by an ever-growing state armada dedicated to sustaining trade monopolies between the east — Constantinople — and west.

Beyond salt, Venice has no resources so its rise is based on the shipping or value-added refinement of raw goods from elsewhere. The enforcement of trade route monopolies and aggressive taxation of all trade are key.

So is having drinkable fresh water. So, as Michael walks us through parts of the city, he shows us some of the 6,046 water cisterns — maybe 150 were public — in the casa courtyards and campos (small piazzas) throughout the city, explaining how the Venetians developed and constructed catch basins for rain and imported water that would purify and hold it beneath the cisterns.

Michael is a font of gen as we walk around the city, touching points large and small: how buildings were kept from settling by inserting blocks of istrian cornerstones, how the masons guild hall reserved rooms for widows and aged workers, how the city superintendents who approved new bridges had their seals put in the arches, how the city required candles to be burned in votive shrines on dark streets to deter crime, the final exams taken by masons (perfect chimney top) and bricklayers (perfect pediments for columns), and on and on.

And a carefully constructed and nicely repetitive flow of info about the city’s relationship over time with — my list not chron. — the Ottoman Empire to the east and Popes to the south (or west when in Avignon), and Holy Roman Empire to the north … and how the Venetians, above all, DID NOT TRUST FOREIGNERS and taxed the living daylights out of just about everyone.

Wanna build a boat: pay a tax. Wanna set sail out of Venice: pay a tax. Wanna sign a trade deal: pay a tax. Think Robert Moses as government rather than individual.

Enough. We say arrivaderchi to Michael, who we’ll see again tomorrow, have a quick bite, and take a series of wrong turns and full vaporettos to Murano island north of Venice: “Home” of Venetian glass (at least the museum … most factories are closed in late afternoon). Totally worth the visit, check the pics.

We vapo back to the “mainland” and get dinner at a restaurant under an arbor in a very small campo with a cat sleeping on the cistern.

We order a bottle of Chianti Classico — 8 euro more than the “unclassico” — and our waiter brings a bottle and pours it into four glasses and walks away. We sip, like it not, and notice the bottle does not say “Classico” and recall the waiter.

“This is Chianti,” he shrugs.

“But we ordered Classico. It’s different.”

“We have only Chianti,” he stares at us and waits.

We gather the glasses and hand them to him with the bottle. “You can take this back. Do you have the Valpolicella Superiore?”

“Yes.” We wonder if this is dangling strand of Venetian DNA at work.

It all works out and, tired and slightly overwhelmed by the city and our day, we meander through a myriad of interconnected wrong streets back to our hotel.

Veni and Vidi but not totally vici because Darrel and Nora’s room proves to be mosquito central.