Inspiring Stories
Venice by Gondola: The Olympic Flame on the Grand Canal
Stage 46 of the Milano Cortina 2026 torch relay, January 22, 2026
February 5, 20264 min read
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A torch relay is a running event, and in Venice every street eventually ends in water.
So on January 22, 2026, stage 46 of the Milano Cortina torch relay put the Olympic flame on a gondola.
A City With No Roads for Running
Venice has no cars and no boulevards, just canals, bridges and the narrow walkways Venetians call calli. Every relay that has passed through has had to work on the city's terms, which means traveling by water.
That turned out well for the relay. Instead of another motorcade and jogging escort, the 2026 relay produced the image that led news coverage around the world: fire moving across water in the same kind of boat that has worked these canals for a thousand years.
The planners could have routed around Venice, and some of the logistics people probably wished they had. They went through it anyway, which is the point of carrying a flame by hand across a country.
The Route: Cannaregio to St. Mark's Basin
The flame arrived on January 22 as the 46th of the relay's 60 stages, and its day in Venice took in most of the city's best-known sights. Torchbearers carried it on foot through Cannaregio and over the Ponte delle Guglie, then on to the Rialto Bridge, the oldest crossing on the Grand Canal.
There the flame went onto the water. It moved down the Grand Canal toward the wooden Accademia Bridge and past the domes of the Basilica della Salute, the church Venice built in thanksgiving after surviving the plague. The passage ended in St. Mark's Basin, with the Doge's Palace behind it.
Crowds packed the bridges and embankments the whole way, phones out, watching a flame float.
Fire Over Water
A flame is about as fragile as anything gets next to open water, and the relay carried one across anyway. I think that is why the pictures traveled so far.
The 2026 torch was built from recycled aluminum, refillable, and designed to hold its flame through wind and weather across two months of Italian winter. Design does not remove the need for a steady hand in a rocking boat, though. The gondolier did what gondoliers always do, with the Olympic flame aboard.
From the moment it leaves Olympia on its long road to the Games, the flame is kept alive on purpose and handed from person to person through wind, rain and distance. In Venice you could see that happening from a bridge.
Venice Has Done This Before
This was not Venice's first Olympic flame. In 1956, when the Winter Games went to Cortina d'Ampezzo, the flame's journey from Rome to the Dolomites also passed through Venice. Seventy years apart, two Italian Winter Olympics used the city as the gateway between sea and mountains. Somewhere in Venice there are people who watched the flame pass as children in 1956 and watched it float by again in 2026.
Weeks after the gondola crossing, the Paralympic flame made its own trip through the streets and canals on the way to the 2026 Paralympic Winter Games. In Venice, the relay adapts to the city.
I think about that from my own stretch of coastline. I live in Santa Monica, where Los Angeles meets the Pacific, and when the flame comes to LA for 2028 I expect it to get its own fire-and-water moment somewhere along our shore. The route will be built from a 50-state relay that ends at that ocean, and I am campaigning to carry the flame for one short piece of it.