Maggie in Venice

 
ABOVE: Brian of Boston makes friends with a soggy doggie.  

This afternoon, as we were headed for the Memei pet shop to buy dog food, a man ran up to us in the street next to Venice's fire department.

After calling out, "This dog is famous all over the world," he introduced himself as Brian and said he'd recognized Maggie from her blog photo (even though she wasn't wearing her gondolier hat). He added that he'd planned his trip with the help of our Venice for Visitors travel-planning site.

Brian and his friends are renting an apartment for a leisurely stay in Venice, so there's a good chance that we'll run into him again. In the meantime, we send our alliterative regards to Brian's Bichon Frise back in Boston.

(Brian also had a helpful tip for us: He suggested that we link our photos to larger images. We've done this with the photo above and with our welcome post's image of Maggie in her gondolier hat. We'll continue doing this in the future if we can figure out how to put a border around images and insert "alt" text with Typepad's flaky blog software.)

ABOVE: Georges, shown here in civilian clothes, ruffles Maggie's fur with the Scuola Grande dei Carmini as a backdrop.

This afternoon, we were walking near the Scuola Grande dei Carmini in Dorsoduro when a pleasant-looking couple looked at our canine companion and said "Maggie"? They identified themselves as Françoise and Georges of Lyon, France, and said they'd found our blog after reading La Nuova's newspaper article about Maggie a few weeks ago.

While giving Maggie a rubdown, they revealed that they had a 1½-year-old Polish Lowland Sheepdog at home named Eros (see  photo) and knew Pongo, a local dog who has been mentioned several times in this blog.

Françoise and Georges also handed us their card (shown below), which had a picture of two elaborately costumed Carnival performers, an e-mail address, and a statement in three languages that "A nice picture would make us happy!" Only after we'd said farewell did we realize that they were the couple in the photo! (Click here and here for photos of their costumes in 2010.)

ABOVE: Girls from an elementary school in Venice make friends with Maggie.

Like most dogs of her breed, Maggie gets along with children--which is a good thing, since shaggy dogs are magnets for children's pats and hugs.

The 3-, 4-, and 6-year-old siblings in the apartment across the hall love Maggie, who happily returns their affection. And when Cheryl and Maggie encountered schoolchildren having recess in our campiello a few days ago, Maggie was delighted to be surrounded by a bevy of young female fans.