Venice has always been my refuge. Year after year I have returned to the Lido — the slender barrier island at the lagoon’s edge — to think, to listen, and to let the next chapter of Equestrian Destinations come to me on the salt-wind.
It is a strange place to root the imagination of a horsewoman. Of all the world’s iconic cities, Venice is the only one that offers nowhere to ride; aside from a small stable on the Lido where the off-season beach yields itself to a few quiet hooves, there is no equestrian destination here at all. And yet the city kept asking to be included. I came to understand why through its gondolas.
Look closely at a Venetian gondola and you will find, on either side of its hull, a small sculpted seahorse — a hippocampus. Drawn from Poseidon’s chariot in ancient myth, it stands for protection: a quiet guardian of gondoliers and passengers as they move through the canals. It once served, too, as the mooring point for the boat — Venice’s own version of the hitching post.
And in that small guardian, riding the canals of Venice, I saw the parallel I had been looking for — a gondola is to a canal what a horse is to a trail.
On my mother’s final trip to Venice, she brought home twin seahorses — one for my sister, one for me. They watch over our houses now. It felt only right that mine should watch over this company too, and over every traveler we send out into the world.
— Caroline