Venice

Ah, Venice!!!  This city is always magical, like a real life Disney World.  We took a couple of days last week and went up to Venice (only 2 hrs from Florence by fast train).  We'd been there 2 (or 3 for Tre) times before but it always seems to have something new to show.  We stayed in  part of the city (San Polo) we've never been to before so that provided some variety.  It was a nice little "Mom and Pop" hotel.....clean, quiet and by Venetian standards, pretty cheap.

The first night in town we had tickets for a concert in the Prison of the Doge's Palace (to the right in this photos)

The Doge's Palace

 The Bridge of Sighs is all encased in plastic now due to renovations so it looks rather strange.  It was named so because once someone went into the prison, there was little or no chance of them ever seeing freedom again. 

The Bridge of Sighs in shrink wrap - Doge's Palace on the left and Prison on the right

We had an excellent meal in a modern restaurant down the street from the hotel and then hustled over to the concert.  It was an interesting event, clearly designed for the tourists but still the singers had excellent (though not La Scala level) voices.  Oddly enough, the two singers were a mezzo soprano and a baritone, so the music was geared to that range.  The room was fine - not a prison cell but possibly an old salon for the officials, since it easily held 100 people.  The lighting was atrocious; the singers were backlit so you could rarely see there faces.  But in all it was a quite entertaining way to spend the evening.

Afterward we walked over to nearby Piazza San Marco and listened to a bit of music from a few outside restaurant bands that were playing there to small audiences. These bands have a sound all their own.  There's usually bass, clarinet, accordion, violin and often a piano.

It's clearly not prime tourist season although during the day the piazza was packed with tourists.

Finding our way around Venice was much easier than in previous visits; they have put up signs at most of the major corners to direct you to the major areas of the city: "S.Marco", Rialto", "Accademia", etc.  We bought a 24 hour vaporetto (passenger boat) pass which was helpful since we were located a long way from S. Marks Sq.

The next day we wandered over to the Rialto market for lunch and trinket shopping.

The market from the Rialto bridge

View down the Grand Canal from Rialto Bridge

We had hoped to get inside St Marks Basilica after that, but by the time we got there the lines were so long that we figured we'd never get in.  So we "settled" for the Gallerie dell' Accademia.  An awful lot of the rooms here were closed, but what was open was worth the time.

We also snapped a few photos of major sights along the Grand Canal in the process of going back and forth.

The morning of our last day there we went back again to Piazza San Marco and this time waited in line (about 30 minutes) and got into the Basilica.  It is as incredible as we had remembered it from years back.

amazing floors

the interior rates a WOW!

Close up of the gilded ceilings

details over the exterior of one of the secondary doors

Then we squeezed in a quick visit to I Frari, a church in the neighborhood of our hotel that seemed very different from any other Venetian church we'd been in.  It was brick, rather than stone, and Gothic rather than Baroque.  It's highlight was a huge and beautiful Assumption of the Virgin Mary by Titian over the main altar.

And I'm sure you have been asking yourselves, "How do they handle the garbage?"  Well, I'm happy to be able to tell you that it's set out along the streets and canals sometimes simply hanging from a front door knob and then loaded on to these garbage boats. 

What happens to it after that?  You'll have to go see for yourselves (you probably don't want to know!).

And no trip to Venice would be complete without a gondola:

This guy was one of many "junior grade" gondolas we saw without the classic bow and stern prows.  And no, we did not ride on one.  At 80 euros (~$120) a shot without any music Ken told Tre that he would stand up in the back of his canoe on Long Creek in Hampton and paddle her around.