Italy Part 2: Venice!

Hi All!

After leaving Verona, we drove to Venice for a 24 hour whirlwind of canals, boats, and crazy-elaborate architecture. This time we really knew we couldn't drive into the city, so we parked outside near the train station and bussed in (in case you ever go to Venice: the train/bus tickets aren't at the train/bus ticket office with the really long line. They're at the newsstand with no people near it. Logic!).

 

Venice!

The bus ride itself was an adventure: being a major tourist destination, Venice is somewhere you have to watch out for pickpockets. Well the bus ride counts too! Within a minute of boarding the bus, Dad saw a guy trying to work his way into the open satchel-thing of another tourist. He pointed it out to me, the pickpocket knew he had been found out, and got off immediately at the next stop--without the other guy's wallet--after elbowing Dad on his way out. Naturally, Dad laughed about the whole thing. The crazy part, though, was that we saw the same pickpocket getting on our bus as we were leaving the next morning. He rode from one of the middle stops out to the train station, getting off and crossing the street to the opposite-direction bus stop where a huge group of tourists was waiting for the bus. Sketchy! However, that was the only time we really saw that kind of thing in Italy, so don't go avoiding it just for that. Cross-body bags are trendy right now anyway.

 

With Dad and Martin at St. Mark's Square.

So! When we got to Venice itself, we decided to walk to our hotel rather than take a (water) bus or (water) taxi. Since our hotel was near the Rialto bridge in the middle of the city and we had just entered on one of the edges, we got to walk halfway across Venice in the process. It's not a big city, but the pedestrian streets are narrow and punctuated by bridges to cross small canals that divide up the 118 islands that form the city. There are signs directing people to major landmarks, but sometimes the arrow goes both right and left, or sometimes they disappear for a moment just to make sure you really appreciate them. We had our bags with us, but we're light packers and they were backpacks, so we didn't mind the chance to get a little lost, check out some churches, and explore.

Rialto Bridge! On the Canal Grande.

After some wandering, we made it to our hotel. Dad had found it, and it was really cool. It was in a converted convent right in the heart of the Rialto market district. This meant that not only was our area cool, it was right in the middle of the city and very close to one of the landmarks that're signposted around the islands, so we could actually find our way home! We went right back out and back to exploring.

On the walk to our hotel I noticed that every cafe had giant meringues. I really like meringues. 

Don't worry, I shared.

We had lunch in a seafood restaurant recommended to us by the hotel's front desk guy, where we were told to ask the chef (by name) what was good that day, and order from that without looking at the menu. We did as we were told, and we had very tasty seafood dishes, except maybe Martin. Martin's was spaghetti-type pasta with squid ink sauce, and while everything tasted fine there's something really odd about food so black it actually stains your napkin. Venice is known for seafood (what with being in the sea and all), so we felt we had done the city justice.

 

Not a famous church. Just a regular one.

For the rest of the day, we walked our legs off exploring the city of Venice, including every church and other major landmark. The main square of the city is St. Mark's square, with the castle and offices of the Doge. Venice has a very long and interesting history, officially starting with the Romans around 400--though it had been settled before--and passing through Byzantine hands before they declared their independence by changing their patron saint to St. Mark and stealing some horse statues (related to the St.) from Constantinople in 1204. Pretty cool way to assert your independence. Napoleon actually took the horses again in the 1700s, but he eventually gave them back. Napoleon actually snaked a lot of important antiquities from a variety of places; we kept hearing about him as we traveled.

Just your local church.

Anyway, in honor of their new independence, Venetians built a completely insane Cathedral for St. Mark. It was the personal chapel of the Doge, so they also stashed their war trophies (mostly from the crusades, which they also used for political maneuvering and economic gain pretty brilliantly) in the cathedral. The cathedral itself is ridiculously decorated, and every single decoration appears to be different. Even the floor is covered in inlaid marble, but every section is a different pattern in the same colors. It's nuts!

 

This is the entryway. As much as they didn't like the Byzantines, Venetians were aces at Byzantine mosaics.

 

The last thing we did before going back to wandering the city was to ride the (water) bus all the way down the Canal Grande at sunset, while listening to an audio tour that told us what we were looking at. The Canal Grande is the main canal that snakes through the heart of the city--the only canal on which major boat traffic can fit. It is lined with the palaces and ca's (ca' is short for the Italian word for house; only royalty could have palaces) of the merchants who made Venice very rich in its heyday. The buildings have elaborate facades facing the canal, so while they may look ordinary from the street, they are beautiful from the water. They are covered in Byzantine arches and marblework, which is even more impressive when you realize that they are held up by thousands of wooden posts driven into the marsh.

Dancing to the outdoor bands on St. Mark's.

There's a lot of conversation about the continuing decline of Venice. It lost its prominence through a combination of factors: a war with Constantinople in which Venice lost a lot of its land, the Black Plague which killed 50,000 citizens (1/3 of the population) in 1630 alone, and the discovery of the New World and other Eastern trade routes by Spain and Portugal, which caused Venice to lose its trading monopolies. Today, the city loses around 2,000 residents each year--the population went from 120,000 in 1980 to 60,000 in 2009 and continues to decline. The historic city is inconvenient, decaying, and massively expensive. Most people just don't want to live there. There's a feeling of doom in all the information about Venice. While the city isn't really sinking (at an alarming rate, anyway), it is slowly turning into a tourist ghost town, like some kind of macabre Disneyland. The city is beautiful and the history is evident, but it is weird to constantly hear about its imminent demise.

 

The bridge of sighs.

It connects the courthouse and the prison, so you sigh as you go over it post-conviction.

Casanova went over it. He was real!

Next up: a short story about the pros and cons of running in Venice, then Tuscany and Florence!

Love Katie