desoto_hia873 | Venezia, The City of Water (Reply)

We spent the first week of our trip to Italy with members of the Ottawa Choral Society (Mom's a soprano)--they were doing a three-city concert tour of Venice, Florence, and Rome. About 75 people, mostly singers and their spouses (or in Mom's case, daughter), were travelling together. The tour was arranged by ACFEA, a performing arts tour company.

In an effort to keep the cost of the trip down, we had a somewhat insane two days of travel to get from Ottawa to Venice. I will never understand why direct flights cost more than taking multiple planes to the same destination. My father recently priced out flights from Ottawa to St. John's, Newfoundland, and discovered that the cheapest route was to fly to Calgary (two time zones in the wrong direction!) first. Good grief. Anyway, the path to Venice went like this: I drove from Peterborough to Ottawa on Wednesday evening. Early Thursday afternoon, we boarded a bus for a two-hour drive from Ottawa to the Montreal airport (Ottawa's airport has very few international flights). We then had to wait four hours in Montreal before our flight left. As seems to be the norm for flights to Europe, our flight was an overnight one. I think they do this in order to maximize your exhaustion the next day--not only are you coping with jet lag after you land, but you've also had a very short and uncomfortable night on board a plane. We arrived in Paris around 9 am on Friday morning and had four hours to kill before boarding another plane to Milan. Upon arriving in Milan early Friday afternoon, we then had take a bus to Venice, about a three-hour drive away. All told, the trip from Ottawa to Venice took nearly 48 hours. Urgh. This at least guaranteed that we were good and tired by Friday evening, so going to sleep that night, six hours ahead of Ottawa time, was no problem.

They gave us dinner on the Montreal-Paris leg of the journey, and it included a curried salad that I cleverly spilled on my t-shirt. The thing about curry is that it glows on clothing and is damnably hard to get out. Not wanting to wear a stained shirt all day Friday, I bought a Paris t-shirt during our stopover. This is me in said t-shirt, wishing I had a bed to lie down on, in Charles de Gaulle airport:

I went to sleep once we were on the Paris-Milan flight and was suddenly awakened half an hour later when Mom accidentally dumped her glass of cold white wine in my lap. Not having had the foresight to put a spare pair of pants in my carry on luggage, I had to resign myself to smelling of stale wine for the rest of the day. Apparently, this was simply meant to be my trip to wear food and drink.

I usually find west-to-east jet lag much worse than east-to-west jet lag, so I was anticipating feeling like a zombie on Saturday after all that travel. However, much of Friday was spent dozing on flights and buses, and both Mom and I were surprisingly alert on Saturday. Which was good because ACFEA had a pretty full day planned for us.

Our hotel was actually in Venice-Mestre, a city on the mainland, not Venice itself, which is an island. To get to Venice, we drove a short distance on the bus and then got on a vaporetto over to the island. They dropped us off near Piazza San Marco, the biggest piazza in Venice--it's about the size of two football fields put together. The piazza is named for the Basilica di San Marco, one of the many historic buildings around the perimeter. The Basilica was built in the 11th century (one of the things I love about Europe is how old everything is), is gloriously festooned with frescoes and sculptures, and houses St. Mark's bones somewhere inside.

As we were to learn later, no Roman Catholic church in Italy can be consecrated unless it has a relic of saint within it. And by "relic," what they really mean is "piece." I don't know who originally had the idea of chopping saints up and distributing the assorted bits after their deaths, but this is apparently what is done. If you go into any church in Italy and get the permission from the priest, you can lift the cloth covering the altar and see a box containing a piece of a saint's body. Some churches don't hide their bits--San Domenico in Siena has both St. Catherine's head and one of her thumbs on display in ornate cabinets. The thumb isn't always there, though, as they lend it out to other churches periodically. O.O

To the right of the Basilica is the Doge's Palace. The Doge was the ruling duke of Venice back in the days when Venice was both a republic and an Old World powerhouse. Like so many other historic buildings that were erected by people of great wealth, it looks like a lavishly decorated birthday cake. I only had one day to spend in Venice, so I didn't get to see the inside of the Palace.

The main entrance is on the left side and is referred to as the Paper Door. No one seems to know quite why it's called that--one theory is that edicts from the Doge used to be posted here. The fellow and his winged lion over the door are holding onto a large book, so that might be another reason.

It's quite difficult to get nice photos of the Basilica and the Palace in their entirety because they're both so big, and the piazza is always full of people.

The Doge's Palace also housed the local prison in one wing, and connecting the two wings is the Bridge of Sighs. Supposedly, condemned men would be led through the bridge on their way to prison, gain their last glimpse of Venice, and sigh.

At the north end of the piazza is the Torre dell'Orologio, or Clock Tower. It was built during the Renaissance, so it has less of an eastern flavour than the Basilica or the Palace. The tower features one of the world's first "digital" clocks--the two little blue rectangles on either side of the portico underneath the lion. They show the time in five-minute increments; the hour is given in Roman numerals, of course. The bell at the top of tower is struck by two bronze statues at the top of every hour. Apparently, in the 17th century, one of them hit a worker on its backswing and knocked him to his death on the piazza below--the world's first death by robot.

Mom and I posed for a photo in the piazza to prove that we were really there.

Also present in the piazza, along with the zillions of tourists and vendors hawking cheap souvenirs, are zillions of pigeons. You used to be able to buy pigeon feed laced with contraceptives for them, but this has been banned as the city wants to rid itself of them altogether. Good luck with that.

Venice is an odd city, really. It used to be a centre of wealth and power, but these days it's kept afloat (literally--it's actually sinking) primarily by tourism. There are no cars allowed on the island, so it's a very expensive place to live--everything from furniture to groceries has to be carried in. The facades of many of its buildings are very grand, but they also have an air of mildewy decay about them. Venice's permanent population is plummeting, and many of the buildings are empty. It's still an interesting place to visit, but because so much of it is maintained for tourists, it just seems slightly... well, fake.

However, it's still the only place where you can see gondolas and gondoliers. Some of the gondolas shuttle locals and tourists back and forth across the Grand Canal (there are only three bridges along its length), while others will take you for a touristy ride in the smaller canals. If you pay them extra, they'll even sing for you. My travel guide warned that gondoliers are handsome and can be extremely charming, but local women say that anyone who falls for a gondolier "has slices of ham over her eyes." :-)

Hiring a gondola for a personal cruise is pretty pricey, and Mom and I just didn't get around to it, so I had to content myself with taking pictures of other people in them.

We had a three-hour walking tour in the morning, after which we plunked ourselves down at a restaurant on the Grand Canal. As luck would have it, we picked a good place--our ACFEA guides, Patricia (pronounced Pat-TREE-chee-a) and Alice (A-LEE-chay) arrived at the table next to ours a little while later and told us that they sometimes do tours for gourmet cooks and this was one of the restaurants they bring them to. Its menu features mostly seafood, and Alice had squid cooked in its own ink. She looked as if she was eating pieces of tire cooked in tar.

Our restaurant, which I think was called Il Pescatore, was in the center of this little plaza.

After the walking tour and lunch, Mom and I boarded a vaporetto (the big boat on the left in the picture below) and rode from end to end of the Grand Canal, Venice's main thoroughfare.

One of the buildings we passed was this museum. Not every building was this ornate, but lots were--in its glory days, Venice's wealthiest citizens lived in houses facing the Grand Canal, and they made sure to design facades to advertise the state of their bank accounts.

The white building below is La Fenice (fen-EE-chay), Venice's opera house. It faces a small piazza, so it's practically impossible to get a picture of the entire thing because you just can't back up far enough. Later in the day, we wandered into a secondhand bookstore while waiting for a restaurant to open, and I bought a copy of Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon, a murder mystery set in Venice. It was pretty good, so I'm planning to read the rest of the series, too.

I can't remember the name of this building, or if it even had one, but our walking tour guide told us that the tower with the spiral staircase inside was built for a gentleman who wanted to ride his horse to the top of house.

This is just a really pretty bridge over one of the smaller canals.

One of the ubiquitous souvenirs we saw in all three cities was "Ciao Bella" t-shirts. Unfortunately, they didn't come in dog sizes. :-(

Although Venice residents liked to display their wealth, for some reason, they also liked to conceal their identity when they went to balls. It was traditional to attend these events wearing an elaborate mask, and it's now traditional for every other shop in Venice to sell them as souvenirs. They're pretty, but I just couldn't imagine what I'd do with one, so I settled for taking photos of a few.

Navigating oneself around the streets of Venice is a challenge--they're extremely twisty and not very well marked. We spent a good half hour trying to locate what my guide assured us was Marco Polo's house (the rectangle above the door says something to this effect), now a hotel and restaurant. However, the shopkeeper in the secondhand bookstore next door laughed at that idea and said that Marco Polo's house may have once stood there, but the original structure is long since gone.

We had dinner that night at Osteria il Milion, a nice little restaurant next to the building purporting to be Marco Polo's. Mom looks very happy, doesn't she? Note all the bottles of wine behind her. This may have had something to do with that. :-) If you go to Italy, be prepared to drink a lot of wine!

We also found a poster advertising the Ottawa Choral Society's first concert the next day. I didn't make it to this one as I was off on my quest to see the Iceman. Mom told me later that the church they sang in was extremely echo-y. She actually got lost once or twice when the echoes were competing with the singers.

This is my favourite picture from Venice. The sun was starting to go down, and we were waiting for the various choir members to return from their wanderings so that we could board a vaporetto and go back to our hotel. I took a photo of the gondola behind me just because it was there and didn't notice the lamp hanging from the dock next to it until later in the evening. I quite like how it turned out.

So, my overall impression of Venice was that it's a unique place, but not my favourite corner of Italy. Because it's so tourist-oriented, it felt a little bit like going to Disneyland. Still, I'd go again, but I'd learn more about the city's history first so I could better appreciate what I was seeing. I'd also take a bit more time there--you just can't get to know a place in just one day, and I'd like to wander around the back streets away from the main tourist drag.

Next up: the Iceman pilgrimmage.