Day 5 - Ahhh, Venice

The Grand Canal from the Accademia Bridge

19/9/2010 - Venice

This morning we got an early start so we could get L'Accademia, even though we didn't have a reservation. Thankfully yesterday's horrible weather has passed, and it's a little cool, but clear and sunny and looks like it should be a pretty nice day. I had been stressing out and thinking we would need to take a vaporetto to Gallerie dell'Accademia to not get hopelessly lost, but it turned out to be all of a 7 minute walk to the Accademia bridge, one of the five (I think) bridges that cross the Grand Canal. The museum opens at 8:15, so when we got there at 8 we had time to grab a quick breakfast at a cafe nearby (cornettos, caffe for Geoffrey, cioccolata calda for me) before waltzing right up to the non-existent ticket line and getting right in as they opened. 

A beautiful (and cheap, only 6.50 euros) museum, featuring Italian, primarily Venetian painters, such as Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Bellini, and Canaletto to name a few. The galleries are very nicely arranged and it's a very manageable size and laid out in a way where the galleries are numbered, so you don't have to wander around, doubling back in confusion like I feel ends up happening in a lot of museums. We had the place practically to ourselves, and by the time we were leaving a little before 10, the hordes were just starting to descend. 

Calle with laundry flying like prayer flags

This ended up being our museum day, and we timed our visits pretty perfectly so that we were leaving the Accademia right before the Peggy Guggenheim opened at 10, which was definitely more crowded and expensive (still, only 12 euros), and also a very easy to see size. There's a great garden at the entrance, and a glamorous marble terrace on the Grand Canal. An unusual art experience, as the museum is in Peggy Guggenheim's house, some of the pieces still hanging where she had placed them. Each room had an old photo of what the room looked like when she lived there, which made it a very personal experience - you feel like you're stopping by for a visit, and just happen to get to see amazing art by Picasso, Miro, Klee, Magritte, Kandinsky, Pollack, and Dali, all artists that Peggy Guggenheim personally collected, most of them artists that she personally knew and helped succeed with her patronage. As always, I felt like I was wandering around in a reverent daze, feeling so honored to be in the presence of such spectacular art. 

After leaving the Guggenheim, we crossed the Grand Canal in the sunshine back to our hotel for a quick nap and lunch in our room, and a change of clothes, since the day was sunny, clear, and warm. As the museums were really the only thing on the agenda for the day, just wandering around and getting lost would make up the rest of our afternoon. We chose the Frari church as our destination and headed off via the Rialto bridge to try and find it. We found the church with not too much difficulty - so far we've found places by aiming for the closest major attraction nearby and following the signs to get there, then hauling out the map once we're in the general area and asking directions - it seems to work. The church was wonderful, fairly deserted, peaceful and cool, with some fantastic art - Donatello's John the Baptist, Titian's Assumption, a Bellini, and some other great pieces. I got to light a candle, something I really enjoy doing, despite the fact that I'm not Catholic.  

Frari Church

When we left the church, we found a nice grocery store and replenished some of our picnic provisions, along with a corkscrew and a bottle of wine, a nice local Valpolicella for 6 euros. I love how food and wine are totally affordable in Europe, and not just crappy junk food/malt liquor quality, but good, fresh, local food and nice wines.

One of the things we'd registered for on our honeymoon registry was a gondola ride (if you're getting married any time soon and have all the dishes, towels, and glasses you want, and are planning to take a nice honeymoon, I would definitely recommend this, we went through thehoneymoon.com and loved them. You can write whatever you want for your item, assign a price and break it down into smaller denominations so it's easier for people to "buy" for you, and then they just cut you a check for the total dollar amount spent on your registry).

So we decided to take our ride, so we wandered around for a while and picked our gondolier, then we were on our way. We asked to go through the back canals, not the Grand Canal, since you can do that on a vaporetto for a fraction of the cost of a gondola ride. Our gondolier was really nice and took us on a really lovely ride, and he didn't speak much English, so I finally got to practice my Italian. So far in Venice, it seems like most people just would rather speak English to you than to let you fumble through Italian, which is making me lazy. So it was a pleasure to ask him questions about Venice and gondolas and his family in Italian. Venice is so beautiful to see from that vantage point, so quiet and peaceful, I can se why it's know as La Serenissima. Gondolas are such an elegant, relaxing way to travel, no motors or crowds as far as we could see, just water gently lapping at the boat as we glided along.

In a lot of ways, Venice seems like such a study in contrast, it's like two different cities coexisting on different planes of reality. In the early morning, and off the main pathways between major destinations, it feels like just a magnificent, magical city where people live and work, that just happens to have streets paved with water. But you can take the exact same empty piazza from the morning and fast forward to the afternoon, and it's a crazy, swarming, tourist-filled madhouse. I'm already sick of tourists (and yes, I know I'm one of them) and I've only been here a couple of days, I don't know how the Venetians handle it. When we'd gone over Rialto on our way to the Frari church, it seemed like such a beautiful bridge, if only you could take away the gift shops and map and camera wielding tourists slamming on the breaks in the middle of the street for no apparent reason. I feel the same way about malls at home.

Our gondola, serenely traveling the back canals of Venice

In hope of avoiding the San Marco crowds, we decided to go get coffee at Cafe Florian that night, and go up in the campanile for a night view of the piazza and San Marco. After another quick hotel room picnic, we ambled over to Piazza San Marco, which was surprisingly deserted. We took the elevator up the campanile shortly before it closed for the night, had an amazing view and took some great photos, and then were shooed back down, luckily right before the bells rang the hour, they're a little too up close and personal when you're in the tower to really want them to ring.

Piazza San Marco from the campanile at night

We warmed up at Cafe Florian, which was decadently elegant and made me feel completely underdressed to be having hot chocolate in its plush interior, with a string quartet playing outside. After our drinks were done, we took one more spin around the dark piazza, and headed back to the hotel.

Our very expensive coffee & hot chocolate at Caffe Florian

Throughout the day we'd noticed a lot of activity going on in our neighborhood, and when I asked the concierge what was going on, he told me that the neighborhood has a big festa each year to celebrate the beginning of fall. It was beautiful, long tables ran the length of the street, and Christmas lights were strung everywhere, people eating and drinking, kids running around, and live music, like something out of an old Italian movie. The dinner was just getting started when we'd left and was in full swing when we returned, and a guy was singing old Italian songs, which we could hear in our room, like we were being serenaded. 

When we got back to our room, Geoffrey needed to call his bank because his debit card hadn't been working since we'd gotten to Italy. Unfortunately, this ended up taking until about 1 AM to get cleared up, since the bank had messed up and not posted his travel alert to his account, so his card had been canceled. In the end, they said they'd overnight a new card to our hotel in Verona, which I did not have high hopes of actually receiving. To compound the annoyance of a stupidly long phone call with a bank, the music outside had switched from Italian love songs to American disco. Really, really loud American disco. Not the best end of an otherwise nice day.

The block party out our window

Day 4 - Toledo to Venice

18/9/2010 - Venezia - Italia at last!!!

After a sleepless night topped off by getting up at 3 AM, a 130 euro cab ride, and a short flight, we're finally in Italy! Add a bus ride from the Marco Polo airport to Piazzale Roma, where we caught a vaporetto - right number, wrong direction. We got straightened out, and eventually made it to our hotel, Albergo San Samuele. It's perfect, in a quieter neighborhood that actually feels like a neighborhood, and located really close to a vaporetto stop and a traghetto point, so once we were going the right direction, it was really quick and easy to find. Our corner room is a beautiful, with two door-sized windows that open onto mini balconies - you could set stuff out on them, but you really couldn't stand on them, so there's great light and a bucolic view of the little calle we're on.

It was really tempting to just stay in our room all day - it's drizzling and cold outside, and neither of us slept last night due to paranoia about oversleeping and missing our taxi and subsequently our flight. But I had gotten 12 hour passes for the vaporetti so we could go out to the other islands in the lagoon, so after a quick nap and a semi-futile attempt to freshen up and feel more like humans and less like zombies, we ate a so-so lunch at the trattoria across the street and made a quick stop in the alimentari nearby for provisions (including pesto, some Baci, juice, meat, cheese, yogurt, and fruit, we just needed to find some bread), we layered on ALL our cold-weather clothes, including the gloves I thought I'd never need when I threw them in my bag, and headed out in the pouring rain to catch the vaporetto to Piazza San Marco, where we would get the vaporetto to Murano. After a quick pass through Piazza San Marco (crowded even in the rain), and caught the #5 vaporetto to Murano.

A quick note about language at this point - I had been concerned about starting our trip in Spain before ending up in Italy in regards to my grasp of Italian. I've spoken Spanish for 10+ years and have spoken it in many real life situations for travel and work, so it's well rooted in my memory. Italian is a much more recent acquisition, I've only been studying it for about 2 1/2 years and have never spoken it in a real life situation outside of a classroom, so I was worried that a week in Spain, speaking Spanish, would push all my Italian out of my brain. The languages are similar enough that it's pretty easy to get them tangled up if you know both, and I've certainly mixed them up in Italian class where I'm suddenly speaking Spanish instead of Italian. And let me tell you, sleep deprivation has the exact opposite effect of alcohol for loosening the tongue when speaking a foreign language.

After a fairly terrifying, rainy, miserable boat ride across the lagoon, we arrived on a deserted island. No barkers trying to entice us into their shops to see a glass blowing demonstration, no tour groups, nothing that a person typically associates with Murano. We explored a bit, Geoffrey played some table tennis with some sullen Venetian teenagers in a park while we used one of the few free bathrooms in Venice. We walked to the end of the island and got a good look at the storm clouds heading our way across the choppy, grey water.

The end of the world, or at least the sidewalk, on Murano

We were freezing and decided it was time to head back before we got swept out to sea, so we walked back to catch the boat. We took a detour to visit the Basilica dei Santi Maria e Donato, a gorgeous church that was as deserted as the island itself, that had a very un-touristy feel to it - notices about upcoming church events, choir practice notice, that sort of regular church thing.

Basilica dei Santi Maria e Donato on Murano

After another long, stormy journey back to Venice via a different route that put us on land by the train station, we stopped for a coffee and gelato break (my first in Italy - chocolate & coconut, pretty good for a place so close to the station). We caught another vaporetto back to the hotel (after our detour this morning, no matter how confident I am that we have the right one, I ask before we hop on to make sure) and enjoyed a picnic dinner in our room, listened to our audio book before turning in early. Benvenuto ad Italia!!