The Venice of Italy...

Seems like every place has a Venice of _________. Finally the real deal. Packed with tourists, colorful, decaying, smelling of seaweed and salt, the former super power does impress. We really enjoyed this city, eating our way across it. I am too tired to write more tonight so enjoy the pictures:

This morning we got up early and took the first shuttle to Venice. To get to Venice you must take the causeway that runs through the lagoon. The bus let us off, we bought a one day public transit pass and we were off.

In Venice the public transit system is not primarily busses but boats called Vaporetto. We hopped on the #1 slow boat and took a self-guided tour from our guidebook. Venice is in a colorful state of decay with plaster falling off the old palaces and algae growing on the door steps. 1500 years old with a heyday that predates Columbus it feels a little like a time capsule. With a lot of tourist shops.

We cruised under the Rialto bridge where shops abound and there is supposedly a nice breeze at the top and past the post office with postal carrying boats. We passed many old family palaces built by the wealthy merchants here ages ago. Many of them have mooring posts out front that are richly painted with the family colors.

Just to look down the canal is incredible and brings to mind the many painting we have seen on this trip of Venice. It is easily understandable why so many have been inspired here.

We hopped off at St. Mark’s Square and swam upstream through the crowds to see the cathedral from the square. Intricate mosaics cover the front of the domed church where St. Mark’s remains rest. Unfortunately we seem to have hit the tourist crowds at their peak and we tried 3 times to visit St. Mark’s but found the line too long for our liking.

Instead we chose to wander the back alleys and get lost on purpose. We perused the many Venetian glass and mask shops. Glass-making is an ancient and modern art form here and the shops are numerous. Masking making stems from the masquerades famous in Venice. They range from the ornate to elegant, over the top to mundane and cheap.

There are also numerous pastry and chocolate shops, gelaterias, pizza and sandwich bars and shoes and curiously lingerie. Our first stop was a fantastic bakery where I had a passion fruit sponge and cream cake, Bob had a blackberry and raspberry tart and Crystal had a coconut cream puff that she describes as “a piece of heaven. If it were a man, I would marry it”. Very delicious stuff.

At this point we adopted our “eat our way through this town” philosophy that has not failed us in Italy. After more window shopping our next stop was for sandwiches. I had roasted vegetables (eggplant, zucchini, peppers) and cheese panini, Crystal had a hot ham pizza panini, Bob had a shrimp sandwich with large quantities of mayonnaise. Excellent. This sandwich place like many in Venice is Italian food owned and run by a Chinese family.

From there we hopped on the Vaparetto to the Rialto bridge where we wandered the neighborhood and somehow ended up back in the same area we were just in. This was a common theme today, we seemed to walk in circles a lot. But in Venice that is just fine with me. We stopped ion a lovely small church and then wandered across the Rialto to explore more neighborhoods.

Stopping for a drink at an over priced café we ended up sitting next to two lovely couples from Yorkshire England. As it turned out one was actually born in Dayton, Ohio at Wright Patterson Airfield. Well, not the field itself, I’m sure. Anyway,. We had a great time chatting with them. The other woman did her fabulous and hilarious American accent for us and her friends enjoyed it as much as we did. Crystal was particularly amusing to them, telling them in her best Texas accent, “ I don’t really have much of an accent”. . They were rolling…. I particularly enjoyed the gentleman with pigeon poop on his shoulder (hazard of Venice). He looked and talked a lot like Wallace. They highly recommend Yorkshire and it is now squarely on our list.

After our rest we decided it was time for a gelato and a gondola ride. Gelatos are about 1.20 E, gondolas are 80 Euros for a 1 hour ride. We enjoyed our gelato and decided it was instead time for a traghetto ride (a quick gondola ferry across the canal) for 50 cents. Crystal is calling that the “Bob Sudomir gondola ride” as that is all we were willing to pay for.

We enjoyed our 3 minutes on the gondola ferry and laughed all the way through the alley with no real direction in mind. Eventually we hopped on a vaparetto that took us all around Venice from the Grand Canal around the outside to the burbs of Venice (if such a thing exists in the lagoon). We hopped off in St. Mark’s again, shook our heads at the line and took off for a progressive Venetian dinner.

Our first stop was a bar that has been in operation since 1462. Seriously. We ordered wine and appetizers (cichlietti) of roasted veggies, fried stuffed zucchini, tiny sandwiches with ham, shrimp, tuna or anything else you might want. Enjoying our great first course we pondered how many of the 1 – 2 Euro sandwiches we could eat for the cost of a regular meal here. From there we were onto another great OLD pub for a second round of cichlietti – more veggies, roasted tomatoes (yum), polenta with spicy or creamed fish on top. Excellent.

Finally we stopped for sandwiches at yet another Chinese-owned Italian restaurant. Very interesting. Excellent food, no fortune cookie. Time for another gelato? Indeed. Crystal proclaimed this “Bob’s last gelato in Italy”. He looked rather crestfallen.

At this point we wandered around the shops a little more, stopped for fancy chocolates and tried to hop back on the vaparetto back to where our shuttle picked up. However, instead we ended up circling the same neighborhood about 4 times. I was hysterical with laughter every time we turned a corner and saw the same statue.

Somehow back on the boat we made it to the shuttle stop early. Wandering the area around the shuttle Bob found another gelato shop. Bob’s real last gelato in Italy this trip was enjoyed on the banks of the Grand Canal. Back at camp we exhaustedly hit the hay. Tomorrow we are off to Switzerland.