Venice
Categories: holiday
Date: 22 February 2010 18:37:55
So. Venice. Photos. Here you go:
This (above) is the church of Santa Maria della Salute, which (for those of you that know Venice) is at the end of the Grand Canal almost opposite St Mark's Square. If you go out on the lagoon then it is quite a prominent landmark as you come back to the city, and it was also the nearest vaporetto (water bus) stop to our hotel. These photos don't do justice to how enormous and over-the-top it was. Anyway, it was big and beautiful but not glitzy inside, and as I said a handy landmark for when we were heading back to the hotel.
Which was a funny old hotel. We'd only booked a 2 star hotel, figuring we were basically only going to be 
sleeping there so the facilities didn't matter that much. We knew we didn't have an en-suite room; actually only the toilet was shared, and we did have a shower in the room. Literally in the room - the cubicle was at the end of the bed. It was all a bit odd, but we got used to it, and at least although the room was a bit tired and probably could have done with a lick of paint at least it was clean, and it was handy enough for most places. The photo is taken from the front door of the hotel - it was certainly atmospheric and very Venetian!
The time we were there it was Carnevale so as well as the usual canals, gondolas, museums, and whathaveyou going on, there were also stalls upon stalls selling masks and capes, and people wandering around in various Carnevale costumes. Below is just a selection of some of the Carnevale-related stuff we saw - the first one is a very bizarre spectacle of someone being winched down from the top of the Campanile in St Mark's Square to the roof down below, to the strains of the Hallelujah Chorus - I understand it's a bit of a Carnevale tradition:
On our first full day we did a walking tour, and were accompanied by a multi-lingual tour guide called Nicoletta whom I kept wanting to call Nessa - Swansea wibloggers, is it just me?!
The following day we went on a boat trip to 3 of Venice's outlying islands - first Murano, which is famous for its glass factories - there were shops all over the city selling items of Murano glass. All we did there was 
have a demonstration at a glass factory and then a tour round their shop (!) - HD and I both alighted on the same item, a really beautiful glass fish, but then we spotted its equally beautiful price of over 4,100 euros, so out of the goodness of our hearts we decided to leave it there for other people to enjoy. We're thoughtful like that!
After Murano we headed to Torcello, which was apparently the first bit of Venice to be populated (the island now though supports a population of less than 60). We had a quick look at the outside of the Cathedral and Church, via a very tranquil 10 minute walk along a canal, and then were back on the boat for our trip to the final island Burano, which is well known for its lace-making and for the brightly coloured fishermen's cottages. We stopped and enjoyed the sunset there (not to mention a very welcome glass of mulled wine - it was getting decidedly chilly by this point!):
I really liked Torcello for its tranquility and Burano for its colour - although it did give me a bit of a spaghetti western feeling, I don't know what it was about the main street but I think a saloon with a horse tied up outside and a bit of tumbleweed wouldn't have looked at all out of place, even though it was unmistakeably Italian.
Other stuff we saw - these next 3 are the Rialto Bridge, Doge's Palace and St Mark's Basilica:
We had mixed feelings about some of the things we saw - certainly I felt that as a city with a population of less than 69,000 (and therefore smaller than my home town, which isn't big), but which was absolutely heaving with people all the time, I had no sense of what it was like to actually live there - it was absolutely beautiful of course, but these days entirely catering to the tourist market I felt, and I wasn't so keen on that (HD said from this point of view it reminded him of Blackpool - he's so cultured!). Every shop was either selling masks, Murano glass, or tourist tat, or was a restaurant, or so it felt. I didn't see any shops for "normal" people - corner shops, supermarkets, etc, so it all felt a bit unreal. We also both felt uncomfortable about the city's history - as we went round the Doge's Palace museum we read about the life of the wealthy Venetians who ruled the place when it was a Republic, in seats of power by virtue of their wealth rather than because of any great aptitude or care for the people. We also saw on our walking tour how the grand houses all had 2 entrances, a grand 
ornate one at water's level for the wealthy to enter, and a dull street-level one for the hoi-polloi. Also when we were walking round all the little back streets (it is a right old rabbit-warren there!) you could easily imagine what it must have been like to have a large population living there, not to mention rats and sewage and whathaveyou - in other words it seemed to have 
been built on injustice and inequality (even though I gather that it was quite progressive in comparison with some other parts of Italy at the time). It just made us both feel quite uncomfortable and ill-at-ease, I was quite surprised at how strongly we both felt that.
By the middle of the week I felt like I was rather OD-ing on 16th-18th century art and culture and was desperate to see something modern! On the Wednesday we spent a very pleasant few hours in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and this photo shows the gates to her sculpture garden. Peggy Guggenheim was a great collector of modern art (paintings and sculpture) and settled in Venice until her death. Going round this museum, which I loved, and the Doge's Palace where a lot of the amazing paintings did so little for me, reminded me a lot of Tractor Girl's thoughts on classical music and how there is very little of it she *gets*. If I go to the National Gallery in London, I could probably find only a small handful of paintings that do anything for me at all, whereas put me in the Tate and I'm in my element. As with many modern art galleries, I found myself having a reaction to most of the pieces at the Guggenheim - whether it was "wow", "yuck" or "I could do better than that" (or, in the case of one sculpture in the sculpture garden, the first one you come across after showing your tickets, "That looks like the Black Knight!"), whereas with the art at the Doge's Palace, I was largely thinking "yeah, whatever" (I'm such a Philistine!).
Talking of works of art:
See that top lump of milk chocolate? I ate that, I did :D
I haven't mentioned the food yet, have I? To be honest, I probably ate my body weight in food most days, 
but as we had to do so much walking (supplemented in my case by so much complaining and whingeing - HD really was very patient with me!) I luckily didn't put on any weight, so that was a relief. On our penultimate night there we ate at the restaurant in this picture, Zucca, which we had found on a google search of veggie restaurants in Venice (it does meat stuff too, but most places didn't have all that much vegetarian selection, Zucca's menu was a bit more wide-ranging). This was quite an achievement, as it took us 3 attempts to get there - the first time we walked straight past it without noticing it, ate somewhere else then noticed it on the way back. The second time we did the same thing again, and then the 3rd time they were full, but let us book for a bit later in the evening which led to half an hour or so of sitting in the nearby square trying not to notice how just about every extremity was about to fall off from cold. But the waiting paid off, because the food was delicious and can I say they do the best chocolate mousse ever! Thank you.
On our final day there we took a boat out to the Lido (beach) and I think this was the first time that we had any kind of sense of how the locals live. There were very few tourists around (as they were mostly soaking up the Carnevale atmosphere) so most of the people we saw did actually stay there. We started off at the beach, looking at the Adriatic (which we realised neither of us had ever seen before), walked down the beach for a bit then caught a bus to the village of Malamocca which we both thought was very pretty. Then we caught a ferry to the next island down, stopped at a village whose name escapes me where the book talked about waterside tavernas, but I think they had all shut up for the winter, we didn't find a single one! So we carried on down to the bottom of the island and caught a ferry to the next one and the village of Chioggia where we hoovered up pizza mid-afternoon (pretty much our first food of the day - no breakfast at the hotel as we were room-only, no lunch as we had thought we'd get it at the unnamed village), then wandered round Chioggia for a bit before doing it all in reverse and ending up heading back into Venice just in time for sunset:
Malamocca
Unnamed village
Chioggia
Venice sunset (the church in the middle is the one near our hotel)
And so homeward. We caught the vaporetto from Salute to the bus station and then onwards to the airport - knackered but rested. It was a good holiday, and so good for us to get away together for a while. We'll have to do it again sometime! (perhaps somewhere a bit closer to home next time, we'll see!).