Full day in Venice

Day 17    Venice, Italy     Sunday, August 10, 2014

We walked, vaporettoed, and gondola-ed all over beautiful Venice today. This photo is at the Accademia Bridge, which took us back over to the San Marco side of the city, where we toured the majestic basilica.

It was our last morning on the Norwegian Spirit. We enjoyed our final breakfast and thought back on what a wondrous cruise we had. The disembarking process was smooth, and we pulled our luggage and things back over the walk and people-mover route to get to the vaporetto at Piazzale Roma.

On our Grand Canal trip to our BnB stop, we passed by this cool "palace" with the formal painting of Jesus.

Our landlord had e-mailed that we could not drop off our luggage early, even though he originally had said we could. Luckily, a local woman on the vaporetto let me use her cell phone to call him since my attempts to use the public pay phone did not work. After much angst and yelling, he seemed to understand that I wanted only to leave our luggage and would wait to check in at the appointed time in the afternoon.

When we got to the BnB and rang the doorbell, one of the tenants answered and we put our luggage inside the entryway behind the door. It turned out that had those tenants not been there, and they left a few minutes later, we would have been out of luck. The landlord was nowhere to be seen.


Janet and I took the vaporetto on past San Marco Square and toured a church facing the lagoon, Santa Maria della Pieta (1760). It was covered in scaffolding and actually cost 3 Euro each to go inside, but we did anyway. It turned out to be the least fancy of any church we had seen on this vacation, but we enjoyed listening to the music they were playing, and getting to sit down out of the sun. There was a plaque on the exterior that threatened a curse and excommunication to all those who abandon children for whom they can provide.

We then hopped on a vaporetto and crossed to the far side of the lagoon to this church, which you can see in the background of many of our photos. It is San Giorgio Maggiore, built between 1566 and 1610 by Andrea Palladio, considered the most influential individual in the history of Western architecture. Those yellow columns were a temporary exhibit. The interior was lavish and magnificent, which we had grown accustomed to.

  

Being a Sunday, there was a service going on while we were in there. But there were so few attendees, especially for such a massive church, it seemed kind of odd. They were all seated close up to the pulpit, so they are to the left of the chairs on the left side of the photo.

 Outside again I got a telephoto close-up of Saint George on top of the cupola.

 

Here is another shot of the church faҫade, which is known for how white it is. You can see the statue from the previous photo on top of the cupola to the right of center.

Here's a "famous" view of the San Marco Square area taken from across the lagoon where we were at St George's Church. We were waiting for a vaporetto to come take us to our next destination along the waterway where our ship originally passed through.

The next stop was this church of Santa Maria del Rosario (1743) (I took the photo a day earlier when our ship cruised passed). They had to drive 270 piles into the soil to support the weight of the church's faҫade. As usual, it was beautiful inside.

We then walked to the Accademia Bridge, after needing to pay 1.5€ to use a public restroom in this busy area. I took this photo of all the locks on the bridge, and they were crammed onto every post of the entire crossing. It's amazing how popular this fad has become in Europe after we first learned about it a year ago in Innsbruck. 

Immediately on the far side of the bridge in the courtyard of Palazzo Franchetti was this cool bit of "bicycle art" that we had already seen twice before when we cruised past on the vaporetto. It is called Forever Bicycles and is made from nearly 1200 stainless steel bicycles arranged into hypnotic form. It was moved here recently from its original location in Toronto.

After this we walked back to San Marco Square to tour the basilica, which didn't allow tours until the afternoon due to its being a Sunday. No charge to enter, as none of the churches were other than our first church of the day which also was the smallest and least fancy. Inside it was pretty darned incredible. Everything seemed golden, since it was the background color of the walls and art inside; in fact, its nickname is Church of Gold. The first church here was in 828, when relics believed to be the body of St. Mark were stolen from Alexandria by two Venetian merchants and brought here to Venice. Thus, Apostle St. Mark is buried here. The current church was built as early as 1073! A highlight inside was the Golden Iconostasis, a masterpiece "curtain" separating the choir and apse which has 14 statues across it of the Crucifixion, the Apostles and Madonna.

Following this tour, it was time for us to return to the BnB to officially check in. I had told the landlord 2:30, which is what his webpage had said was the proper time. When we got there on time, there was no one to be seen. I finally went off to see if I could phone him from a pay phone, since his e-mail had said there were such phones in the nearby plaza. There were, but you needed a phone card and no one sold them. A person directed me to a tobacco shop in a different plaza a few hundreds yards away, but he didn't sell them either. So, I returned to the BnB where Janet was still waiting, and she had spoken to the owner of the shop across the lane who said she would call him for us. She did and he soon came as a result. Apparently to use this BnB, you need to have a cell phone to call him or else you're just out of luck.

He said nothing in the way of a greeting, but just led us upstairs to show us what he needed to, and then he left and we never saw him again. We actually had a great little corner room that had windows looking out in two different directions:.

This was our view eastward, and way off in the distance you can see San Marco's Campanile.

This is the view out the other window, to a plaza. The church of Campo San Barnaba is on the left. I had my one and only gelato at a little shop in this plaza (other than the gelato I had in Barcelona). Later that evening we ate at a small restaurant up the lane off the far end of the plaza.

This photo shows the canal just below our window, and the front of Campo San Barnaba. A church was first built there in the ninth century, destroyed by fire in 1105, rebuilt in 1350, and reconstructed in its present form in 1776. The church is presently de-consecrated and used for exhibits. Its faҫade was used as the old Venice library in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

There's Janet waving from our window! We got to watch an occasional gondolier or delivery boat using the canal. The room did not have air conditioning, but at least it had a strong fan that saved us that afternoon and all night long.  

Since we now had WiFi, we spent a little time there checking e-mails before heading back out for our final sightseeing. We took a vaporetto to the farthest point on our side of the Grand Canal, where the peninsula ended directly across from San Marco. It was the Santa Maria della Salute Basilica (St Mary of Health).

As I stated in yesterday's post, Venice experienced an unusually devastating outbreak of the plague in 1630. As an offering for the city's deliverance from the epidemic, the Republic of Venice vowed to build and dedicate a church to Our Lady of Health. The Salute is a vast, octagonal building with two domes and a pair of picturesque bell-towers at the back. It is built on a platform made of 1,000,000 wooden piles.

If you walk from the Salute just a few yards farther east (to the left looking at the photo above this one), you reach the tip of the peninsula. The point there is called Punta Della Dogana, and I got this photo of it when we were across the lagoon earlier in the day. To the right of the point is the Grand Canal, while to the left is the Canale Della Guidecca where our cruise ship went. The grand white building on the point was originally a customs office, but is now an art museum. At the top are two slaves holding a golden ball with Atlas on top of it, made in the 1600s.

We used another vaporetto trip to cross the Grand Canal again, and walked some more in the San Marco area. This photo is the Teatro La Fenice (Theater of the Phoenix), one of the most famous and renowned opera houses in Europe. It was originally built in 1774 and was the San Benedetto Theatre. It burned down and was rebuilt, and again in 1836. Then in 1996, an arson fire completely destroyed it and it was completely rebuilt and opened in 2004. This time, to reflect its four comebacks from the ashes, they renamed it Phoenix. 

Even though we didn't get to see this interior, I stole this photo from the Internet to show how glorious the new opera house is. It's funny how difficult is was to even find the front of this theater, since the streets and canals are so convoluted. How did all the people in this photo even find their way there? haha

We then went off in search of a building we saw mentioned in our Venice book, and we took this photo along the way. Our own gondola ride was coming up soon, and it turned out we went right where the gondola in this photo was going.

It took some crafty map reading and luck, but we found what we were seeking - the famous staircase of Contarini dal Bovolo. It is part of a palace home built in the 15th century, and this staircase was built in 1499. It was used extensively in Orson Welles' 1952 screen adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello.

Then it was time for our 6 pm gondola appointment! We were a bit early and watched as several tour groups came and went, but finally it was our turn.

Just the two of us and the gondolier ventured out across the Grand Canal, then we turned back and entered a small canal between two large buildings.

Here we are entering the small canal with our gondolier silhouetted against the blue sky. They operate those rudderless, shallow-draft boats using their single oar and their legs and arms to push off of buildings. Our guy spoke only a little English, and was trying to give us information, but we already knew almost everything we could understand since we'd been touring the city already.

Here we are going under some of the bridges. It was nice and quiet and serene on the course we took. We recognized some of the places since we had walked all through there. We went right behind Teatro La Felice where their shipping dock was located. Our ride was all nice and romantic!

After 30 minutes, we were back on the Grand Canal and returned to our starting point. By then it was later enough that we wanted to return to the plaza next to our BnB and find a cozy restaurant for dinner. Once we got there we ventured down a small lane off the plaza and compared several restaurant menus before selecting one.

We were the only patrons in the restaurant, as it turned out. I liked that they had on tap a German beer I was familiar with - Krombacher. My cycling T-shirt now seems out of place when I see this photo, since it was a fairly formal atmosphere with a haughty waiter. But it was yummy and we enjoyed our meal.

We returned to the BnB room to check e-mails and shower and pack, as our incredible 18-day vacation was winding down.

Janet just HAD to take this final photo. It actually was pretty hot in the room, so we relied on a fan that blew on high speed the entire night. We set the alarm for 6:30 am since our vaporetto to the airport was departing at 8:15 the next morning. What a fabulous time we had in Venice!