A Day in Venice

We had a leisurely start to the day and after breakfast caught the train to Venice. From Padua, Venice is a fast train trip of 30 minutes or by the slower, cheaper train, 50 minutes. We bought the 12 hour vaporetto pass, and endeavoured to use it as much as we could, seeing as much of Venice as we could. There were a few “musts” – the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Biennale, Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge.

We took the No. 1 vaporetto and sat outside at the front of the boat, to make sure we saw as much as possible. The Grand Canal was teeming with traffic, water taxis, delivery boats, gondolas, and vaporetti, nevertheless, it is still thrilling.

WOW moment – when the vaporetto stopped at Rialto Mercato, Dick noticed Francesco (Francesco’s Venice and Francesco’s Italy). We were stopped long enough to get a few snaps, but not long enough to engage in conversation.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is pretty amazing – all the big names of Modern Art – Picasso, Dali, Delauney, Kandinsky, Chagall, Mondrian, Klee, Max Ernst, Miro, Modigliani. Sculptures all over the place including one thing that really annoyed me, which was, supposedly an art piece or maybe an installation, an olive tree given to Peggy by Yoko Ono. Since when did giving a gift of a plant become an art work? It’s not as if Yoko was the first to have the idea of giving a plant, even if it’s an olive tree. Apart from that we did enjoy the Peggy experience. We got back on the vaporetto, to Arsenale, to visit the Biennale. Unfortunately it was close to closing and we didn’t think the 30 euros each, was worth spending for a short time. There are quite a few sculptures and installations around the town to look at. So we sort have, have done the Biennale.

We did a bit of shopping for Murano glass. Of course!

We walked to St Mark’s Square and looked in the shop windows, had a gelato and refused to pay 9 euro for a coffee. Swarms of tourists, not us of course, we are “travellers”, as a wanky Dutch traveller proclaimed while we were in Croatia. Really we feel like passengers, a lot of the time.

We found our way to the Rialto Bridge and stopped to have a spritz there. It did improve our sense of well being and revived us enough to trek on. The heat is sweltering and debilitating and relentless.

We had such a fantastic experience taking Rick Steve’s recommendations for dinner last night, we followed his advice for Venice. The first place we found is not open on Thursday. That’s OK we thought, we’ll just go to the next one, which was all boarded up, and the third was all booked out. So then we just went to next place we came across, which is not worth writing about, except that their small beer is very large.

Back home to the air conditioned comfort of Hotel Grand’Italia.