April 12: Venezia

We woke up to rain again, girded ourselves for a moist day, went downstairs for breakfast.  Our hotel manager has a flair for the dramatic.  I'm not sure what the music blasting was -- Judy immediately envisioned Faust, I conjured the beginning of Holst's the Planets -- but it was pretty intense for 7:55 in the morning.  But the breakfast was really good... fresh croissants (plain, apricot or chocolate-filled), rolls, yogurt, cereal, ham, prosciutto, red orange juice, and great Italian coffee.  Probably more, but that's what struck me.

We left breakfast and... the sun was almost peaking thru.  We got on the vaporetto (the water shuttle between the many islands of Venice) from the terminal about 3 blocks from our hotel and... there were patches of blue!  We reached Piazza San Marco and... the sky was blue!  And an hour later, there wasn't a cloud in the sky!!!

And so the rest of the day went. 

Everywhere we've been, Judy has been sad when we left.  My stock line is, "but maybe the next place will be even more amazing than this one!" And sometimes I have believed it.  And usually, it has been true.  Go figure.

But Venice saw my bet and raised me big-time.  This day was the best day of our entire trip.  And we have had some pretty incredible days.

We did not plan anything for Venice before we got to Florence.  Liz and Judy booked the room while we were there, and through an uncanny and almost eerie genius that has not failed us yet, they found an incredibly reasonable quad room at the Hotel Cristalle, just a couple of blocks from the ferry to Old Venice.  It is a great hotel, and I will stay here again if I ever come back.

And then Liz found a very reasonable tour of Venice that starts with a foot tour in the morning, and a boat tour along the Grand Canal at 5:20.  She booked it the morning we left Florence.

The day was absolutely magical.  Piazza San Marcos (St. Mark's Square) looked pretty good from the ferry in the rain, but it is absolutely breath-taking it the morning light of a cloudless sky.  We met our tourguide at 11:00 and she took us through the history of the area, and then through the maze of back alleys of Venice -- with not a little editorializing -- before depositing us near the Rialto Bridge, the oldest bridge spanning the Grand Canal.

During the tour, she had pointed to some gondolas along Santa Maria Formosa Campo, suggesting that a canal tour might be a lot more fun and less commercial back in here.  So we found our way back to Sant Maria Formosa, and found the gondolas... and found that they had gone to lunch.  And would be back around 2:00.  Or so.  So we parked at a cafe near the gondola, got a carafe of wine... and waited... and waited... 

Around 2:30 the guy showed up and we quickly negotiated a ride, and what a ride it was!  He sang old Italian songs, he whistled, he talked up the other gondoliers we passed.  The view from a gondola is very different from that on the street, and you get an increase appreciation for the tenuous hold land has on this place. 

At 5:20, we met for our boat tour of the Grand Canal on a water taxi, beautiful wooden boats that hold about a dozen at max.  Our guide was actually a young American who had attended NYU and studied in Rome and Florence before discovering Venice and decided to stay "for awhile."  That was 10 years ago.  It was a great tour.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on that.  I'm just going to post some pics, some from the tour, and some after we stuck around afterward.  We took the vaporettos around the Grand Canal after some dinner north of the Rialto Bridge and ended the evening back in Piazza San Marcos, leaving for Lido around 10:30 PM.  Enjoy!