03) Italy: Venice & Florence

Notes from Libby in italics.

Here is the Venice picture gallery.

After our arrival in Venice, we had to find one of the water “busses” that run up and down the grand canal towards our hotel. After some confusion about which boat to board and which stop we needed, we started our slow cruise of the center of Venice. Our hotel wasn’t too far from St. Mark’s square (the biggest square in Venice, and home to the famous St. Mark’s basilica). We had booked a room on the third floor of a building down a small narrow street with a shared bathroom down the hall. It was a bit worried about what we would find, but it turned out to be a cute little place. The room was plenty big enough, and being on a corner, the windows looked out on the intersection of a couple of narrow streets in the heart of Venice. We never had a problem with the shared bathroom (I never encountered another person using the bathroom when I wanted to use it, so the fact that it was down the hall didn’t bother us a bit.) We tried another recommended restaurant not far from our hotel, but both Libby and I were disappointed. It was a cute place, but the food was tasteless and overpriced. A very comfortable bed back at the hotel made up for everything, and we slept like rocks.

The next morning we needed to find a laundromat, since this was the midpoint of the trip and we were packing light. Unfortunately, the only nearby laundromat was halfway across Venice, and there were no canals you could take to get there. So, we hiked through a labyrinth of streets that were often no wider than four or five feet, and crossed countless footbridges that consisted of two half staircases laid back to back. We weren’t taking back roads, either – that’s just about how big the streets are in Venice. Everything in the city is first brought in by truck or train, delivered as near as possible by boat, and then trucked by hand in wheel barrows and carts through the narrow streets and over the stair-laden foot bridges to their destination. Any piece of equipment or furniture wider than about four feet simply didn’t make it.

The laundromat was expensive (about $30 for two loads!), but did the job, and on the plus side we found a little fruit stand outside were we picked up breakfast. After returning our laundry to our room, we headed off to see St. Mark’s Basilica. Using a tip from Rick’s book, we checked our backpack and used the claim check to slip in the front door, bypassing the long line that had formed out front. The inside of St. Mark’s was incredible. Actually, incredible is an understatement. It was mind blowing. The entire ceiling (three large domes and an arched ceiling covering the rest of the church) was encrusted with super-detailed mosaics. The size of the tiles used to create the images of Jesus, and numerous biblical scenes were often no bigger than the head of a pencil eraser. The attention to detail was astonishing – the skin tones and shading in the figure’s clothing, color variations in beards and lips – it looked more like a painting than a mosaic. The background color used over the entire ceiling was gold tile, so when the sunlight penetrated the small windows on the upper floor, the domes lit up with this warm glow that reflected around the entire church and created an ethereal ambiance. Not to be outdone by the ceilings, whoever did the floors outdid themselves. The floor was covered in extremely dense and detailed patterns rendered in granite mosaics. Each section of the church had different patterns. In the 1700’s, an artist painstakingly drew all of the patterns of the church floor on a series of four-foot wide sheets of paper (now on display in the museum on the second floor.) The smallest details were only a few millimeters across even at that scale. The amount of intricate detail was staggering. (It was incredible. This is one of the highest points in the trip for me.)

When Venice was the political and economic center of the region some 500 years ago, the government resided in a huge palace right next to St. Mark’s Basilica. The leader at the time was known as the Doge, who lived in the palace alongside the meeting halls for senators and judges. In fact, St. Mark’s Basilica used to be the Doge’s private chapel when it was built. It was graciously opened to the public hundreds of years after it was finished when Venice ceased to be political center of Italy.

When you first enter the Doge’s palace, you tour his private apartment and living spaces for his family. With all of the furnishing removed, it wasn’t as impressive as I am sure it would have looked back in the day. (Uhm, except that you could fit our house and the one next door just in the dining room.) Further on in the tour you see the meeting rooms of the judicial council of ten (sort of like a Supreme Court that also has limited powers to write new laws.) The woodwork became more ornate, and the artwork larger and more imposing. In fact, the subject of the artwork (justice, heaven, hell, punishment, etc.) was meant to intimidate the accused who were brought to chambers of the court inside the palace to be judged. Upon leaving the court chambers section of the palace, the tour enters the section of the palace that was used by the senate. The antechamber located at the entrance to the senate rooms was the most ornate we had yet seen in the palace. Large oil paintings hung on the walls, and the detailed decorations on the ceilings were impressive. The next room was a meeting room for senate subcommittees. It was amazing! The ceiling was covered with oil paintings set in gold-gilded heavily carved wooden frames. Some of the paintings were square, but others were oval, crescent shaped, or triangular. Every square inch of the ceiling was either part of a frame or an oil painting. Some of the paintings were in full color, and others were done in a collection of red hues – kind of like a black and white photo with a red filter applied. (And, realize, they didn't have photography, sepia-toned or otherwise, to look at. They didn't have black and white television to know what a monotone or duotone image would look like.) The red hued paintings were placed in a specific pattern that created a meta-pattern mosaic effect using the oil paintings as colored tiles in the design. (As if the massive mosaics in the basilica next door weren't detailed enough!) Libby and I had never seen anything like it – it was stunning. We figured that was the peak of the tour until we walked into the main senate chamber. It was just like the subcommittee room we had just left, only the ceiling was twice as tall, and room was ten times the size, covering an area about the size of a football field. Again, every square inch of the ceiling was encrusted with heavy gold-painted wood frames and Technicolor oil paintings. We spent the next twenty minutes wandering aimlessly through the room with our heads pointed skyward and never bumped into another tourist – the room was massive. I think Libby would agree the senate room in the Doge’s palace (as well as St. Mark’s) was one of the highlights of the trip. (Holy crap, that was amazing. I was overwhelmed. I've never seen anything like that in my life.)

That afternoon we walked to the Rialto bridge, which is one of only two bridges across the grand canal. The Rialto bridge is famous for having small shops up and down both sides of the bridge. It is like a large version of the foot bridges we had been walking over all day – it is humped back bridge with stair cases running up one side and down the other. We stopped at a tiny shop selling hand-made leather purses, brief cases and wallets. The bags were dyed in a rainbow of brilliant colors (deep red, ocean blue, grass green, sunburst yellow, etc.) Libby picked out an unusual red purse and fell in love. It decided to follow us home.

That night we walked to one end of the grand canal and took the slow water bus down the canal, following Rick’s self-guided tour point out all the sites. The sun set while we were on the boat, casting the buildings along the canal in a warm amber glow as nighttime took over and the lamps attached to the sides of the buildings took over. I had been to Venice once before, but the weather was cold, gray, rainy overcast. It made Venice seem like a damp, dark, rotten backwater that was slowly sinking into the muck. This time, with sunnier, warmer weather, the city took on a completely different character. It was really beautiful.

The next day we took the train to Florence, about 2 hours a way. The terrain between Venice and Florence was much more hilly than I had remembered it, and there quite a few more tunnels than I remembered. We passed hills and forest, but also farms and vineyards (we were traveling through Tuscany after all.) It seemed that even the smallest sheep or cow farm had a small vineyard at the back of the house. Libby and I will have to come back and spend some extended time here and sample the wine...

Here is the Florence picture gallery.

In the center of the old part of Florence there stands a huge church with a gigantic red-roofed dome. Informally called the “Duomo” after its huge dome, the church was actually built with gigantic hole in the roof where the builders hoped that someday the technology would exist to actually build the dome they had envisioned. Luckily, a local architect figured it out, and the church was completed. Libby calls this church the “inside out” church because the outside is a noisy, blocky pattern of white, black, green, and pink marble. (And just as ornate as the insides of the other churches we saw.) The inside, however, is actually pretty plain. (Like, plain, stark stone, no decor, a couple images hanging on the walls, but no embellishment or decoration or filigrie.) Next to the Duomo is smaller octagonal building built in the same style. This is the baptistery, and the doors on the north, south, east, and west walls are covered in intricate brass carvings depicting scenes from the bible. Inside, the domed roof is covered in Mosaics similar to those at St. Mark’s showing the many of the stories from the Old Testament (Adam and Eve; Cain and Able; Joshua, his brothers, and his multi-colored coat; etc.) It was impressive, but couldn’t match St. Mark’s.

Our hotel was about a block from the Duomo. Happily, the entrance was also about 15 feet from the best gelataria in all of Italy. Several people (including our guide book) recommended Grom as the best place in Florence to get gelato (Italian ice cream), and that Florence was the best place in Italy to get gelato. After sampling, I have to agree. I tried the double-dark chocolate and went weak in the knees. It was the smoothest, most chocolatey thing I’ve ever tasted. Libby got a mix of extra-dark chocolate and coconut, which tasted like a super-rich Mounds bar. The gelato was so good we stopped by twice more in the day and a half we were in Florence.

We had tickets to the Accademia, where Michelangelo’s statue of David resides. Since we booked ahead, we were able to skip the long line and walk straight in. I had seen David before, but I had forgot just how impressive (and big!) the marble statue was. Everything about it is perfect – the smoothness of the stone, the proportions of David’s body, his curly hair, and those stone eyes that seem almost to come to life. The rest of the museum wasn’t nearly as interesting, so we skimmed the rest of the exhibits and headed back towards the Duomo. Scattered around the old town of Florence are a series of open-air markets containing hundreds of booths with people selling souvenirs (many of which were centered around a certain, below-the-waist part of David's anatomy...ah-hem...), clothing, handbags, and postcards. About every third booth was a shop selling leather handbags, briefcases, and wallets. Just like Venice, the purses and handbags were died in bright, catchy colors (in addition to more traditional browns and blacks.) They had every design and shape you could imagine (except for the design that Libby had picked up in Venice – we never saw another bag like it.) After wander around the shops for an hour or two I was almost ready to buy a purse for myself – they were that pretty. I settled on a simple wallet instead.


The next morning was Easter, and every year on Easter Florence holds the festival of the exploding cart in the square surrounding the Duomo. I’m not sure what an exploding cart has to do with Easter, but apparently it started as festival to kick off the planting season in hope of a good harvest. It was combined with Easter celebrations later. The festival consists of dragging an ornately carved 20 foot tall, 300 year-old wooden cart to the base of the steps of the Duomo and packing it with fireworks. At the appointed time, a rocket is lit inside the church, and it shoots down a metal wire through the middle of the church, out the front door, and impacts the side of the cart, where it lights the fuse for the rest of fireworks. Sparklers, mortars, pinwheels, and smoke bombs all light off in sequence and fill the square with smoke, flame and explosions. There were also a number of costumed performers marching around the base of the cart, but there were so many people in the square, we couldn’t see what they were doing. With Libby’s shorter stature, she couldn’t see much of anything, so she used a little trick that she had picked up just before we left the states. Libby found a “bottle top tripod” for her camera. It's a standard tripod top that screws into the bottom of her camera, but instead of three tripod legs, there was a rubber fitting that went perfectly over the top of a standard water bottle. As luck would have it, we had a water bottle with us, so she attached her camera to the top, set it to take ten pictures in a row with a one second delay, and then held the water bottle at the bottom as high as she could over head and used the camera as a periscope to catch the fireworks display. I could hear all the of the people around us commenting on what a good idea the bottle top camera was, and how they wished they had one too! (...and how mad they were that all THEY were getting were pics of someone's water bottle -- tee hee!) After the fireworks display was over, we grabbed our things and hopped on a train to Rome.