Avignon

The Mediterranean from the train.

From Carcassonne, we took two trains to Avignon. Along the way, the train passed very close to the Mediterranean, no more than half a mile or so in some places, giving us some great views of the coast. Avignon is located on the Rhone River on the very western edge of the Provence-Alpes-Cotes d'Azur region ("the California of France"), a region located in southeastern France and containing such famous cities as Marseilles, Cannes, Monaco, and also the French Riviera. We didn't go that far into the region, though, and we stayed inland along the Rhone ("the Ohio River of France").

Palace of the Popes (the first time Lisa saw it, it was
celebrating an anniversary and had a big red sign, saying
"ca va durer longtemps" "it will last a long time.").

Part of the story of Ariadne.

Avignon is famous because it was the home of the Popes for about sixty-five years on the 14th century. I won't go into all the details, but because of conflicts between various factions of cardinals and between popes and the king of France, a French cardinal was elected Pope in 1309. He decided he didn't want to move to Rome and stayed in Avignon. He was followed by six more Popes in Avignon, all of them French and all of them increasingly under the control of the French king. It was only in 1377 that the Papal court was moved back to Rome (although because the Popes had purchased the city of Avignon from the kings of Sicily, who ruled the area, so Avignon wasn't united with the rest of France until 1791, following the French Revolution!). Thus, the major sights in the city relate to the period of Papal residence in Avignon.

14th-century funeral monument.

Pont Saint-Benezet

We got to Avignon in the afternoon and walked a few blocks from the train station, through the old city walls, to our hotel. There, one of the owners, Pascal, gave us a map and TONS of information about the city - what sights to see, names and locations of restaurants to try, locations of restaurants to avoid ("they're touristy - not for you," he said) and shopping areas. We then headed out to the Petit Palais, which used to be a cardinal's residence next to the Papal Palace and is now an art museum. It was almost all religious art from the 14th and 15th centuries and almost all of it was Italian. It was sort of strange to see works by the same artists we had just seen in Florence the week before! Beyond the standard "Madonna and Child"s, there were some nice things - a work by a young Botticelli, some interesting paintings from the side of clothes storage chests showing the myth of Ariadne, a cool painting of the Last Judgement and, Lisa's favorite, the remains of a late 14th-century funeral monument of a cardinal that she can reference in her dissertation. There was also an exhibit on how to restore medieval paintings, although it was all in French so I didn't get much out of it.

Lisa on the hill above the Pont Saint-Benezet

After the museum, we went next door to the Palace of the Popes. We tried to buy a combo ticket for the palace and the broken bridge of Avignon (inspiration for a French song) but the ticket guy said the bridge was closing soon and we probably wouldn't have time to see both places unless we hurried. We decided to try to get to the bridge first then come back to the palace, but we couldn't figure out how to get there. Instead, we ended up in a park on the hill above the river looking down at the bridge and then we headed back to the palace. Lisa had already visited it before, and I was okay with not actually going out on it, even if it meant we didn't get to sing the song that Lisa said was known there (Sur le pont d'Avignon l'on y danse l'on y danse. Sur le pont d'Avignon l'on y danse tous en rond).

Cloister in the Palace of the Popes.

Pope's dining room.

Pope's chapel.

Lisa had been in the palace in the summer of 2004 when she studied in Montpelier and she remembered it as being empty and boring. There were certainly very few furnishings (like the abbey at Mont Saint-Michel) but some of the rooms contained some small exhibits and interpretive plaques that seemed fairly new. As a whole, the palace seemed to be a medieval castle that just happened to be owned by the Pope: huge rooms, Gothic architecture, and lots of stone. But we both agreed it was a cool place. The size of the dining room and the chapel were awe-inspiring - you have to have room for the entire Papal bureaucracy to eat and pray! - and some of the Pope's private rooms still had some amazing frescoes on the wall (although we couldn't take pictures of those). We couldn't see the whole palace, though, because it's also now used as a convention center and so they were setting up some of the rooms for the next convention. Plus, in the courtyard, they were erecting a huge stage for Avignon's annual month-long theater festival in July. We left when we got kicked out at closing time (7 pm) and, on the way, got a free postcard in the gift shop because neither we nor the cashier had change and she just didn't want to deal with it. It was quite nice of her!

Aaron on the street outside the Popes' Palace.
Note the new hat.

After the palace, we had dinner at one of the restaurants Pascal recommended. It wasn't fancy, just good solid, cheap Provencal cooking. As we left, a small wedding party entered, fresh from being married at the mayor's office. In France, the state only recognizes marriages performed by local mayors so those are the official ones. If you have the desire, time, and money, you can have an "extra" church wedding, but everyone gets married at the mayor's office first for it to be official. Anyway, it was fun to see such a happy group of people sharing champagne and dinner.

Market hall.

The next morning, we did something very unglamorous - laundry! For the only time on one of our adventures, we decided we needed to wash clothes. We were going to be gone so long that we knew we couldn't carry enough clean clothes with us so we asked Pascal about a local laundromat, which, of course, he could direct us to. While the laundry was going, we walked to Avignon's market hall. I was expecting a good old-fashioned French market area with lots of small booths and minimal roofing. Instead, it was a modern building with lots of vendors inside, not unlike the North Market in Columbus (except Avignon's was full of American tourists for some reason!). We bought supplies for a picnic lunch - bread, cheese, olives, strawberries, and apricots - then went back to collect our laundry. As we left we gave some of our extra soap (we had to buy two pellets from the machine) to a young American kid with a huge backpack doing laundry. We imagine he's spending several months on his own backpacking across Europe! We dropped off the laundry at the hotel then headed back to the train station for an afternoon trip to Arles.

Carcassonne

Note: We're home in the US now, but we've got a lot of blogging to do to catch up, so we're continuing with the places we visited on our final trip, across southern France.

Entrance to the city walls of Carcassonne. Note the large
number of tourists.

From Toulouse, we took an afternoon train to Carcassonne, in the Languedoc-Roussillon region stretching along the Mediterranean coast. (Region-counting update: this was my twelfth of twenty-one regions and Lisa's fourteenth, although she's been in this one before.) This train trip was the first one we've had all year marked by significant delays. There was some sort of unspecified electrical problems at the Toulouse station that caused it. Our original train was first delayed thirty minutes then canceled outright so they moved everyone to a second, slightly later train, that was then further delayed another 45 minutes. Good thing we had a deck of cards to pass the time!

View from the walls of the castle.

Carcassonne is a city divided into two parts. The "new" part, where the train station is, was created in 1247 after King Louis IX conquered the city and settled the inhabitants of the old part across the river, away from the city walls. The old part, on the other side of the river, is on a large hill surrounded with two rings of walls forming a heavily fortified medieval stronghold. To get from the new part to the old part, we could either walk half an hour or take a bus. As we didn't feel like walking uphill with our bags on a warm sunny day, we opted for the bus.

Castle.

Our "hotel" room. Note Aaron's new hat on the table.

The old city of Carcassonne is like Mont Saint-Michel, but bigger. That is to say, it's a medieval town with huge walls, a church, twisty streets, lots of chintzy stores, and far too many tourists (although in Carcassonne they're mostly British and American, whereas in Mont Saint-Michel they're mostly Japanese). Like our December trip to Mont Saint-Michel, we opted to spend the night inside the walls of the old city and we're glad we did. It gave us a much different feeling of the city once all the day-tripping, tour-bus-utilizing tourists left. The place we stayed was great, too. It was one of three mini-apartments owned and managed by a woman who lives upstairs and runs a boutique next door. The one we stayed in was probably about the size of our tiny apartment in Cesson. It even had a kitchenette stocked with some basic food and lots of dishes (but almost no cooking utensils for some reason) and a nice little patio out back. The whole place had a beach-house kind of feel, despite being miles from the ocean! We loved it and the woman who ran it, Nicole (who had a beach-bum kind of look herself!), was quite chatty and friendly, too. In fact, the friendliness of the people we interacted with in the south was one of the first things we commented on, starting with the hotel clerk at the hotel in Toulouse who actually asked if there were any problems with the room to the tourist office woman in Albi who complimented Lisa on her French, all the way to the super-helpful hotel desk clerk in Lyon (more on him a few entries later).

Castle courtyard.

Anyway, once you block out the tourists, Carcassonne is a pretty awesome place. We started by touring the castle proper and walking around its ramparts, which afforded us some great views all the way to the Pyrenees. The castle also had an informative documentary and lots of interpretive plaques telling the history of the fortifications. It began as a Roman fortified camp in the fourth century AD, it was strengthened by the local lords in the twelfth century to resist the French kings (and to protect Cathar heretics, another act of resistance to the French), and, after the French victory over the local nobility in the thirteenth century, a second outer wall was added. After the seventeenth century, its military importance declined and in the nineteenth century, the whole fortification was restored (although not necessarily to the state it would have been in the thirteenth century - a lot of extra decorations were added to make it more "medieval"!).

Cathedral.

We also went to the former cathedral, next to the castle proper. (Because of a decline in population, the church is no longer a cathedral nor even a functioning parish church.) It's another one of these half-Gothic, half-Romanesque churches so prevalent in the south: the Romanesque part dates from the older, semi-independent period while the Gothic part (done in a northern style) dates from after the annexation of the region by the French kings and is meant to demonstrate the new "northern" power over the south.

Dinner.

For dinner that night, we decided to take advantage of our kitchenette and cook for ourselves. As there are no grocery stores inside the old city, we had to walk down the hill to a small store to forage for supplies before heading back up the hill to cook. We had bread, cheese, salad, beets, and tabouli for dinner on the patio. It was quite nice and a welcome change from all the meals out we'd been having.

Mostly-deserted street.

After dinner, we walked through the mostly-deserted streets, lined with closed shops, to get to the large space between the two city ramparts. We walked through the dusk between the walls, climbing up on to the outer ramparts at points for some beautiful views of the fading light over the countryside and the moon rising above the mountains. It became a lot less beautiful, though, once the massive floodlights down below were turned on in order to illuminate the town from the outside. Looking over the ramparts nearly blinded us! So we left the wall and walked down the hill to a bridge over the River Aude where we could get some great views of the city all lit up.

Our seat mate at the café.

After taking some photos, we climbed back up and on the way, we ran into a middle-aged Italian couple who had just driven into town in their camper. They wanted to know if the castle was open. We answered in broken Italian that no, the castle itself was closed, but you could walk around the walls as we were doing. It was only after answering that it hit me that they were speaking Italian, that's how confused my brain is with languages these days! Anyway, we finished walking all the way around the walls and then had a night-cap violet liquor and glass of wine at a bar on one of the plazas in the old city.

The next morning, we left early and walked down the hill to the train station (it's a lot easier going downhill on a cool, cloudy morning!) for the next stop on the trip: Avignon.

Sunset.

Turning the lights on at dusk.

Lisa on the bridge.

Carcassonne intramuros and moon.

Toulouse and Albi

Aaron, ready to leave Cesson for the south.
Notice the lack of a hat.

The day after our outing with Margaret, we began our final European adventure of the year: "The Circle Tour of France." We started by taking a train (well, three different trains, really) from Rennes south through western France to the city of Toulouse. It took about eight and a half hours total and we had a couple of close calls with connections because of delayed trains. But we played a lot of gin, slept, and read. We also experienced our first Intercités train. They're high-speed trains (although not as high-speed as the super-fast TGV trains) that go long distances through areas without TGV services. The cars seemed a little shabby and dated. They're probably what all of France used before the expansion of the TGV network. On the way, we had a ten-minute stop in the city of Bordeaux. I got out of the train to walk around so that I can now add Aquitaine as another region of France I've technically been to!

Convent of the Jacobins, Toulouse.

Cloister of the Convent of the Jacobins.

We got to Toulouse at about 9 pm and turned in shortly afterwards. The next day we set out to explore the Midi-Pyrenees region, "the New Mexico of France - but a little less dry and with more wine production." We spent the morning looking a couple churches in Toulouse, the most interesting of which was the Convent of the Jacobins, an old convent dating to the twelfth century. There's a nice cloister area we could go into, but unfortunately, they're doing a lot of restoration work on the rooms around the cloister, meaning there was little to see there. It also meant that the sound of jackhammers ruined the peaceful stillness of the cloister atmosphere! The church is all done in brick, as are most historical buildings in Toulouse since there are few stone quarries in the region. Inside, the main altar contains the remains of St. Thomas Aquinas. We can't figure out why he's there, though, as he has no obvious connection to Toulouse!

For the afternoon, since Lisa's French friends were unavailable for a visit, we decided to head out of Toulouse and visit the city of Albi. We didn't even know it existed until Margaret mentioned it to us the day before we left. After looking it up on-line and in Rick Steves, it seemed like a cool place - and boy was it ever! We're very thankful to Margaret for the suggestion! The one small problem is that the French railroad company is doing major track work in the Midi-Pyrenees region for the next two years so there are no longer trains between Toulouse and Albi. It's all been replaced with bus service, which is a bit slower and (in our case, at least) behind schedule. Still, taking a bus through some of the small towns on the way was nice as we got to see different parts than we would have on a train, specifically houses and centrally-located buildings. Usually on the train, we see the backs of industrial buildings lining the tracks. Midi-Pyrenees borders Spain on the south and we could definitely see more of a Mediterranean influence as we rode along - lots of tan stucco houses with red ceramic roof tiles. It was also the first place we've been where interpretive plaques and brochures are written in French, English, and Spanish. It really did seem a lot like the southwestern US.

Albi Cathedral.

The major sight in Albi is the cathedral (which is now my favorite of all we've seen in France), but it's very different from every other cathedral we've seen in France. It was built in the late thirteenth century following the conclusion of the Albigensian Crusade, a military action undertaken to 1) kill a lot of heretics who lived in this area and 2) strengthen the king of France's hold on the region. The cathedral was thus built to be an imposing fortress-like structure that proclaimed the power of the Catholic Church. It's constructed entirely of red brick, there's no front door, the windows are very high (to prevent breaking from stone-throwing peasants!), and it really does look like a fortress. We didn't stand around outside to take too many pictures, though, as it was a hot sunny day - high 80s - very different weather from what we're accustomed to in Brittany! So we tried to go indoors whenever possible to stay cool.

Interior of the Albi Cathedral.

Last Judgement - sinners on the right, saved on the left.

The inside of the cathedral is a complete contrast to the outside. Every available inch of wall and ceiling was painted with beautiful frescoes, most of them never restored. They were painted in the fifteenth century by a group of Florentine artists hired by the bishop of Albi so all the paintings are done in Italian Renaissance style. Again, this is very different from the other cathedrals we've seen in France, which are usually just bare stone on the inside. Behind the altar is a huge wall-sized painting showing the Last Judgement, done by unknown Flemish painters in the same period as the ceiling and walls. It's a pretty cool painting, even if the middle section was removed later to make room for a door to a new chapel.

Courtyard of the Toulouse-Lautrec
Museum, formerly the archbishop's palace.

The other major sight in Albi is the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, built into what once was the bishop's palace (and which looks much like the cathedral from the outside!). Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was a late 19th century artist working in Paris, drawing the cafes, cabarets, and brothels he frequented, before dying of alcoholism and syphilis at age 36. (If you've ever seen the movie Moulin Rouge with Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, Toulouse-Lautrec is the dwarf played by John Leguizamo.) He was born in Albi, though, and the museum there has the largest collection of his art works in the world. Having never seen much of his work, it was interesting to learn about his life and his style.

Cloister of Saint-Salvi, Albi.

The only other thing we really did in Albi was visit the ruins of the cloister of Saint-Salvi, much of which was destroyed during the French Revolution, but now housing a municipal garden. Our hopes for a quiet cloister were dashed here, too, however. As we entered, we saw a shouting match between an elderly man and a teacher escorting a group of middle-school students. Since we came in during the fight, we don't know what it was all about, but we think one of the kids may have provoked the old man in some way, because it seemed that the teacher was angry at one of the students, too. But he saved most of his vitriol for the old man. It was a tense few minutes and we took refuge from that (and the heat!) in the attached church, before returning to the cloister when the school group left.

Basilica of Saint-Sernin, Toulouse.

We took the bus back to Toulouse for another night there, then in the morning continued visiting churches in the city. We saw the Basilica of Saint Sernin, housing the relics of a bishop-martyr of the city in the third century. Unfortunately, we were at the church so early that parts of it hadn't opened yet so we couldn't go into the crypt to see the remains. But it's still a beautiful austere Romanesque building from the thirteenth century. They also have an altar from 1096 consecrated by Pope Urban II, which is a good example of early medieval art.

Chapel of the Carmelites.

Weird asymmetrical cathedral of Toulouse.

We visited the chapel of a now-defunct convent of Carmelites to see the ceiling frescoes there, from the 17th century and painted directly on wood (which is unusual). They were also using the space as part of some sort of contemporary art exhibit taking place at various sites around Toulouse, involving a huge black tent and a recording of people talking. It was odd.

We also stopped the cathedral, which is an odd place. It's half Romanesque (11th/12th century) and half Gothic (13th century), but the two halves don't match up, making it asymmetrical and off-kilter. Strange.

Basilica of Saint-Sernin, Toulouse.

Something else we did that morning before leaving town was to stop by the big outdoor market in the city's main central square (which may be built over the old Roman forum, I'm not sure). After our hot day in Albi, I wanted to buy a straw or paper hat to wear during the rest of our trip. I actually wanted to buy in Venice, too, which is where I first saw them, but we never got around to. But I found a decent one in Toulouse. Sadly, it was a cool overcast morning, meaning I didn't really need a hat that day. Still, Lisa thinks it's very cute.

Finally, it was back to the hotel to collect our bags, check out, and head to the train station to get to the next stop on our tour: Carcassonne.

Back at the Ranch

Canal d'Ille et Rance.

We returned to Cesson for about forty hours so that we could do laundry, get some things done around the house, and take a few deep breaths before our upcoming ten-day tour of the rest of France. The Sunday we were back, our friend and colleague Margaret (featured in our entry on Lunch in Saint-Sulpice) took us around the local area.  We originally planned to go to Merlin’s forest with her, but with all the rain the day before, we decided it would be very muddy and went to Becherel instead.

Castle of Montmouron.

Instead, we stopped at a bunch of places, including the Montmouron castle and the canal (the Canal d'Ille et Rance) you saw in one of our very first entries! We feel like our time here is coming full circle.  The weather was beautiful, so we continued on to a couple of small towns, looking at old chateaus from the outside as well as visiting bookstores because first of all, we really love books, and second of all, I am still searching for Le roman d’Eneas for my dissertation. OSU doesn’t own a copy, so I’d have to wait for it to come in for a while.

Closed...because the cat is a lunatic?

After wading through books and making friends with the local cats (which of course was enough in itself to make my day), we visited a man who teaches calligraphy classes and who works at the Avranches scriptorium (where they house the manuscripts taken from Mont St. Michel’s library).  We’ve wanted to go all year but have somehow never gotten around to it.  He was very nice and gave Margaret all kinds of information about the summer course offerings.  We’re sorry we won’t be around to learn from him!

Lunatic cat.

Les Iffs church.

Afterwards, we went to a beautiful little church in the town of Les Iffs ("The Yews") and saw the yew trees around it.  We visited the inside, where there was a lot of interesting sculpture.  Then, we finished our visit and went back home to pack up for Toulouse!  We were very happy to spend time with Margaret and look forward to a lasting friendship.

Les Iffs Church interior.

Funny statue on the ceiling of Les Iffs Church.

Venice

Just one lovely site!

NB This was written by Aaron and Lisa. Also NB: Venice is a very picturesque city with the light and the water and the stone so it's very hard to narrow down our photo choices for this entry!

The canal at night.

The final stop on our northern Italian adventure was Venice. We arrived on a very hot day and went straight to our hotel to take a much-needed afternoon siesta before braving the sunshine. We were by far the youngest people staying in our hotel—everyone else seemed to be a good thirty years older! That’s about right since we travel like we’re from a different century anyway, following Aaron’s nineteenth-century travel guides and ignoring almost everything produced in the twentieth century.

We had some preconceptions about Venice—that it would smell very bad because of the water not having much movement and being very touristy. I wasn’t quite prepared for just how touristy it was; we named it the Mont St. Michel of Italy. With the water, confined space, and all the visitors, there was nary a local in sight! Still, we had a very enjoyable time.

Vaporetto.

We started by taking a vaporetto (water bus) to the art museum, where we saw lots of Titian and Tintoretto, none of it quite as enjoyable as the Florentine stuff in the Uffizi. The vaporetto was quite fun; there was a very competitive American family behind us with their giant backpacks and a rolling suitcase debating on where they needed to be on the boat to get the best view (as if they were the only ones important enough to get a good view). They seemed very concerned about it (I—Lisa here—think they must have read a travel guide telling them to be on one specific side) and the mother seemed like she was going to knock us over for the canal view. However, they learned as soon as they got on board that anyone with luggage must sit in the inside compartment, thereby having their plans thwarted.

8-foot naked boy with frog.

From the art museum, we walked to the end of the island to the old customs house, across the canal from Piazza San Marco. The customs house is now a contemporary art museum and at the point is an eight-foot-tall white statue of a naked boy holding a frog. We didn’t get it.

Art museum courtyard.

Speaking of art, we also went to a special exhibit on Canaletto. Our tickets to the art museum included admission to that exhibit, even though it was across town in another palazzo. Canaletto was an 18^th-cenury Venetian painter who specialized in painting views of the canals and buildings of Venice for tourists, especially British ones.

Speaking of art....

The exhibit was about his sketch book and the methods he used to draw the views before transferring them to a canvas and, in some cases, making engravings out of them to sell even more work. It was all very interesting. The palazzo the exhibit was housed, the Palazzo Grimani, was also interesting. It was the home of several doges (elected leaders) of Venice in the 16^th century and one room had a ceiling covered in a garden fresco with animals hiding amongst the plants.

Basilica San Marco.

Mosaic from the porch of San Marco.

The main draw in Venice, other than the canals, is the Piazza San Marco and its Basilica, and we tackled that on our second day in the city. The piazza was thronged with tourists and while we had to wait in line to get into the basilica, it really didn’t take long. At the door, the guard was turning away women who were inappropriately dressed (exposed shoulders or too-short skirts), something we’ve never seen in a French church! (The refusal that is, not the skimpy attire).

Four tetrarchs stolen from Constantinople.

Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, so you’ll have to take our word for it that it’s a cool place. It’s a real combination of Western, Greek, and even Arabian architecture and decoration. The inside is covered in gold-leaf mosaics of various Biblical scenes, most of them dating to the thirteenth century. It has lots of domes and is a square cross shape, a definite Greek influence. Plus, following the Fourth Crusade and the plundering of Constantinople by the French (who were looking to pay off their debts to the Venetians), a lot of the loot of Constantinople ended up in Venice, like a huge gold and jewel-encrusted panel depicting various saints (now behind the altar at San Marco) and four bronze horses (on top of the basilica). We could also see the unevenness of the floor where it had sunk in places over the centuries. It was an interesting place, but very crowded with tour groups, especially since most of the church was roped off and our route was carefully controlled.

Doge's Palace.

Clock tower in piazza
San Marco.

Connected to the basilica is the Doge’s Palace, the administrative center of Venice from the twelfth century to the nineteenth century. We saw the doge’s apartments, which included huge frescoes of maps of different parts of the world. We also saw lots of administrative rooms where various councils would meet. The Venetians had an amazingly complicated system of governance with all sorts of committees and sub-committees and bureaucrats. In some ways, the most interesting part was learning about how the whole thing worked. One of the coolest rooms was the massive assembly hall where all male aristocrats of Venice would meet to debate policy. Along the top of the wall are portraits of all the doges in Venetian history. We also got to see the prisons, walk across the “Bridge of Sighs,” (the bridge over the canal that connected the courtrooms with the prison), and examine a huge collection of Renaissance-era weapons, including an actual chastity belt! And here I thought they only existed in movies!

In contrast to many places we’ve been, we didn’t do a “church tour” of the city. We only went to I Frari, which has a massive altarpiece of Mary’s Assumption by Tintoretto, but we didn’t think it was all that great. The church did have some redeeming features, though, like the grave of Claudio Monteverdi (a sixteenth-century Venetian composer who pretty much invented modern opera) and a nice cloister that Lisa enjoyed through a window (we couldn’t go in). Again, we weren’t supposed to take pictures, but Lisa did snap one of the cloister since that was technically outside.

Spritz.

Gondola traffic jam!

In general, we didn’t really have fantastic food in Venice - perhaps because it’s so touristy, it’s hard to find high-quality local restaurants. For lunch one day, we bought picnic supplies at a grocery store and ate on a bench on the side of church, watching gondoliers try to sell their services to tourists. Our last evening there, after some take-away pizza, we bought a meringue and torrone and found what we thought was a quiet alleyway that ended at a small canal. It was fun (albeit hot) to watch the sun set between the buildings, but then the corner we were at quickly turned into gondola central – a new gondola passed about once every ten seconds! It was funny to watch the tourists go by, like the Japanese ones taking pictures of everything or a group of about six young people with several open bottles of wine having a party in a gondola. We did try a local specialty of Venice, though, a cocktail called a spritz., which was somehow bittersweet and tasted a bit like a girly old-fashioned.

Place of concert. Imagine music.

We capped off our time in Venice with an evening performance of Vivalid’s Four Seasons in a small Baroque church. Vivaldi was a native of Venice and he composed most of his music for the orchestra he taught at an orphanage for girls, where he worked. Because he’s a beloved native, we saw advertisements for at least three different musical ensembles with nightly Vivaldi performances. The one we saw was very good, especially the solo violonist. Lisa had never heard the Four Seasons all the way through, and this was a good introduction. It was also a great way to cap off our trip to Italy.

Bonus picture: Can we say scary?

Bonus picture for family members: kayaks beat gondolas.

Bonus picture for Lisa's dad: Casino.

An alley-way where we had lunch.