Running & Reading in Rennes: 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.