Lyon, or, Like the Romans, We Crossed the Rhone

Avignon and the Rhone from the train.

We took an early-morning train from Avignon to Lyon. Unfortunately, this meant taking an even earlier shuttle to the train station because the new(ish) station serving high-speed trains through Avignon is several miles outside of town while the older station serving "normal" trains was just a short walk from our hotel. Once in the new station, we were surprised by the large number of Germans hanging around. Only when we got on our train with them did we realize that the train continued on through France to Frankfurt, Germany, so presumably these were all tourists on their way home.

Fourvière Hill with the basilica and the Eiffel Tower look-alike.

Lyon from the summit of Fourvière Hill.
Mont Blanc is somewhere in all that haze.

We got to Lyon mid-morning. It's almost straight north up the Rhone from Avignon so it marks the point at which our "Circle Tour of France" made the big turn northward to start heading home. Lyon is in the Rhone-Alpes region, my fourteenth region (2/3 of the way to seeing every region!) and Lisa's fifteenth. Lyon is the third-largest city in France and it's situated at the confluence of two major rivers, the Rhone and the Saone, with a a huge steep hill behind it - not unlike Pittsburgh, actually. This strategic position appealed to the ancient Romans, who founded the city in the first century BC, and it became the most important city in Roman Gaul. After a day in Arles, I was excited about continuing my tour of ancient Roman cities in southern France!

Hotel staircase.

We started by taking a bus across town from the train station to "old Lyon," the medieval/Renaissance part where our hotel was located. The desk clerk was SO friendly and helpful! He gave us a map, a booklet about old Lyon, restaurant recommendations, sights to see, where to get the best views of the city, where to get the best ice cream - everything we could possibly want to know. He was better than a tourist office and gave us a good impression of Lyon right away. The hotel itself was charming - on a pedestrian street in an old building with a spiral staircase and all the rooms opening onto the staircase. The hotel was one of the original post offices when it was first established in France.  As a result, it slanted just a bit!

Stairs up the hill.

From there, we walked back the way we came across the Saone River to the Saturday market we saw lining the river. We foraged for supplies for a picnic lunch: bread and cheese (of course) plus a lot southern produce we don't really have in Cesson - cherries, olives, and watermelon. We also got a huge hunk of nougat to take home to the US to share with Lisa's mom. We decided to have our picnic lunch on top of Fourvière Hill, the huge hill behind old Lyon. It was a good idea, but we stupidly decided to walk up the hill rather than take the funicular. (Lisa adds that she ended up being very cranky while sweating up the hill in a sun dress.)  It was a hot, sunny, muggy day and climbing hundreds of steep steps up a 950-foot-tall hill was not fun. However, we enjoyed our picnic at the top, cooled down, and got some great views from the summit looking east over the city. In fact, we could even see Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps and about a hundred miles away on the French-Italian border!

Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière.

The summit of Fourvière has a couple features that make it like a mini-Paris. First, there's the funicular up the hill, similar to the one in Paris going up the hill of Montmartre (although Lyon's is older). Second, there's the Tour Metallique, a 19th-century tower that looks like the upper portion of the Eiffel Tower. Third, there's the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, built in the late 19th century to thank the Virgin Mary for saving Lyon from the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War (sort of like Paris' Sacre-Coeur being built in the same time period to ask God's forgiveness because of the "divine punishment" of the French defeat by the Prussians). The basilica is very different from Sacre-Coeur, though. It's not as big and it's built in more of a traditional western church style than the neo-Byzantine architecture of Sacre-Coeur. Inside, there are lots of mosaics dealing with the life of Mary and her miraculous interventions in French history. Sadly, there's a large restoration project in the works right now so there was a lot of scaffolding (like so many other churches we've visited this year!). Below the main sanctuary is a much-less ornate one dedicated to Joseph - apparently the money ran out after completing the Mary-centric upstairs!

Joan of Arc mosaic from the basilica.

Outside the basilica, we refilled our water bottle at a public water fountain and met a young American couple doing the same thing. They knew we were American because of our stainless steel water bottle, they said; no French person would carry something like that! They're from Portland, Oregon, but they've been working in Paris for the past year (they didn't say specifically what they did) and were now traveling around France, much like us. It was strange to meet our doppelgangers.

Roman theater.

Part of a chariot race mosaic, Gallo-Roman Museum.
This guy obviously did not win the race.

Also on top of the hill are the remains of two ancient Roman theaters and the Gallic-Roman Museum. The Roman city was actually located on the top of the hill and it was only in the Middle Ages that this area was abandoned as the population moved down to the lowlands along the rivers (probably because the aqueducts stopped working and they needed fresh water - that's Lisa's guess). We looked at the theaters from the outside but didn't go in and climb around. I had my fill of provincial Roman theaters the day before at Arles. Plus, it was so hot and humid that we preferred to go inside the museum. It was fantastic, probably the best collection of ancient Roman material I've seen outside of Italy (although, to be fair, I haven't seen much ancient Roman stuff outside Italy). I think it was more interesting and better-explained than even the Louvre's collection. It was one of the few places where I commandeered Lisa's camera to get pictures of the inscriptions, funerary monuments, statues, mosaics, and sarcophagi, all of which I can hopefully use the next time I teach a class on Roman civilization. (I could post tons of pictures here, but I won't since most of them are probably only of interest to classicists like me!)

Traboule (covered passageway).

Cathedral.

After the museum, we walked back down the hill into old Lyon - a much easier walk than coming up. We did some shopping at an artisanal honey store, a used book store, and a stained glass store. We also walked through one of the traboule, the covered passageways that were constructed in the Renaissance to link two parallel streets by going through the courtyards of the buildings between. They were meant to protect the skeins of silk as they were moved between workshops (Lyon was a major silk-production center in the Renaissance). We checked out the cathedral, which was just a big Gothic church. Most of the exterior sculpture was destroyed during the French Revolution. The only real distinguishing feature that I noticed was that the tower of the church wasn't the pointy Gothic spire you see on northern churches but a squat square tower in the Italian style, like what one sees on old churches in Rome. We also looked at the "archaeological park" next to the cathedral which contained the remains of very old churches pre-dating the cathedral. In fact, Lyon claims to have the oldest Christian community in France.

Dramatic clouds, but where's Jesus or Mary?

We had dinner in old Lyon, too, then went to the ice cream place recommended by the hotel clerk. We shared a scoop of blood orange sorbet and it was delicious! On the walk back to the hotel, we stopped to admire the setting sun and the clouds. It was very dramatic and it looked like something out of one of the sixteenth-century paintings of Jesus or Mary we had seen in Italy the week before (although I don't think it looks as dramatic in these pictures as it did in person). After that, it was off to bed before our day-trip the next day to Geneva, Switzerland. Lyon is definitely a city I would like to which I would like to return. It was very beautiful and everyone was so friendly. It would be a great place to come spend a relaxing few days, I think.

Bonus picture for Lisa's dad: Dionysus!

The Roman Emperor Caracalla. (Or is it my graduate adviser?)

Bonus picture for Lynn: Stained-glass store.

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.

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.