Italy - Greece Vacation 1999 - Venice

16 May 1999

The whole reason I picked this particular bar is that a lively quartet was playing. But they've just put their instruments down and walked off. Oh well.

Main canal as seen from the Ponte di Rialto.

Yesterday was grey and rainy. We took a vaporetto (water bus) from the train station to the stop nearest our hotel. You know you're in Venice as soon as you step off the train -- through the wide glass windows of the train station you can see gondolas, vaporetti and other small boats jostling for position as they cruise Venice's main canal.

We found our hotel, the Serenissima, buried deep in the alleys only a few minutes walk from San Marco.

[The band has started playing again. There's an elderly German couple sitting in front of them, and they insist on clapping along with every song. The violoinist is trying not to crack up.]

Anyway, from the hotel we decided to wander towards San Marco. I absently grabbed a hotel umbrella as we left, that turned out to be a great idea since it really started pouring as we walked.

There are no cars in Venice, but don't think it's a pedestrian paradise. Even in the rain, the streets are jammed with people. The umbrellas are particularly tricky in the small streets.

One lady in front of us had a broken umbrella, with bits of the metal skeleton poking out in random directions. She walked stodgily straight ahead, ignoring traffic flow and forcing people to choose between ducking or getting lacerated. Randy was laughing incredulously and kept repeating: "she's going to kill someone! She's going to kill someone!"

We quickly tired of walking in the rain and started looking for something indoors. We tried to get into St. Mark's Basilica, but we were thrown out for wearing shorts. So we tried the Museum Ducale, in the Doge's Palace. We got inside, only to be faced with another sign saying no shorts were allowed. But we went in anyway.

I was a little worried -- at first it looked as if it was going to be another collection of religious icons.

Instead, the palace turned out to have a number of surprises. First, we found a map room. The walls were covered in paintings (the world as known in the 17th century), and the floor was dominated by two massive globes, one the Earth and the other the Heavens.

After that were more religious paintings, interspersed with pictures of deities and mortals showering gifts upon Venice (anthropomorphised as a beautiful young woman).

But then another surprise: weapons and armor. And not just a set of mail and bits of old swords, this was the armory of the Council's Guard.

There were magnificent suits of plate mail, for men, horses, and children (?!). There were many swords, starting with the first crude weapons of the young city's hired mercenaries, progressing to the fine gilt longswords you'd expect of the premier maritime power of the known world. There were also huge two-handed swords, weilded by overfed but tragically undereducated gargantuans to break through enemy lines while their smaller but wiser compatriots followed with the more practical longswords.

Like the Emperor's busts in the Uffizi, the Doge's Palace (and particularly the accompanying narrative, a bargain at 7000 lira) really made you think about how political power was bought, held, and ultimately lost in the anarchy of the Italian city states of the Middle Ages. I'm reminded of Locke's comments about life being brutish and short. Or was that Hobbes? Don't drop names unless you know what you're talking about.

[The clarinet player just launched into a fast-paced solo, and the Germans have started up again. The violinist has stopped trying not to laugh.]

After the museum, we wandered back to the hotel to plan our dinner. The guidebook recommended a creperie in a non-touristy part of town (actually, there are no non- touristy parts of Venice), so we grabbed our stuff (particularly Randy's laminated map with an index) and headed off through the watery alleyways.

We found the building, but the restaurant had been replaced by a fairly generic- looking pizzaria. The guidebook did, however, recommend the restaurant across the street. They had an hour-long wait, so we went back to the generic pizzaria to wait, play cards, and drink beer.

[The band just started the Blue Danube. A young couple, probably honeymooning, is trying to waltz in a space the size of a postage stamp.]

The meal was great, and of course included our customary two litres of wine, plus a free digestive, which the staff brought to us either in appreciation of our excellent conversation or as a hint to leave.

[The waltzing couple is pretty painful to watch. Their dancing repertoir consists of a single move: stepping around in circles, with little regard to tempo. If you're a couple contemplating a trip to Venice, learn to waltz.]

On the way back from dinner, again on the Ponte di Rialto.

Anyway, we again found ourselves in fine spirits and quite lost in a labyrinthian suburb of an old Italian city. And the Venetian labyrinth is far more confusing than its Florentine or Roman counterparts. Seeing that Forrest and Tamara were the most sober, we cleverly gave the map to Randy. We would sprint off in one direction, then wait while Randy turned the map around a couple of times before proclaiming a new desired direction, at which point we'd start sprinting again.

Randy left early this morning. He had a 6:50 flight, so he had to catch the 4:30 ferry. Fortunately, a rambunctuous group of Italians woke us up at 4 as they walked back and forth in the street outside singing at the top of their lungs.

It was another grey morning. We dressed in long paints, knowing we'd want to visit St. Mark's. We walked to the Basilica and handed the grumpy cashier our 3000 lira.

The tile ceilings were amazing, but we had only a few chances to admire them. The real attraction, as far as we could tell, was the view of the square. Fortunately we were there during Mass, so the sounds of the unseen choir permeated the air.

[The Germans are cracking me up. Anytime there is a pause in the music, they lean forward expectantly, hands poised for another frenetic clapping session.]

Chris and Forrest in line at the bell tower in Piazza San Marco.

After the basilica, we went to the Camponile, the big bell tower in front of St. Mark's. We made several more jokes about our apparent addiction to long stairs, but in fact were led to a stylish elevator that whisked us to the top of the tower.

[A fast number. The Germans are going nuts.]

We stepped out of the elevator into an 8-bell cacophony. We joined the other two dozen tourists with their fingers in their ears, waiting for the noise to stop so they could get back to taking pictures. The only person oblivious to the noise was the old man minding the souvenir stand. He was idly straightening postcards as a massive bell swung directly above him. He wasn't wearing earplugs so he was either completely deaf or incredibly stupid. Based on my short interaction with him (I bought 3 postcards), he may have been both.

When the bells had stopped, we took our fingers out of our ears and looked around. The clouds had burned off almost completely, and we were looking down at a very sunny Venice with blue skies above. It was an amazing day in what was easily the most beautiful city we'd seen in a tour of beautiful cities. We looked at each other and asked the obvious question: "Why aren't we wearing shorts?"

We decided to visit Murano, an island next to Venice famous for its glasswork. We took another vaporetto, first a leisurely cruise down the main canal, then a faster, more direct line to the island (after a stop to buy gelati).

Forrest, Chris, Tamara and I on the vaporetto to Murano.

After a look at the glass blowing museum, we got down to business: buying stuff. We wandered up and down the small canals of Murano, going into glass shops looking for the perfect pieces to bring back.

The shops ranged from cheesy tourist traps with 2000 lira trinkets to flashy art shops where Armani-clad salesmen eyed us suspiciously as we inspected their multimillion-lira wares.

Forrest, Tamara and I settled on pieces from a cute little shop run by an eager young couple. We paid in cash, which for some reason Italian hotel- and shop-keepers find very endearing. Our new-found friends agreed to ship everything to our Seattle address, and we left to catch a vaporetto back to the hotel.

Chris and I attempted to phone some hotels in Athens to book rooms for tomorrow. I have advanced degrees in physics and mathematics, and Chris is an engineer and manager of the build lab of some of Microsoft's most strategic products. After working together for an hour with several phones, we were unable to get past the dial tone. We finally retreated to our hotel and sheepishly asked the concierge how to dial.

The magic incantations worked, and we were able to make our reservations.

Again, we followed my guidebook's recommendation to a restaurant that no longer existed. At this point we were tired of walking and agreed to go to a restaurant we'd seen in the alleys. It lacked some of the charm of other restaurant's we'd visited. We sat at a rough wooden booth. The menus were photocopied with the kind of bad English translations you see in cheap VCR manuals. The menu items all had a four-character code that the staff would use to enter our orders into handheld computers. The food was pretty good, however.

After dinner (which included very little alcohol, mostly because we didn't trust the wine there) we had time to kill. Forrest and Tamara contemplated a romantic cruise through the waterways, but it turns out that an evening gondola ride in Venice is more expensive than buying your own boat. We also considered a concert, but it was held pretty late, was very expensive, and the program we'd gotten from the hotel had TOURIST TRAP written all over it. So we skipped it.

So Forrest and Tamara decided to call it an early night. Chris used his newly-found telephone skills to call Alison (his girlfriend), then retired to watch Italian television.

So here I am in St Mark's square, at a small table with a by-now very cold caffe latte. There are around fifty of us at tables, drinking and talking and watching the band (actually a quintet). Another fifty or so people are standing in a ring around the tables, admiring the music but not willing to pay $10 for a cup of coffee to get closer.

Actually, I think I'm the only single person here. The other patrons are all couples, either young honeymooners, middle-aged sightseers, or elderly couples here with fifty other friends on one of those annoying tours that always seem to show up wherever you are, dumping overweight retirees with large cameras by the score to infiltrate local attractions with loud conversations about the hijinks on the tour bus or the quality of the previous night's sleep.

Anyway, it's a couples-only crowd and I'd probably feel out of place if I wasn't writing most of the time.

I should probably get back to the hotel -- we're going to get up early and enjoy Venice for a couple more hours before our flight to Athens.

17 May 1999

In the Rome airport. We're just waiting for the flight to Athens.

We got up this morning and wandered around Venice for a while. It was a cloudy day, at first the sun flirted with breaking through, but then heavier clouds rolled in. Fortunately it didn't start raining.

We hopped on a vaporetto near St. Mark's, and took it through the main canal and around the back end of the city. The bits of Venice near the Italian coast aren't terribly interesting. There are a lot of warehouses and parking garages, where goods are unloaded from large ships or trucks and bundled into smaller boats for delivery into the city.

Gondoliers on the main canal of Venice.

But once we swung around the south side of Venice, the scenery improved. Again we watched quiet houses, old hotels, and dignified parks glide by as the driver shouted and gestured at the other water traffic.

There's something uniquely classical about the decay in Venice. Buildings have plaster falling off, showing the brick underneath. Many of the doors have lost their paint and are rotting at the bottom. The stone is worn. Somehow it all looks good. That sort of decay in other cities just looks dirty. Maybe it's the flowers or the ivy or the water.

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