Yesterday I took a train to just outside of Venice, through the Alps. It was very pretty, but I didn't take any pictures, or do anything else. Today I actually went to Venice, and took a bunch of pictures. I'll put those in a separate post, because I have a lot to write.
Venice has a reputation as the most beautiful city in the world. However, this is 90% based on the Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal, with various other churches providing the rest. More residential areas are marked by narrow twisting streets full of old buildings with crumbling masonry, and not as richly decorated as the palazzi on the canal. They have seen better days, and when they saw those days, they would telegraph each other about them, or maybe send a carrier pigeon. This mass of marrow twisty streets is made worse by the canals themselves. Imagine that your home city has been split into 117 different sections that only have three or four ways in and out of each one (unless you want to get all wet and possibly covered in sewage), and you can see why having all of those canals kinda sucks for tourists. You can't get too lost if you have any hope of finding the right bridges, which is easier said than done because of the crazy disordered streets, and side alleyways that don't appear on any maps (if you want a map that shows everything, it will need to be the size of a nice flatscreen.)
Then there's the matter of the Grand Canal. It makes a big S through the city, and there's only three footbridges across it. One is by the train station, one is the famed Rialto Bridge (this is where you go for cheap souvenirs), and one is by the Accademia. There are no continuous sidewalks between them, because this has always been a city ruled by the filthy rich, and a lot of then decided that their palazzi needed to be right on the Grand Canal, pedestrians be damned. As such, using the bridges is a wee bit tricky, and results in the second most common sight in Venice being lost tourists (the most common sight is birds). Other than that, you have two options. You can catch a water taxi, which can take you anywhere in the Grand Canal or around the edges of the city. This is a nice way to see a lot of the Grand Canal without shelling out €80 for a 45 minute gondola ride, but at €7 for a one-way trip, it's not cheap. The other option is to go to one of 5 crossings and take a ride in a traghetto. A traghetto is basically a gondola that has had the fancy benches and ornaments removed. It costs €2 per ride, but you get 5 minutes in the Grand Canal, on a gondola, with a dude in a striped shirt standing on the back and rowing. Besides, Venice will get that money from you another way.
Once you make it through the labyrinth (which is charming if not pretty), you get to the Piazza San Marco, AKA the best city center square I've seen yet. You've got a four or five story colonnaded building on three sides in white. You've got the towering Campanile. You've got an astronomical clock with a winged lion (the Venetians love winged lions) on it. Then you have the two buildings everybody comes to see: the Basilica San Marco, and the Doge's Palace. The basilica is a massive Byzantine cathedral, built to house all the shit Venice stole from them in a Crusade 900 years ago. There are big domes, the famous 2000 year old horses on the front (actually those are in the Museum in the church, the ones outside now are replicas from 150 years ago), and a collection of interior mosaics that puts the St. Louis Basilica to shame in both size and opulence (this is a staggering achievement, considering our basilica is the largest collection of mosaics in the Western Hemisphere, and is from the 20th century, while St. Mark's mosaics were put in in the 13th century).
Not to be outdone by a bunch of guys in long robes wearing pointy hats, the doges of Venice came up with their own long robes and pointy hats, and built their palace right next door to St. Mark's (which actually used to be the doge's chapel). The palace is arranged around a central courtyard with a double colonnade, and while the outside has nothing on Versailles, the inside might. Not content to have great artists paint the ceiling of the place, the doges had old Italian masters like Tintoretto, Titian, and others paint the ceilings and the walls (because Venetian mirrors don't scream opulence if you're Venetian). The paintings are mostly scenes of Venetian naval might, or of spoils of war, and they are absolutely massive. Between them, there is of course the gold leaf over carved wood decor used everywhere in Versailles, except the Doge's Palace is about 200 years older. Versailles is still just a bit more over the top, but whoever put it together knew where the doges lived, and was French (which means it made him feel inferior and he wouldn't feel whole again until Versailles was even more luxuriant).
Tomorrow I'm going to Murano, and then seeing more of Venice. The pictures will follow presently.
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