Saturday, April 25th, 2009: Venice, Italy

Bob:

I had been concerned about how our transfer from the bus tour to our cruise ship would go, but in the event it turned out to be no problem at all. Lino, our guide, arranged with Antonio, our tour bus driver, to momentarily stop just outside the cruise ship dock and we hopped off, retrieved our luggage, shook hands with both of those gentlemen, and waved farewell to the people on the bus. We could see the Splendour of the Seas towering above the dock, so we simply pulled our wheeled luggage about a block in that direction until we found some of those friendly Royal Caribbean people who were quite happy to take charge of our main luggage for the day.

Free of that encumbrance, we walked back into Venice with the ultimate goal of rejoining our group at St. Mark's Plaza for a glass blowing demonstration. Guided by my GPS and the street signs, we worked our way through the crooked, narrow, and unbelievably magical maze of streets and canals that is Venice. The streets were so narrow that the GPS did have problems tracking our exact location, occassionally beeping at me and complaining about "Poor Satellite Reception". But whenever we came out into a plaza or an open spot on a bridge over a canal, it would kind of shake itself and suddenly re-adjust our position. The route it plotted to St. Mark's Plaza was, however, sheer genius. Time and again it guided us down narrow alleys that for all the world looked like complete dead end cul de sacs, and then suddenly at the very end we would find a doorway onto a narrow passage that lead on the the next alley. Unbelievable.

I don't know how many of the folks who visit Venice take the time to wander around the areas back in from the Grand Canal, but in my opinion they should. It is much nicer on a sunny day, of course, and we had bright sunshine and a brilliant blue sky the day we were there. In these "backyard" areas, the canals are quite narrow and I find the small bridges that span them to be particularly charming. Plus, on the side canals you see the small, slice-of-life touches of everyday life in Venice such as windowboxes full of flowers or even the family wash hanging from the balcony of some ancient building.

As far as I can tell, all of the buildings in Venice are ancient, and many show the signs of centuries of wear and tear. Many buildings fronting the canals have sunk to the point that their first floor is clearly under water, so I expect that folks in those residences are only living in the upper stories. The sides of the buildings also suffer from the constant damp. Paint and sections of plaster are falling off some houses, while others have patches of moss.

The foregoing description emphasizes the physical reality of Venice, but completely misses the aesthetic and emotional impact of walking through the city. Venice is unique partly because it seems to be a city rising directly out of the water. The buildings on the Grand Canal kind of float between the blue sky and the shining, sun-dappled surface of the water in a way that just doesn't seem possible. You see it, but your mind doesn't really believe it.

The constant coming and going of boats on the Grand Canal gives it a unique charm as it almost pulses with activity like some giant aquatic aorta, supplying the body of the city with necessities of life. All food, building material, and other essentials must come down the Grand Canal including that most essential ingredient of all, tourists! Cheap tourists like us take the "vaporetto" or city boat lines that operate like a bus system in a normal city. Wealthier folks take the sleek, low-slung water taxi boats that burble along the canals. Tourists looking for a historical, romantic experience take the gondolas which are slow and expensive but offer an unforgettable experience. Even the police uses police speedboats to get around the city in a hurry (Donna Leon writes excellent mysteries set in Venice that vividly describe those things.)

The interior sections of Venice away from the Grand Canal are also unnatural in being a beautiful but completely perplexing urban maze. I have never successfully walked across Venice without getting lost, and I think my experience is typical of most tourists. Native Venetians, if one can believe those mystery novels of Donna Leon, have an internal map of all the city canals and alleys in their heads that they consult when planning how to walk from one place to the other. However, when you are in that maze, you can literally swing a cat and hit a beautiful, old building in any direction. I know of no other city with that density of interesting, gorgeous buildings.

The net result is that Monika and I always take a long time to walk across Venice, not just because we keep getting lost, but also because we are taking so many pictures. Whenever I see a pretty house with an curious balcony or a small canal with a graceful bridge and a mirror image reflection of the houses gleaming in the sun, I stop to take a picture. And Venice has so many of these scenes that I take a LOT of pictures, by which I mean hundreds and hundreds of pictures. Fortunately, with modern digital photography I don't end up carrying umpteen cans of film, but by the end of the day I ran out of room on a 4 gigabyte memory chip in my Olympus Evolt 510 SLR.

Despite the delays, we did catch up with our group at Plaza San Marco. Phyllis sat down while Lois, Monika, and I searched out a relatively cheap gelato (ice cream) stand (1.40 Euro per scoop). Monika and I each settled for a single scoop while Lois bought double scoops for her and Phyllis, and we hustled back to the bell tower to give Phyllis hers. The bell tower is a remarkably tall and plain looking obelisk-shaped tower that juts up out of St. Mark's Square about 100 meters away from St. Mark's Cathedral. I should warn the Gentle Reader, however, about the generally sky-high prices of pretty much everything in Venice. Just sitting at a restaurant typically cost 1.50 Euro or more per person, and the food was correspondingly expensive. Phyllis and Lois, for example, had to pay 12 Euros each for a small pizza for lunch, and the waitress there absolutely refused to let Monika and I, who were not that hungry, split one, whereupon we left.

But it wasn't just sitting and eating that cost more in Venice. The public bathrooms near St. Mark's Plaza were priced at 1.50 Euro per person per visit! That's almost 2 bucks a pee! Lino, our tour guide, had joked that if you stand still and breathe too much air in Venice they will try to charge you for it, and I could see that his jest was not that far from the truth.

We accompanied our bus group one last time to a small glass shop on one side of St. Mark's Plaza. First we watched a master glass blower make both a jug and a horse. It was an amazing process and we were all just sorry when at the end he broke them up and put the pieces back in the oven to be remelted. Monika found a nice necklace of black beads with gold flake inclusions and we bought that to take along.

Taking leave of the bus group, we walked a bit more with my sisters. Unfortunately St. Mark's Cathedral was closed but the gift shop, predictably enough, was still open so we could go in there and all get a look at how the interior of the church is covered with golden mosaics. When we discussed what time they should start back to catch their shuttle boat a couple blocks from St. Mark's Plaza at 2:00 p.m., Monika said they should leave at 1:00, Lois thought 1:15 would be good enough, and Phyllis thought 1:30 would give them plenty of time to get back. We all laughed and as Lois commented, you could right there in a nutshell see the cultural differences between the German, the typical American, and the laid-back American!

We left my sisters having their 12 Euro pizzas for lunch and decided to walk out toward the Arsenal section of Venice before heading back to our ship. Along the way we passed the Carabineri station and probably the police station. I have never understood why Italy seems to have two separate police forces, the Carabineri and the police, but the Inspector Brunnetti novels of Donna Leone make it clear that they are truly independent law-enforcement organizations.

We found a canal leading directly into one gate into the Arsenal, but we were surprised to find that it was still an active naval institution of some kind and therefore closed to the public. There was a maritime museum in the adjacent building, but by this time we had been on our feet for the better part of 6 hours and were getting too tired to take on a museum. Also, we only had an hour or so before we supposed to board the Splendour Of The Seas, and that, as the Gentle Reader knows from previous Wanderungs, is not nearly enough time for me to do any museum, much less a naval museum!

Putting the naval museum on our list of things to do in the future, we returned to the vaporetto stop and bought one way tickets good for an hour (6.50 Euro!). We chose to take the vaporetto route down the Grand Canal to return to the Piazza Roma because that offered us the water-level view of all the magnificent palaces on the Grand Canal. If you take the vaporetto, make sure to get the outside seats either in the extreme bow or the extreme stern of the boat, because those offer the absolutely best positions for taking some wonderful photographs of the passing scenery.

The vaporetto makes a lot of stops on both sides of the Grand Canal, so the trip back took us about an hour total and I was busily taking pictures from the starboard side of the back cockpit the entire time. Monika found a seat on the port side in back, so we pretty much had both sides of the canal covered, photographically speaking. The ride also gave me time to rest my aching legs and back, and to regain enough energy to walk the last 1/2 mile or so from Piazza Roma over to the cruise ship terminal. There, we once more happily surrendered ourselves into the welcoming hands of Royal Caribbean folks. We signed in and then sat down with a glass of champagne and a brownie before moseying up the gangplanck to our cabin where a nice bowl of fruit awaited us. Ahhh, luxury.

After the mandatory life boat drill, we had one final view of Venice from the top deck as our ship eased its way out of the dock and down the lagoon. It was the same route we had taken with Heinke and Gustl on the Astor during Wanderung 10, but this time the sun was still shining so we had great views of Venice, St. Mark's Plaza, the Doge's Palace, and all the buildings fronting the lagoon werer bathed in the warm light of the setting sun as we glided quietly out to sea.

Waving good bye to a truly unique city, we waited until we were out on the Adriatic Sea and then went to table 78 in the dining room for our first meal aboard ship. It was a quiet meal for us as we were the only people at our table for six, but that also let us listen to a pianist and violinist who were playing live chamber music. And after the go-go-go of the bus tour we enjoyed the chance to relax and unwind. The evening show featured a very talented mime plus a couple of numbers performed by the ship's song and dance troupe, which in that case consisted of six dancers and four singers. And so to bed once again on the high seas, gently rocked on the bosom of the deep.