The Great Gigolo Hunt of 2007, Part 5B

Day Five (Afternoon)—October 4, 2007

Once the wayward calf of our group was found and leashed to his wife, we made our way through the crowd to the next tourist hot spot following the Piazza del Duomo and the Bapistry: the Piazza della Signoria. Basically, it’s an open air museum. Michelangelo’s David stood guard just outside the Piazza della Signoria’s main building, the Palazzo Vecchio, for a few hundred years before the Florentine city elders decided that the elements were taking a bit of a toll on Dave and he was moved inside the Accademia dell’Arte.

Many a Florentine pigeon mourned that day.

There is now a full-sized replica of David outside the front doors of the Palazzo Vecchio, where he spends his time hanging out (literally) across from his good friend, Hercules, who had just kicked the ass of Cacus. (Say that five times fast.)

The Palazzo Vecchio itself...well, I would’ve liked to see the interior of it, but there just wasn’t enough time. As it was, we didn’t even really get to view the various artwork on the far side of the Piazza della Signoria (I’m pretty sure I caught a glimpse of a huge statue of Cosimo I de’ Medici and Neptune palling around over there); most of our time was spent looking over the fairly packed Loggia dei Lanzi as we pushed our way past the crowd, past the Galleria degli Uffizi (man, I wish I could’ve gone in there, but...well, you know, just not enough time...), and on to our next stop, the Basilica di Santa Croce.

I know it’s stating the obvious, but I really would’ve loved to have more than just one day to see all of Florence. Even if it was humid as can be (and I live in the muggy south, mind you). Just so much to see, and never enough time to see it all.

And even where there was enough time, there were certain things we just couldn’t see. Case in point: the Basilica di Santa Croce. Santa Croce is the largest Franciscan church in the world as well as Florence’s primary Franciscan church, and as this day just so happened to fall on the Feast of Saint Francis, Santa Croce was closed to the general (um, tourist) public.

There are a couple of quite famous Italian bones in Santa Croce, some of whom you may have heard of: that artist guy Michelangelo, that astronomer guy Galileo, that writer guy Machiavelli, that opera guy Rossini, and that radio guy Marconi.

But one Famous Florentine you won’t find there is Dante Alighieri. If you remember your old advanced literature class, you should remember at least a little bit of a certain poem he wrote called The Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy, among its many accomplishments, is the first Western piece of literature written in a “Vulgate” language as opposed to Latin. Rather than being in the language of the Church, The Divine Comedy was in that vernacular language known as Italian that the scruffy people on the street spoke.

And Florence and her politics permeate The Divine Comedy, particularly in some of the smellier parts of the Inferno. Dante very much loved his city, but political finagling led to his exile and he died never seeing his native city again. As any first-time reader of the Inferno probably remembers (and, yes, it was probably just the Inferno, since reading about Hell and its torments always came across as much sexier than Purgatory and Paradise), Dante’s Florence was torn in two by the Ghibellines and the Guelphs (and don’t mix your White Guelphs with your Black Guelphs). Short explanation: the Ghibellines liked the way the Holy Roman Emperor was doing things as opposed to the Pope whereas the Guelphs (yep, you guessed it) liked how the Pope was doing things as opposed to the Holy Roman Emperor. Dante was a Guelph, and after a whole lot of feudin’ and fussin’ that would have made the Hatfields and McCoys proud the Guelphs eventually won out and exiled the Ghibellines.

Oh, and what started the whole Ghibelline/Guelph war? A bride who was ditched at the altar, more or less.

At any rate, once the Guelphs held Florence in their hands, there was a further split (gee, politics have never been easy, have they) between the Black Guelphs and the White Guelphs (which initially really did start out as a family feud). Short explanation: the Black Guelphs wanted the Pope to keep his finger in the Florentine Pie whereas the White Guelphs wanted more independence from Rome. The Black Guelphs (aided by some Ghibellines) got the upper hand on the White Guelphs and whupped them pretty good. Dante, a White Guelph, was then banished from Florence, and he died in exile and was buried in Ravenna.

At any rate, enough of the history/literature lesson. I mainly go into it because, since we couldn’t actually go inside Santa Croce, we spent some of the 2-hour break we had in the Piazza di Santa Croce sitting within spitting distance of a marble statue of Dante sitting outside Santa Croce.

Now that I think about it, my Mom and I probably could have spent some of that 2-hour break going back to the Piazza della Signore to get a closer look at what we didn’t get a chance to see, but a) it was very very humid and we were feeling really sticky, b) we were dead tired and our feet were hurting, and c) we didn’t want to run the risk of getting lost.

Of course, we could have went to see the optional demo at the leatherworker’s shop that some of our group went to see, but since the Piazza di Santa Croce had quite a few souvenir stands and food stands and we still had a bit of souvenir shopping to do (and not much time to get it done in, seeing as tomorrow would be our last full day in Italy), we opted out of it.

As an aside, my third wedding anniversary was coming up in a couple of weeks. Leather is the new traditional third anniversary wedding gift, and as I’d yet to get my Bitter Half anything in terms of a souvenir I probably should have gone to Ye Olde Leatherworker’s Shoppe. (Then again, being a good Catholic girl and all, anything leathery I would have been interested in buying him probably wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to buy in front of my Mom. As it is, I got him an apron with David and his boys from the neck down on it.)

So we tied up a few loose ends on our respective souvenir shopping lists and, bah, it wasn’t until Florence when I found the naughtier type of postcard that I’d been looking for all along (the Roman and Venetian ones I saw were far too modest). Of course, mailing postcards out at this point would’ve been...well, I would’ve been back home before they arrived.

Which is something that kind of hit me as we were sitting around resting our slowly swelling, tired feet...my vacation was nearing its close. I’d seen so much in the last few days, yet there was still so much I hadn’t seen and there was still so much to absorb. (And, as I write this more than a year later, I feel that there are still things about it that have yet to sink in. Which is a good thing...keeps the memory fresh and keeps the old brain muscles processing.)

At any rate, after a couple of hours resting a bit and sweating a lot in the Florentine heat, our group reassembled and we headed off to our hotel, to get ready for our dinner party...

Gaze upon the pictures, while they last...

The Great Gigolo Hunt of 2007, Part 5A

Seeing as it’s coming up on a year since I made this initial trip to begin with, it’s just about time I get off my tush and start wrapping things up here. Usual real life shenanigans have hindered this so far. At any rate, on with the show...

Day Five—October 4, 2007

It’s the penultimate day of my vacation (I don’t count the entire day spent flying back, since that was pretty much a lost day), and on the menu is the chunky goodness that is Fiery Firenze, Florid Florence, the Tinseltown of Tuscany.

Few things can actually make me feel good about waking up. The gentle nuzzling of a kitten (as opposed to the smothering of fat cat butt in your face), the warm feeling of a loved one’s arms around you (as opposed to the sharp jab of their elbow into your side), the gentle pitter patter of rain when you realize it’s the weekend and you can sleep in late (as opposed to realizing your alarm didn’t go off last night and it’s Monday and the snow’s already 2’ deep)...yes, that sort of thing. And to this I can add the smell of fresh baked croissants. It just so happened that our room was almost directly over the kitchen, and it was still dark outside when I started smelling the delightfully delicate scent of some lovin’ from the oven. (There’s a reason my bitter half calls me a bread whore...I do so love my baked goods, carbs be damned.)

Breakfast, without a doubt, was most tasty.

We left Torbole before most of the locals were awake, so we didn’t see much that was different from what we saw coming in. We didn’t get a chance to go by Lake Garda again, so I couldn’t tell whether the hazy fog-shrouded morning look of the lake was any different than the hazy fog-shrouded evening look of the lake. But no matter...we were on to Florence, the heart of the Italian Renaissance.

And, it would turn out, the central location for the Invasion of Italian Mosquitoes upon my person. But more on that later.

While I’m at it, I should probably mention that the humidity level in Florence was almost as bad as having a fine spray of hot, sticky honey covering you. I don’t do well with humidity as it is, but it’s true what you’ve heard about Tuscany: it’s quite lovely.

Florence started out as a Roman soldiers’ settlement established by Julius Caesar. Because of the Rose Parade-quantity of flowers all around, he named it “Florentia,” which more or less means “flowery” or “flowering.”

It’s a couple hours drive from Lake Garda to Florence, and we got into town around late morning. Again, due to the narrow width of most Italian city streets, we’d be taking a walking tour. We were given about 45 minutes or so to grab a quick bite before meeting up with our local guide Francesca to go check out David’s cojones (well, I mean, c’mon, they’re right there).

We were dropped off for lunch at St. Mark’s Square (the Florentine version is significantly smaller than the Venetian version). Small shops surrounded the square, and we grabbed a couple of panini sammiches and some indulgent cannelloni. As my Mom sat near a statue of Manfredo Fanti (an important Italian general throughout the ongoing Italian Risorgimento struggles for independence against Austria during the 18^th century...his star is usually overshadowed by Garibaldi and his Red Shirts in the south) and hobnobbed with a couple of Canadians from our group, I once again braved the International Phone System to call home and see how things were holding up. My bitter half asked where I was today. “Florence,” I said. “We’re going to go see David soon.” “David’s CENSORED FOR YOUR PROTECTION, you mean,” he said. Well, shyeah, I mean it’s right there.

Michelangelo wasn’t the first choice for the sculptor of David. As part of a massive Fine Arts project commissioned by various Florentine big wigs to decorate the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, the work had been started about 40-odd years before Michelangelo got his hands on the honkin’ huge block of Carrara marble that would end up as what is quite possibly his most famous sculpture. When he first received it, some chipping had been done near the base of the marble block, but nothing terribly definite.

Michelangelo is on the record as saying that his approach to sculpture is that the work is already completely formed in the marble, and all he does is chip away until the work emerges.

Be that as it may, Florence wouldn’t know what hit it when the then 26-year old local boy started working on it.

The ramifications soon spread throughout most of Europe, and eventually the world.

I’m not an art critic, nor do I play one on TV, but I know what pleases my eye. David very much does so. Impressive is far too modest a term to describe it. And, yes, he’s huge. Apart from a slight dimpled imperfection near the right scapula (the marble block wasn’t quite big enough), David is well nigh flawless.

David is often touted as the symbol of the Italian Renaissance. I’m not going to go into a historical lesson here, but without the Renaissance, it’s very unlikely our western world would be as it is today. Sure there’s plenty that’s mucked up about our modern world, but in terms of critical thinking and expression, I for one am glad it happened. Maybe it’s time for another one.

At any rate, after completion David sat just outside the Palazzo Vecchio in the Piazza della Signoria—in the open air, with not even a fig leaf for protection—for nearly 400 years. There’s a full-sized replica there now.

Then one day, after nearly 400 years enjoying the Florentine open air, it was decided that David would be given room and board in the Accademia dell’Arte del Disegno, Europe’s first academy of drawing (so, do YOU have what it takes to be a serious art student?) set up by the Medici family.

You do not win a prize if you guess that photography is strictly prohibited in the Accademia dell’Arte. So I have no naughty pictures of David. In days of old, the alcove David sits in now was pretty much an open foyer so, while protected from the elements, he could continue to flash his junk at passersby on the street in front of the Accademia dell’Arte. Now, the foyer is closed off and the Accademia dell’Arte is treated more as a standard museum. Whether it also houses sketches of Tippy, Puppy, and the Pirate is up to speculation on my part, since our tour group basically only had enough time to circle around David once before having to move on.

And we moved on to what is quite possibly the architectural landmark of the Florentine skyline: the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. In tasteful white, green, and pink marble.

Keeping this white, green, and pink marble clean is no easy task, as Florence tries to win the endless battle of preserving Santa Maria del Fiore, but since it took well over a hundred years to construct it, a little upkeep here and there is naturally called for.

The, well, main pointy things of the Santa Maria del Fiore are Giotto’s Bell Tower and the Duomo by Brunelleschi. The dome at St. Peter’s in Rome is a bit bigger than the Duomo, but the Duomo held the world’s biggest church dome title for about 150 years.

We got to take an all-too-brief peek at the interior of Santa Maria del Fiore, so fast indeed that practically all my pictures came out blurry, showing the great speed with which we toured the interior (which you couldn’t really tell from the huge clock inside, since it only has one hand that moves every 24 hours). I didn’t even get a chance to get a good look at the Last Judgment painting that adorns the underside of the Duomo. So much to see, and never enough time.

Just outside the Santa Maria del Fiore is the Piazza del Duomo. Here you will find what is commonly believed to be the oldest building in Florence: the Battistero di San Giovanni. St. John’s Baptistry is in the shape of an octagon. Whether Chuck Norris was skulking around there is something I’ll never know, due to the overwhelming crush of humanity that was trying to get a look at Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, gilded bronze doors which are also known as the East Doors. (Actually, these are replicas of the original gilded bronze doors, which had to be taken out of the open air in order to preserve them.) The East Doors/Gates of Paradise depict scenes from the Old Testament, in super cool raised detail, whereas the other gilded bronze doors of the Baptistry (South Doors and North Doors) get their inspiration from the New Testament and the lives of various saints, including St. John the Baptist.

The Gates of Paradise are quite a tourist draw, and if you’re lucky enough to get close enough long enough to get a decent view, all the more power to you.

It was at this point that a member of our group decided to wander off and get lost in the crowd. So here is as good a point as any to take a bit of a break before cranking things up again...

The first serving of my Florentine photos are here.

The Great Gigolo Hunt of 2007, Part 4B

Day Four—October 3, 2007

I had my itchy trigger finger ready to snap out of focus pictures. But, like the Sistine Chapel, photography is strictly forbidden inside both the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Basilica. (It has something or other to do with Fuji Film owning the copyright on reproduction rights to the artwork inside.) Up to this point, our little audio devices had been quite serviceable, but now they decided to throw a hissy fit of the first water. As a result, most of the audio commentary from our local guide Lucia was lost (well, that and we kept picking up part of a German group’s tour), and a lot of the details of what I saw inside the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Basilica remain pretty sketchy for me.

First of all…you may be asking yourself what the heck is a Doge, and why doesn’t the name sound more Italian. Well, maybe not the latter…but the Doge was basically the elected ruler of the Republic of Venice. The word is more or less part of the regional dialect, but it’s close to the standard Italian duce, or duke. Or just plain leader.

The more you know.

At any rate, the Doge’s Palace is big and pink and gray and white. Venice, a commercial power that pretty much called all the shots in its heyday, wanted to make sure any approaching visitors were treated at first sight to a display of Venice’s glory and wealth, and that’s what the Doge’s Palace does.

As a major commercial center, Venice incorporated some stylistic, artistic, and architectural borrowings from those oh so wicked heathen Arabs from the East, who liked the Byzantine look so much they decided to conquer Constantinople and make it Istanbul. (At least I think this is why they did it.) This was especially evident inside St. Mark’s Basilica, but there’s a fair smattering of it here and there inside the Doge’s Palace. Now I don’t mean to say there are minarets and such all over the place, but the architecture was more than superficially different from the sheer tonnage of marble columns I’d seen in Rome.

Now, even though photographs can’t be taken inside the Doge’s Palace, they were permitted in the inner courtyard. St. Mark’s Basilica is clearly seen from the courtyard, and pigeons were pretty much absent.

The Doge’s Palace was meant to show the wealth of Venice, and as a result it isn’t afraid to flaunt its bling. The Golden Stairway didn’t go totally off the deep end (in that the steps themselves weren’t made out of gold—rather, the ceiling above it is largely golden), but obviously the Doges weren’t overly concerned with modest restraint.

The interior of the Doge’s Palace was no less impressive (or gaudy), even though every once in a while you could feel the floor shift slightly beneath your feet. (Venice is prone to flooding and the foundation of the Doge’s Palace is pretty soggy, although we were repeatedly reassured that it was structurally sound.) Prior to Italy’s unification, Venice was a wealthy republic, and the Doge’s Palace shows just how crazy you can go when you have oodles of money (you just have to take my word for it, since pictures of the inside are verboten).

I’m pretty sure the main chamber where the Doges held their meetings with their advisors is bigger than my entire house.

But at least the floors in my house don’t shift underneath me.

And while there’s still a lot of impressive art in the Doge’s Palace (lots of Titians hanging here and there), a lot of it has taken out (I believe Napoleon looted a lot of it and took it to Paris).

Now, I’m trying to remember the layout here, but at some point we crossed the inside of the Bridge of Sighs on our way down to the dungeons underneath the Doge’s Palace. Now, why is it called the Bridge of Sighs? Because prisoners who crossed the bridge from the Doge’s Palace dungeons were basically going to their deaths, since once you were in the dungeons that was it. I figure that kind of warrants at least a sigh or two.

The dungeons would have looked a little more imposing if all the tourist graffiti wasn’t scrawled on the walls. (I do remember many low ceilings, and lots of low lighting.) But as for the size of the actual dungeon cells, well, they were not too much smaller than my residence hall room in San Francisco. Of course, back in the day they were packed from wall to wall with Venice’s worst offenders, and it doesn’t look like there was much in the way of bathroom amenities….

There are only two reported successful escapes from the dungeons under the Doge’s Palace. One was Casanova (and there’s some whispered talk that the Doge at the time, who was one of Casanova’s lovers, facilitated the escape). The other was, I believe, a Sicilian magician, but the name I heard in German doesn’t seem quite right.

After the tour of the Doge’s Palace, we were led back out to the courtyard and through a small tunnel of sorts, which plopped us out at the side of St. Mark’s Basilica. (St. Mark’s Basilica used to be the private chapel of the Doges rather than a public church for the people of Venice.) Since we were in a tour group, we didn’t have to wait in line to enter (just as we really didn’t have to wait to get into the Doge’s Palace), but there was a slight wait since, because this church is also sinking a bit—along with most of Venice itself—guards will only admit a limited number of visitors every so often.

St. Mark’s Basilica is very Byzantine in its look and feel (and, again, no photos were allowed in there). I mean, you look at it and you think: BYZANTINE! The vast majority of its artwork is composed of mosaics, most of which contain gold. The incorporation of so much gold into so much of the artwork and decoration of St. Mark’s Basilica took several years to complete, because those mosaics were made out of itty bitty pieces and anybody who’s tackled large jigsaw puzzles knows this sort of thing can take a while.

At some point in history, Venetian merchants stole some of St. Mark’s relics (which, up until that time, had been comfy cozy in Alexandria) and brought them back to Venice. (It was at this time that St. Mark became the patron saint of Venice, totally dissing St. Theodore.)

I wish I could say more about what I saw in St. Mark’s Basilica, but it was rather dark in there and as our tour was running a little behind we didn’t have too much time to look around.

Once we left St. Mark’s Basilica, we had a little more free time before we’d have to meet up with the rest of our group to get back on the bus. There was time for a small gelato and a visit to the most primitive (not to mention costliest) public bathroom (2 euros for a metal cubicle which seemed smaller than your standard airport bathroom.

But all too soon, it was time to kiss Venezia goodbye.

Our next, and last, stop would be Florence, but it would take a while to reach Florence from Venice. So, on the way to Florence, we were taken on a short side trip to Lake Garda, at the foot of the Italian Alps. This area of the Alps is known as the Dolomite Mountains, suckas. Again my Mom and I lucked out as we ended up on the side of the bus overlooking the lake. The downside is it was pretty foggy for the most part, and the mountains only started peeking out through the haze as we reached our destination for the night, the lakeside town of Torbole (not Toblerone).

This was just going to be an overnight stay, so there really wasn’t time for any sightseeing by the time we reached Torbole in the early evening. Like most towns on the lake, Torbole is really a summer town, and whether they keep the beaches open when Jaws is there is a mystery I will never know the answer to. In other words, everything was pretty much closed in Torbole by the time we got there.

But we’d had a very full day, and after a light but tasty dinner (I never knew carrot soup could be so good), we tucked into the smallest room we’d been in up to that point (and I’d almost forgotten the unique configuration of small European shower stalls that I’d last seen when I was an exchange student many many many years ago).

Florence was only little more than a night’s sleep away.

Not too many photos, but here they are nevertheless.

The Great Gigolo Hunt of 2007, Part 4A

Day Four—October 3, 2007

After another night of sleeping like the dead, we woke up early as we would only have until early afternoon to check out Venice and there was a lot to see.

And that included taking a peek at some of the less picturesque parts, namely the dock area, where you could see the industrial smokestacks puffing whitish gray plumes of God knows what into the air.

An open-topped ferry took us from the don’t-think-too-much-about-what’s-in-it Venetian Lagoon toward the Grand Canal and, ultimately, St. Mark’s Square. Large cruise ships regularly cross the Venetian Lagoon on their way to and from Greece, and at least two of them lumbered past us (I never spotted a yeoman purser, though).

I wish we could have passed by the Rialto Bridge during the day, but we entered the Grand Canal on the opposite side. But this did give us a closer view of the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, which was erected during one of Venice’s many plagues. (Lots of water, lots of rats.) In fact, every single Venetian gondola is black, as they were often used to carry the dead from the city and the tradition continues to this day (of being painted black, that is, not of carrying off dead bodies left and right).

We docked a couple of bridges away from the Doge’s Palace, meaning we’d have to hoof it to St. Mark’s Square. On the way over, we passed the Santa Maria della Pietà o della Visitazione church. Once upon a time, there was a little musical priest named Vivaldi who worked in this church…and he rocked out in the name of the Lord!

Oh, and if you peek around the corner of Santa Maria della Pietà o della Visitazione, you’ll see another of Venice’s leaning towers.

So, on to St. Mark’s Square (which, oddly enough, is a lot more crowded during the daytime than in the late afternoon). And the pigeons, oh God, the pigeons…with their great raking claws and their sharp ripping beaks and their beady little eyes and their messy droppings. The pigeons of St. Mark’s Square are cheeky devils, no doubt about it. Not to mention very well fed. There are vendors in St. Mark’s Square who sell little bags of breadcrumbs and these flying rats will basically dogpile on anybody who’s handing out breadcrumbs…or rather just anybody standing still with their hands out for any reason. I kid you not, because I was standing still with my hand out as my Mom handed me some aspirin and a saucy bird flew down and tried to take my drugs. Not cool, man, not cool.

We found ourselves in a fairly good position, tourist-view-wise, in front of St. Mark’s Basilica and the Campanile, but the main place we were headed (as we would have roughly 2 hours later that morning to look around for ourselves) was to see the wizard!

A wizard who looked an awful lot like an Italian glassblower.

As part of our walking tour, we were treated to a roughly 10-minute glassblowing demonstration in one of the higher end glass shops. It normally takes at least a half hour to get a small glassblowing job done right. But after 10 minutes or so, lo and behold, from the fiery pit and after a lot of huffing and puffing and sweating over hot molten glass, we saw a rather lovely glass pitcher.

And then crash!

The guy explaining how the glassblowing process worked broke the pitcher. On purpose. After all, this was just a demonstration and the finished pitcher (which looked rather cool) really wasn’t “top quality.”

Naturally, after the demonstration we were given a brief spiel about how to differentiate quality Murano glass (as opposed to the cheap stuff), and why red glass is more costly than any other color of Venetian glass. (Answer: gold is used to color it…and why it turns out ruby red is something I’ll have to leave to Beakman or Mr. Wizard to explain.) Murano, by the way, is one of the many little islands that make up Venice, and pretty much all that’s done on Murano is glassblowing.

Venetian glassblowing is a family tradition, passed on from father to son, and family seals are used to identify the glassblower on finer quality items. It takes some ungodly number of years (I want to say something like 35 or 40) in order to become a master glassblower, and I’m pretty sure only the menfolk are allowed to play around with the molten glass.

After our visit to the glass shop (and, yes, I did bow down to the temptation of buying a little something something in red), we were pretty much let loose on our own for roughly two hours before the next part of the tour was scheduled to start. This gave my Mom and me an opportunity to see some of the “lesser quality” glass shops, which all seemed to specialize in figurines of nekkid gondoliers, pigs in various positions makin’ bacon, and many examples of bawdy naughty animals. Oh, and glass harlequin masks. Lots and lots and lots of glass harlequin masks. I mean, lots of them. I had noticed the high number of spooky clown masks in the many souvenir stand in St. Mark’s Square, and there were also jester’s caps (with bells!) and various masks with feathers and sparkly stuff…and eventually I found out why. Venice, like Rio and old New Orleans, holds a large carnival for Mardi Gras.

So, horrifying clown faces…you can’t escape them, no matter where you go.

My Mom went a little wild at the souvenir stands again, but all I really wanted was a postcard that wasn’t too touristy. (I didn’t find one suited to my, um, needs, until we hit Florence, and by then my Mom had used up all our stamps.)

I made another call to my bitter half (to make sure the cats hadn’t eaten him alive yet). He asked if Venice stank, and I told him not as much as you might think. (He has a very sensitive nose.)

Lunch followed our mini-shopping spree…a panini for me and something on soft bread for my Mom (oh, her poor old toofs can’t handle crusty Italian bread very well). There are a series of wooden platforms or pallets that are stacked up in front of St. Mark’s Basilica, and many people were sitting there, so we thought we’d sit there and rest our feet a bit as we ate. But two Italian policewomen came up to us and told us we couldn’t sit and eat. So, we went over to sit and eat by the water, near the Towers of St. Mark and St. Theodore. And, since bread was involved, the pigeons attacked. We fought them off as best we could, and before too much blood was shed it was time for the next part of the tour, of the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Basilica…

Some mostly pigeon-free photos here.

Hello, Stranger

So far, about all I've written in this blog has to do with a vacation I took in late 2007.

2007. It's already 2008. Granted, it's still early 2008, and my vacation was in late 2007, but it's been a little too long since I've written anything.

And there's a bit of a reason for that...personal stuff involving a little of this and a whole lot of that which has pretty much kept me...out of things for most of the time since mid-December. But, unfortunately, a car chase was not involved, nor was there a Schwarzeneggeresque shootout.

Be that as it may, things are back on schedule, I think, and my chuck wagon's hitched up again and about to hit the road...