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.
