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.
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