Venice

 Dear Gentle Readers

Today we had a sumptuous breakfast in the hotel restaurant before catching the vaporetta (water taxi) to St Martin's Square. Victoria is feeling a lot better after a good night's sleep.

Camera Room

This is our room, they upgraded us to the Camera Room which has views over the water to Venice.

Eat at Joe's

Last night Victoria sent me out to find a burger and I found this quaint eatery, an old double-decker bus that has been converted into a burger joint. They weren't bad either.

St Mark's Square

Now I've seen pictures of St Mark's Square but they don't do justice to the size of it. This facade stretched all the way down the square and that's not all of it, I couldn't fit it in the photo and I have a 25mm wide angle lens on my camera. Compare the size of the people in the shot and you just may realise how big it is.

At the end of the square you have this, the Basilica di San Marco or St Mark's Basilica. It is also huge.

Astrological Clock

I also took this photo of the astrological clock on the facade of Torre dell'Orologio, just off to the side of St Mark's Square. It is unique because it only has an hour hand and it is a 24 hour clock, not the usual 12 hour one we use. It shows the sun's progression through the zodiac (the inner ring of star signs rotates too) and also the phases of the moon. It's also an hour out, I took this photo at 9:58am and it is showing 8:58am. No DST for this marvel and for a 500 year old clock, adjusting the time twice a year for this delicate mechanism would not be desirable.

The Moors

These figures are the Two Moors above the Astronomical Clock. Every hour they take turns striking the hour. Quite amazing, a mechanism that was already ancient before Galileo was born, it still tells the time, tracks the zodiac, shows the moon's phases and position and also rings the hour.

Bell tower

Forgot to show you the bell tower for the Basilica, as usual, they build them tall. When it and the astronomical clock chime the hour, it makes quite a cacophony of sounds.

What's the one thing you must do when you come to Venice? That's right, take a gondola ride, which we did. Cost us €200 (ouch) but we saw parts of Venice we would never have seen otherwise. It was nearly an hour long and we even went out into the Grand Canal, a very busy waterway.

This was our gondolier. He was fairly quiet, only pointing out a few landmarks, but as we returned to St Mark's Square, he started singing! Interesting fact, the gondolas are not symmetrical, they're longer on one side than the other, which compensates for the gondolier only using the oar on one side. That's how they can go straight so easily.

And to prove we were actually on the gondolier, here's a selfie we took. Years later, we'll have forgotten the cost and only remembered the experience.

This plaque marks the location of Marco Polo's house. The inscription reads

"QUI FURONO LE CASE
DI MARCO POLO
CHE VIAGGIÒ LE PIÙ LONTANE REGIONI DELL'ASIA
E LE DESCRISSE
PER DECRETO DEL COMUNE
MDCCCLXXXI"

which translates to 

"Here stood the houses of Marco Polo,
who travelled to the most distant regions of Asia
and described them.
By decree of the Municipality,
1881"

Now Marco Polo died 500 years earlier than the date on this plaque. The actual medieval house no longer exists. He opened up the Silk Road between Europe and Asia. I never knew he lived in Venice.

There are lots of bridges in Venice as you can imagine but this was one of the grandest as it is a covered bridge. All the other bridges we saw were uncovered.

We then took a vaporetti over to Murano Island where the famous Venetian Glass Blowers ply their trade. 

We paid €5 to watch a glassblowing demonstration  and it turned out to be money well spent. In a matter of minutes, a craftsman transformed a glowing lump of molten glass into a coloured vase and then a rearing horse. Seeing the speed, precision and confidence with which he worked gave us a new appreciation for the centuries-old craft and for the prices of the finished pieces in the showroom.

Here he's shaping the vase as it cools.

The finished product. The glass blower then laid a piece of paper on top of it and it burst into flame to demonstrate how hot the glass still was. They actually have to put the finished works in an oven that slowly cools the work down, otherwise it would explode as it cooled.

Here he's shaping the horse

Here he's separating the horse from the blowing tube.

The finished product with paper being laid over it.

The paper bursts into flame to show how hot the glass still is.

After this we took a vaporetti back to Venice, found a nice restaurant, had a very nice meal then took a vaporetti back to Lido and our hotel. Tomorrow it's off to Milan.