Venezia

This past weekend I spent in Italy, traveling from Bologna to Venice to Rome.  The weekend was full of delicious food, many churches and rain.  I decided that I didn’t have the attention span to write about the entire weekend in one fell swoop, and so split up the events.  First, Venice:

Matt and I flew into Bologna and stayed with some friends studying in the Brown-in-Bologna program there, including Matt’s BFF Katherine.  Katherine and her roommate Rocio joined us on the overnight train to Rome for our travels in Rome, but now I’m getting ahead of myself.

Matt and I took the morning train from Bologna and made it to Venice around 11:30.  We purchased a day pass for the Vaporetto, the water buses, and took line 1 down the Grand Canal.  One of Katherine’s roommates, Tyler, had told us to just buy a one-trip pass and pretend to swipe it every time.  He was right.  The day pass was a waste of 11 euros, since no one pays attention to the ticket validation booth anyway.

So we traveled down the Grand Canal, zigzagging from one side to the other for all of the vaporetto stops.  You can see the side of the water-bus in this picture.

Grand Canal and Clouds

We made it to Piazzale San Marco, where the Basilica and clock tower are located.  In 1902, the clock tower collapsed, almost spontaneously, into the square.  The city council had an impromptu meeting that day and decided to rebuild it.  You can see it here.

St. Mark's Basilica (on the left) is supposedly home to St. Mark's relics, stolen from Alexandria by Venetian merchants.

My question is: why rebuild the tower when it obviously has some structural integrity “issues”, in regards to the city being built on water? The square had walkways (or as Matt like to call them, fashion runways) in order to lift pedestrians over the growing puddles of water caused by “aqua alta”.

The runways of Venice- similar to those of Milan...

Aqua alta happens in Venice around 60 times a year, and is increasing in its severity. Venice, built in a lagoon, is slowly sinking.

Luckily, the world as Venice knows it still exists and tourists like us continue to flood her streets. Matt and I took the waterbus out to Murano, the glass-blowing island that was forced out of Venice proper by fire safety concerns. I guess I could understand the Venetians thought process about glass/fire cause and effect. We walked into several shops where the proprietors were sitting behind the counter with open flame, crafting some small token while watching Gossip Girl (true story).

Murano proved to be entertaining, as we moved from glass store to store to gallery to store. We made it back to Venice and wandered the streets of the sestiere (Sestiere = a sixth = the subdivisions of Venice). One thing about getting lost in Venice (an inevitability for locals and visitors alike) is that dead ends aren’t always brick walls, but rather open water. I think that in total, we probably crossed upwards of 50 bridges, just circling between the Sestieri San Polo, Santa Croce and Dorsoduro.

So we got lost, got found, wandered across the Rialto Bridge and past the Bridge of Sighs (the latter covered in advertisements.)  After delicious paninis for dinner at a small pub, we boarded our midnight train to georgia rome.

But that’s a story for a different time…