As has been too typical during our weeks in Europe there was plenty of rain in Venice. There were brief periods of glorious sunshine, though, allowing us to get views like this of the Grand Canal.
This was a short two-night stop in one of the world’s great cities. We’re meeting the Zephyr Adventures group here before heading up into the Dolomites for a week of biking and are coming back with friends for five days next month, so we didn’t need to spend a lot of time just yet.
Just one of seemingly a million beautiful tiny canals that provide Venice’s transportation system
We were here six years ago or so and on that trip it took me two or three days to identify one of the things that I love about Venice: there are no cars. It makes walking around the city just so calm and easy. Or at least as calm and easy as walking through hordes of tourists can be. But it’s fascinating to see a big city operate with no cars. Boats, yes, and guys wheeling around carts full of supplies. But no cars. While much of the old city feels more like a Disney World adaptation of an historic city – there are hordes of tourists mobbing central areas – there are still about 60,000 people who live on the hundred-or-so islands that make up historic Venice, with another 200,000 on the mainland in what is a more modern Venice.
The big cultural highlight for us was a couple hours in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, a magnificent collection of 14th to 19th century art specializing, not surprisingly, in some of the Venetian masters like Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. And so many of the buildings are really spectacular. Given the brevity of this pass through Venice I didn’t really appreciate that until we were taking the vaporetto – the local bus that’s a boat – up the Grand Canal as we were going to the train station to leave the city. But watching these grand old palaces go by really drives home the fact that this was once one of the richest and most powerful cities in the world. That starts to explain why Venice’s entire historic part is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Veronese’s “Banquet in the House of Levi” from 1573. This might look like a Last Supper painting, and Veronese intended it to be just that. But he was called before the Venetian Inquisition because the setting was considered too profane for a Last Supper. Thus he was forced to change the name to represent simply a miracle performed at Levy’s. Strange world they lived in.
Our friends Marc & David, who joined us two years ago for a few days in Corsica, are doing the bike trip with us and got to Venice the afternoon of our last night there. So we had drinks and then dinner and then more drinks catching up. Marc had been a client some years back when he was the technology director for the Liberal Party of Canada but over time had become a good friend. When we met up in Corsica he was no longer with the Party and we were no longer actively involved in the company. Since then, though, he actually took a job with our company managing most of our programmers so once again he’s part of our professional family. It was great to get caught up on some of the gossip going on back in Boston!
Our breakfast view, about as nice as anything you can get outside of Greece!
At any rate, here are some pictures from our brief time in Venice. Tomorrow we start a week long bike trip up in the Italian Alps. Very excited!
More art from the Gallerie dell’Accademia, this one Tintoretto’s “Theft of the Body of St. Mark.” Another great story. St. Mark’s corpse was supposedly in Alexandria, Egypt. But as he was the patron saint of Venice, Venetian leaders wanted his relics there. So a few guys went to Egypt and just stole the body, or what they at least believed was the body. Their story was that Mark had spent time in Venice and intended for his earthly remains to spend eternity there. A little hard to swallow since Venice didn’t exist when Mark walked the earth, but hey, that’s just a technicality. To make matters worse, the Venetian church his body was stored in was burned to the ground during a political disturbance and his bones were destroyed in the fire. Until, that is, some enterprising religious leaders discovered that St. Mark in fact hadn’t been in that church but that his real bones were in a different one. So *presto* his relics are still there!
One of the important features of religious art was that characters often display specific characteristics so viewers know who they are. You know, St. Sebastian and the arrows always sticking out. One that always amuses me is when John the Baptist – on the left here in an il Vecchio painting of the Holy Family – carries a cross while meeting the baby Jesus. Doesn’t that seem just a little insensitive? “Hi, cute baby. See what we have in store for you?”
A canal in a more working class part of Venice
The Grand Canal
More canal – it’s all over this city!
And finally Mark with his new raincoat over the Grand Canal. After weeks of rain, with more rain forecast for our bike trip, it was time to get a rain coat. And then the sun came out!