The REAL Christmas present: Venice

1.1 Happy New Year! Our neighbor Mauro and his family were here for New Year’s Eve from Milan, and brought fireworks. We could just barely see a town’s show over the mountains, but Mauro’s show was in many ways the best show ever. Nice fireworks, on our front patio, that we could watch from inside the warm house behind the protecting glass. Can’t beat that! Of course, it meant we stayed up until well after one am, which played merry hell with getting to bed early to get up early to go to Venice, but sure was cool.

Trip to Venice was easy. Much as one has to go through Atlanta to go to hell, one has to change trains in Bologna. It was purely freezing in Fidenza when we left, but warmer in Bologna and positively balmy in Venice. I had forgotten to check the map for our hotel before we left the house, but the information lady at the station knew it. I have done well: it was barely three blocks from the station, right on the main road past the front door. When we found it I became concerned. It was no more expensive than anywhere we stayed in Rome and much nicer, so I was convinced that the price I'd been quoted was in fact per DAY instead of for the week, but no, it was for the week! Very fancy. All red velvet and gilded fixtures. And lots of pictures of Mozart and his contemporaries all over the hallways on the ground floor (well, it IS Hotel Amadeus). The concierge told us where to have dinner, about another block further on, at La Vittoria, and it was delicious. I had budgeted 50E per meal because Venice is famous for being very pricey. So far so good, at 51E for dinner.

We did manage to get down to San Marco to have a look before dinner. AMAZING building. By far the most impressive church we’ve seen, and we’ve seen some impressive ones. I think it beats St Peter’s all hollow. Very similar to Hagia Sophia, I’m told. So, a little on St Mark. For a long time St Theodore was the patron of Venice. Yeah, I’ve never heard of him either. Then in 828 some enterprising Venetian merchants apparently stole poor ole St Mark the Evangelist from his burial place in Alexandria, wrapped him in bacon so the Muslim inspectors wouldn't make them put him back, and brought him on home. The foundation of the church as it is now wasn’t laid until 1063, and has been added to A BUNCH since then. Venetians, after all, travelled everywhere, and it was a poor traveller indeed who didn’t steal bring home SOMETHING to spruce it up with. The very famous Tetrarchs (Diocletian and company) are sitting at one corner. Hey, just because you spent your entire careers slaughtering as many Christians as you could lay hands on doesn’t mean your cool statue shouldn’t be part of a cool church, amirite?

The interior is even more amazing than the outside. I love mosaic floors. I took about 25 pix of the floors throughout the church before I saw the "no pictures" sign. Oh well, I'm not planning on publishing these anyway. But the mosaics on the ceilings…! They are, unfortunately, hard to see. I have to get a book on San Marco. Too much to take in.

2.1 The hotel arranged for us to have a water taxi to Murano to see the glassmaking. We LOVED the water taxi! Even though the day was gloomy (it rained most of the morning), it was such a luxury to have a private boat across the lagoon. We laughed with joy the entire way.

The glass factory was really cool (and we were lucky to see it – most of the factories are closed this week for Christmas holiday). The one we saw specializes in chandeliers, and the glass-blowers were working on one while we were there. As a demo, one of them came over to us with a blob of glass on his pipe. I turned on my video camera. 95 seconds later it was a rearing horse, so hot still that when he dropped a piece of paper on it the paper burst into flame. Afterwards a salesman took us through the showroom to let us see the variety of stuff they do – mostly lighting, but a lot of vases and statues as well. The one that got me was a set of water glasses, 6 in different colors with gold flake in the bases, so they gleam in the light. Really pretty. Really expensive. I really wanted them.

We went down to the jewelry section and didn’t really see anything that appealed particularly until Elise found a necklace that I personally would never have looked at twice: a black glass snake with copper and bronze stripes, and an asymmetrical arrangement of variously-shaped beads. She fell in love with it. I was dubious until I saw it on her. Also really expensive, but it was gorgeous on, so we agreed that it would be her birthday AND Christmas present for this year. She was amenable to that. It's an art piece, unique, and it looks great on her. And hey, my shopping is done for the year! Besides, I couldn’t in good conscience complain, since I, er, ordered the water glasses.

3.1 Since today was gorgeous and warm for January, we decided that touristy and cheesy and expensive as it is, we must have a gondola ride. I mean really, go to Venice and NOT? “It’s SOOO cacciatore!” So we got one, and got some really lovely views of the city, as well as some lovely close-ups of the architecture. Expensive, yes, but it was great fun. Our gondolier didn't have the stripey sweater (it was cold out) and refused to sing for us, but he did have the hat with the ribbons!

Venice really is the embodiment of shabby chic – everything is so gorgeous but just a BIT run-down. Things that are TOO well kept-up look so nouveau riche! Elise has decided she wants to buy a 2nd or 3rd floor apartment here to just live above the water and take care of the one million lap dogs that everyone carries around with them. (No ground or first floor apartments, however, thank you very much – the water marks on the buildings told us that they flood a LOT.) After our gondola ride, we hopped on the vaporetto to go to Burano. Whose bright idea was it to name two islands next to each other MURano and BURano? Wackos.

Anyway, BURano is the home of world-famous handmade lace, and is also known for its brightly colored houses. Aurora had money from her godfather that she wanted to spend, so we stopped in a glass shop and she ordered a glass heart necklace with “Rose” on it in melted glass. Very pretty. We watched the guy making some of the little tchotchkes that he sells after he finished the heart charm – really interested after seeing the glass blowers at Murano, since this man was using sticks of glass, some as thin as embroidery floss, and a tiny blowtorch to make his pieces. We got the classic picture from the bridge in the sunshine of all the colors down the canal, shopped for lace, and eventually found the lace museum and went in. They said there were demos of lace making every day; today there was just one elderly lady sitting there. She said she was 86 years old and had been doing this since she was in her teens. The lace is so tiny and so fine, and there were so many pieces in the museum, some of the quite large – made my hands hurt just thinking about it. The factory used to employ a couple hundred women just sitting in these little specialty desks knotting thread all day long, but the lady doing the demo said the young people don’t stay in Burano anymore, so the technique is gradually being lost.

We headed back about sunset. Beautiful views over the lagoon. For dinner, we decided to try a restaurant down the block from the hotel which looked interesting. Turns out to have been a mistake. Though we were seated right away, it was 30 minutes before they took our order, and almost another hour before the food arrived -- COLD! Definitely not idea for diabetics. We were so hungry that we ate it anyway (it would have been quite good if it had been hot), but when the 56E bill arrived, 6E for servizio, I pulled out a 50E note and gave it to the server. After all, we had eaten. I was willing to pay for that. When he said, "Uh, plus 6 for service," I replied, rather loudly, "Since it took over an hour to get dinner and the dinner was cold when it arrived, I do not consider that I have received any service. So I'm not paying it." No one tried to stop me as we left. Hmph!

 4.1 We decided that we could not do without a look at the original Jewish ghetto. Venice’s oldest synagogue was built in 1538. It's in the New Ghetto, which is the old part. The Old Ghetto was made part of the Jewish area later! (Ghetto is a Venetian dialect word meaning foundry or ironworks. The Jews were originally cordoned off in the newer of the ironworks areas.) We took the tour and they wouldn't let us take pictures inside, but here is a pic of the inside: http://www.museoebraico.it/images/sinagoga1.jpg Here's an interesting tidbit on the Venetian synagogue architecture: Since Jews weren't allowed to belong to craft guilds of any kind (thus their all being doctors and bankers), they couldn't even build their own buildings. So they had to hire Christian architects and builders to put everything up. (The synagogues are all added onto the tops of buildings because there wasn't any space to put anything on the ground.) So the interiors of the three 16th C ones we saw all had a distinctly church-y plan and decoration. The bima is not in the middle because the ground in Venice is so unstable that you have to balance all your architectural elements to keep your building square, and when they originally put it in the middle it made the floor buckle. Thus there are only pews on the sides so you can look one way and face the bima and look the other and face the ark. The women and kids sit behind the screens upstairs. Our tour was ostensibly in English, but that was a bit debatable: I had to keep translating for Aurora because the woman was so hard to understand.

After the tour we walked through the museum for a bit. Having seen the lace at Burano we had a slightly better understanding of what went into some of the Torah covers and other vestments that were hanging in the museum – Elise and I agreed the amount of work and care lavished on these things was crazy. I like the way the museums handle displaying the textiles: the display cabinets are multi-level bureaus, basically. You slide the glass-topped drawers back and forth to see what’s underneath, so about 5 times as many pieces are available to view as would be in just an ordinary display case. There were several rooms on Shoah, but Aurora started to get very sad about the whole thing and so I chickened out. I read a few of the wall cards, but only a few. One of the cards said that of 8000 Jews deported from Italy, 8 came back. It was difficult.

We did, however, look at the little Holocaust memorial in the piazza. The Italians may not have been wild about Jews, but they were OUR Jews goddamit and we won't have a bunch of Germans coming around taking OUR Jews. There were about 1200 Jews in Venice when Mussolini was killed and the Germans arrived to round folks up; the Venetians managed to hide or disperse to safety nearly 950. The memorial is a bronze bas-relief entitled The Last Train, showing people being herded into the cars, with the names and ages on the wall around it. It couldn't have been more than about 8'x5', but it was very moving.

The concierge’s recommendations for restaurants have been uniformly good. La Vittoria, in the piazza next to the hotel, was delicious, and the waiter even brought us a sardine appetizer that is supposedly a Venice specialty. The girls refused to eat a whole fish, but I liked it. For lunch today we ate at a restaurant near the ghetto, also delicious (and very good crème brulee for dessert!). After lunch, we went shopping. I became bitter when Elise found EXACTLY the boots I wanted, in her size but not in mine. Grr. However , I did find a pair of granny boots and a pair of short cowboy-style boots that were both highly adorable, and the shoe man said if I bought all three pairs he would charge me only for the two more expensive. Since the more expensive were only 10E more than the least, it worked out nicely. I still want a nice pair of black boots, but we’ll see how we go. Elise also found a red belt that she really liked, and since it was a bit too long, they cut it down for her and put two extra holes in, just in case.

Aurora continues to collect goodies. At Murano she selected some glass dolphins as part of her present from her godfather David; at Burano, a lace parasol, Barbie-sized; and today she found a turquoise mask with tall feathers that she liked. So she has quite the representative sample of Venetian wares.

5.1 I got up early to try to catch the sunrise on the vaporetto, as my friend Rob had recommended this as a very beautiful view. I overslept, of course, so only got a glimpse, and got on the wrong boat so ended up in the industrial docks directly across from the mainland. Ugly, but still interesting since I had no idea Venice actually HAD industrial docks. Got back on the right boat toward the Rialto and climbed up over the bridge, but it was less interesting than usual as everything was closed for the tail end of the Christmas holiday. Modern photos also take major advantage of photoshop before being published: the bridge is covered in graffiti.

Our train didn’t leave till 2:30, so we decided to have one more look at San Marco before we left. Elise was a little calmer this time and came in. She was really wowed by the interior (as indeed I was, again). Truly one of the most beautiful buildings we’ve seen in Italy, and that’s saying something! I got pictures of them climbing on one of the lions. We also got severely freaked out by the clock tower across the piazza from the church: when we were here before, it was just a tower. Today it had a big ole bronze statue on the top! And we KNOW we’re not hallucinating because the clock tower was really cool so I took a picture of it when we first came on Tuesday. NO STATUE.

After a light lunch we headed for the train. We’ve all got significant inner ear issues from the rocking of the boats, and apparently of the very islands Venice is composed of. Everything sways just a little. It’s a little unnerving, but we definitely want to try to get back here before July. And we definitely will stay at the Amadeus again if we come back. Breakfast got two thumbs WAY up and wigglin’ from all concerned.

7.1 We were sad to leave Venice -- we had barely scratched the surface in 4 days -- but it was nice to get home again. Since we got home after dark on Saturday, we couldn't see much of the surrounding countryside, so we didn't know that it had snowed last week until we went out Sunday afternoon -- into the 60-degree weather! Seems they got 8 inches of snow Wednesday morning, but it had been upper 50s to low 60s the rest of the week, so only the very shadiest spots still had snow.

Today I did laundry and hung it out in the morning. Bright sun, blue sky, and 62 degree low humidity weather is ideal for hanging out laundry, I think. Elise and I went for a walk at lunch and saw rabbits, lizards and butterflies. Not what one expects in January 5 days after a big snowstorm, but we are NOT complaining. Weather is supposed to cool off through the week, but no snow in the forecast before the weekend. We're hoping it stays nice so we can take in another castle or two before Elise heads back west in February. Other than that, we're pretty much back to the usual schedule. This weeks’ project is sorting through all the Venice pictures: we took over 500!

In the afternoon my friend Ida called and asked if we wanted to join her and her children and nieces at the Epiphany tombola in Pellegrino. It is traditional to play tombola (an Italian variant of bingo) at the end of the year, and since Jan 6 is the last day of Christmas, it sorta stands in for the last day of the year as well. We went down, and the whole village it seemed was crammed into the school auditorium playing tombola. When the next round started, we bought a couple tickets and played, and lost, not a big surprise. You should know that there are 5 levels of prizes: the first person to get two numbers in one row (the card is three rows of 5, but only rows, not columns or diagonals), then the first to get three, then four, then five, then finally the first person to fill all 3 rows gets the top prize for that round. We played again (one card for me, one for Rose; Elise didn't feel like going), and the 2,3,4 and 5 prizes went very quickly. I only had 8 of 15 squares filled. After the 5 prize was claimed, however, the next 8 numbers were mine, mine, mine, mine, not mine, mine, mine, mine. I was as surprised as anyone to hear my own voice call out, "Tombola!"

Befana (beh FAH nah) the candy witch fills stockings and shoes with candy the night of Jan 5, so Epiphany, the day the three kings arrived with presents for Baby Jesus, is a day of sweetness. The girls got candy from Befana, but I did not, as Befana is well aware that I am chubby :) However, a basket the size of a laundry basket filled with panettone (traditional Italian Christmas raisin bread), 2 bottles of wine, a bottle of amaretto, half a kilo of local honey, and half a kilo of parmesan cheese with a fancy grater MORE than makes up for it!