First full day in Venice…
And a Sunday as well. And even better, a lazy morning. There was some suspicion of rain over the weekend, but instead all the rain fell on Saturday night and Sunday dawned just fine thank you ma’am. In Firenze we noticed a lot more shops (compared to Rome) that were shut for August. However in Venice a lot of them were instead shut on Sundays. Nonetheless we had a great time walking around, this time heading over the Ponte Realto (the 48,000th famous bridge of our holiday so far) past the markets – where we found to our great surprise 1€ cups of fruit salad, and also a pastry shop where I acquired for my own nefarious purposes a small slice of tiramisu and an espresso for 1.90€.
So much for Venice being expensive.
More wandering around the ‘middle’ island of Venice led us to a grocery shop where we got a bag of croissants for breakfast (also cheap-ish) and a pizza shop where we bought our lunch (by this time it was nearly 1pm). Some of the Venetian pizza shops offer thin crust and not much topping for 4€; this one offered thick crust and much topping for 3€ each.
Also the order of shops in Venice goes like this; Mask shop, Murano glass shop, tourist shirts/hats/boxer shorts of Italian themes, restaurant, shop selling paper/books/fountain pens, then gelato, then back to another mask shop. There must be some kind of by-law or something.
Across the ‘road’ – that is, across the half-metre wide alley – from our hotel there was of course a gelaterie so before retiring up to our hotel to open the windows and watch the Formula One on TV we bought more gelato, telling ourselves that there would be no ice cream whatsoever in France and therefore we had to invest now (ahem). We folded ourselves into the window chairs and had a little snooze and then after the race set about acquiring dinner. Over the Ponte Realto again we found that the 1€ fruit-cup-people had gone home for the day there was a 1.50€ fruit-cup man still open, so we bought more fruit salad, sat by the canal, and then found a cheap tourist meal (pizza and risotto with a glass of wine each) for dinner.
Back over the bridge we threaded our way to Piazza San Marco again, where I discovered that I didn’t have a charged camera battery in my bag; but we can assure it was very beautiful because you can’t see quite so much of the pigeon crap at night. Meanwhile we overheard a chap bartering with a gondolier to get his 100€ ride down to 80€, and we ran in the other direction with maximum haste.
Past the Ducal Palace there is a famous bridge (last one before Paris, I promise) called the bridge of sighs, which ordinarily would look fantastic at night but at the present moment was covered in huge plastic billboards to permit some kind of restoration. On the hand we had noted how many of the buildings around Venice were looking either slightly shabby or even downright decrepit, and on the other hand some of the stuff we wanted to see wasn’t really available because it actually was being fixed.
Anyhow.
Walking away from the Piazza San Marco along the South-Eastern edge of the suburb which I think was called Giudecca, there is a reasonably wide promenade which is probably the closest thing to a foreshore in Venice. We trawled along there and back, taking some extended detours into back alleys for the sole purpose of attempting to get mildly lost and to see if there is a part of Venice which isn’t that touristy. And that is where we found the Venice we had come looking for.
Greg
