St. Mark's redux, more Venice, new city

Only in Venice can you witness a gondola traffic jam!

As always, click on an image to see a larger version.

I can't get over how easy it is to encounter yet another old church or a strange piece of solitary art here.  Like this lovely little building.

Or this little alcove.

Of course, sometimes the magic of Venice is modern magic.

Okay, that's not magic; it just cracked me up.  I wonder if this designer offers the equivalent for men.

A bookbinding shop saved me a lot of money by being closed.  Consider this lovely volume.

Or these two.

I would love to have been able to see if the bindings went over the bindings of the first editions, which these were, or replaced the originals. 

The tour of the upper levels and the outer balcony of St. Mark's were closed when I was first there, but today it was open.  Getting to see a few of the mosaics up close was wonderful.

The view of the cathedral's interior from on high also didn't suck.

Nor did the views of the neighboring bell tower or the two squares.

After a bit more exploring and some pretty tasty gelato, the next stop was an expensive but fun ride in a water taxi to the airport.  A fairly short plane flight and a twenty-minute taxi ride later, and I'm now in a new city.

Clues?

Here's a typical view (not of my hotel).

Not enough, you say?  Does this help?

Or this tasty treat from the above?

No?  How about this clear giveaway?

Yes, I'm in Vienna, where I'm staying at another fabulous hotel.  This one comes with an amazing luxury:  the best bandwidth I've encountered in any hotel in years.  It's a wonderful treat.

An even bigger treat, though, now awaits me:  sleep.

The Doges and the art of the home-court advantage

Some spots afford great views no matter where you look.  One is in front of and to the right of the Doge's Palace here in Venice.  These six shots came from me standing in one place, shooting, turning slightly, and shooting again.

As always, click on an image to see a larger version.

A clearer shot of the lovely structure across the water.

The Doge's palace was the seat of government, functionally equivalent to the de' Medici's Palazzo Vecchio and equally as intimidating, though in somewhat different ways.  It's another do-not-miss Venetian attraction.  The structure grew over hundreds of years into the enclosed fortress it is today.  To give you a sense of the different types of construction, here's a shot from the entrance end of the interior courtyard.

The Venetian systems of government and justice were, to put it mildly, complicated and involved multiple groups with somewhat overlapping responsibilities.  One little tidbit I found interesting was that any citizen could report a crime by sliding an accusatory note through the slot for the relevant administrator.  Here you can see two of those slots.

To gain access to the various bodies of government, one would typically ascend the golden staircase.  Here's a shot down it.

Yeah, you could easily be intimidated by the time you reached the top--and then you'd have to climb another one just like it.

The progressively more luxurious halls that would ultimately take you to the various governing bodies are amazing, rooms crowded with wonderful paintings by Veronese and Tintoretto, among others. They did not permit photography, so I tried to minimize the number of shots I took; most visitors didn't even bother.  Here's a sense of one of the rooms.

The main hall, a room more than a hundred feet wide and more than twice that long, definitely stood its ground against anything the de' Medicis produced.

The paintings in this room, including the Il Paradiso huge piece at the far end, were by the next generation of painters, Tintoretto's son and the students of the masters who painted the works in the other rooms.  These guys just were not as strong as the best of the previous generation, but the art is mind-bogglingly complex and impressive nonetheless.

The armory rooms provided a very different kind of treat.  Dave, if you're reading this, I hope you get to visit them, and I offer this one happy snap for your perusal. 

The prison cells, which you access via enclosed walkways over the Bridge of Sighs, were also well worth a visit, cold and damp even on a reasonable early April day.  They must have been brutal in the winter.

As with so many other places I've visited on this trip, by the time I left this museum, my head and heart were full and craving a break.

Gobsmacked by Venice

Today's journeys through the twisty streets of Venice simply gobsmacked me. 

Canals are everywhere, which is easy to say and completely obvious, but until it sinks in, you have no chance of really getting this place.

As always, click on an image to see a larger version.

Art is also all around.  On a random wall in a narrow alley on the way to the Accademia. 

Or in the facade of the grand old buildings that fill the city. 

Or even in the acts of lovers: Paris, of course, had love locks, but so did Florence, and so does Venice.

Today, though, the most compelling, mind-boggling art stood in the galleries of the Accademia.  Tintoretto, Carpaccio, Titian, Veronese--gigantic works by these great masters and many more filled room after room of this wonderful museum.  Carpaccio and Veronese particularly grabbed my heart with technique and emotion that would not let go of my gaze. 

In one room of the Accademia, one very big room, stands the largest known oil painting, a huge piece by Veronese. 

Yes, they forbid photography, but I had to show you.  Ten other huge paintings fill this room, though this piece dominates them all. 

No book can ever prepare you for this room.  Unless you visit it, you cannot fully grasp the scale on which these men were working.  I feel blessed and fortunate to have been able to come here.  I wish I could bring everyone I know here.  Rooms like this are reason enough to justify the expense to create lifelike virtual reality on a gigantic scale. 

If you ever go to Venice, do not miss the Accademia.

On a more mundane note, Venice also offers great gelato at...the Grom!

Ah, the Grom was tasty today.

On the way back from dinner, Venice hit me one last time, as the water literally bubbling up through vents in the Piazza San Marco slowly flooded it and made it viscerally, not just intellectually, clear that this city is fighting a losing battle against the water on which it sits. 

I hope Venice and its citizens keep up the fight for a very long time to come. 

St. Mark's Basilica, oddities

In case I haven't made it clear already, each of the great attractions I visit could repay years and years, in some cases, a whole lifetime, of study.  A few hours gets you the sense of a place and a certain amount of data, but these vast and ancient structures and collections have so very much more to offer than any single tour can reveal. 

So it is with St. Mark's Basilica.  The structure, with its accompanying tower, dominates Piazza San Marco and is at a quick glance merely another amazing Italian church. 

As always, click on an image for a larger version.

As you approach it, though, you see that its Byzantine construction makes it quite different indeed from, say, Firenze's Duomo.

Even an alcove on its side makes clear that the imagery is going to be different indeed from what abounded in Florence.

Once you're inside, however, you realize how completely different and how Byzantine it is. 

It is also simply magnificent. 

I found the ancient Christian imagery and the Byzantine style to be far more moving than I'd expected.  At one point, overcome by emotion and thoughts, I went to a side chapel and sat and stared and thought a great deal about God and the power of belief.

If the bandwidth here were better, I'd upload a ton of photos, but it's not, and midnight fast approaches, and I want to rest.  Even so, I must show you a few more things, such as this amazing reliquary collection.

Note the skull in the dome in the lower right.  As it turns out, the "treasure" exhibit (a three-euro fee to enter) to the right of the front contains a great many reliquary collections, at least some of them supposedly tied to St. Mark. 

"Arms?"  Did someone say "arms?"

By the way, signs did prohibit photography, but guards stood by and watched as people shot all sorts of photos, so I kept my flash off and joined in.  I just couldn't resist. 

The cathedral contains many altars, but on the back side of the one that appears to be at the front of the church, facing a small final altar that seems to have been reserved for the very rich or the very special, was this amazing piece of work.

No photo can do it justice, but magnify this image and marvel at the gilt and the cloisonne and the insanely ornate beauty of it. 

To the left of the cathedral as you face it stands this lovely building. 

Moving from the sacred and near-sacred to the truly profane, the award for the scariest hot dog of the trip goes to...

No, I did not eat one.  Even I have standards, and limits, even with hot dogs. 

Okay, that's a lie.  I would totally eat one of these sick-looking rascals.  I was just still full from lunch. 

Lost in Venice, wandering the streets and working back toward the hotel, at the end of a lane so narrow it was more a corridor than a road, stood this beautiful piece.

Magic really is all around. 

Canals are magic, too, or so they seem to me, popping up around corners and filling the air with the gentle sound of quiet waves.

Not at all magic is the entrance to the hotel's bathrooms, but it is ornate beyond all reason, which is something I've seen a lot this trip.

And now, to read, and then to sleep. 

Travel day, hotel hassles, walking, high tide

Today, I bid farewell to Firenze.  I hope I get to see her again one day, but it was time to move on. 

After a wait at the train station and a little over two hours in the wonderful first-class train car--a bargain and a great way to travel--I left another train station to see this.

As always, click on an image to see a larger version.

Yes, it's Venice, the city of water taxis, the city that is slowly sinking.  I visited here for about six hours in 1985.  My most notable memories are of the smell from the trash-laden canals and the stink of the pigeon shit on my head, a gift I received within five minutes of entering St. Mark's square.  Much has improved here since then, so I am looking forward to a vastly better visit this time. 

The water taxi ride to the hotel was big fun and offered many fine views, even on this chill, damp day.

The hotel, on the other hand, was a bust.  Though it received top marks everywhere I searched, it was over-priced, tatty in the extreme, and, worst of all, utterly deficient in the bandwidth department.  After the third room yielded no happiness, I insisted--to the chagrin of staffers all the way to the manager--on leaving. 

I'm now happily settled into an equally rated but far nicer hotel, one in which I was able to bargain for an amazing room at quite a reduced (though still rather high; this is a luxury tour) room.  The room includes an amazing terrace that wraps around two sides of it.  Here's a shot of the Grand Canal in the distance. 

This one is from the other end of the terrace.

A very helpful clerk made a dinner reservation, but after spending over 70 minutes on what was supposed to be a 15-minute walk, the restaurant's location was still a mystery.  Dinner at a touristy place was completely adequate salad and pasta.

I have never walked anywhere that is even as remotely difficult to navigate as Venice.  At the same time, the tight dark alleys and the twisting, turning lanes invite the fantasist's imagination to run wild.  How could it not, with images like this waiting at the ends of canal-facing alleys? 

On the way back to the hotel, high tide was hitting its peak and leaving water all over the city, as here, around chairs that had, only two hours earlier, sat on dry ground.

The path back included stretches on these platforms, which crews had spread around the city in anticipation of the tide. 

I've never been anywhere that such measures were necessary, but I'm glad to have walked on them here.