A Day in Venezia 6.15.06

Bob and I drove to Venice last week. How fun is that! The night before we really said to each other: "What do you want to do tomorrow?" I don't know. Do you want to go to Venice?" And so we did. We could have taken a train that leaves from the station in Verona but we decided to take our car and take our chances with finding a place to park. Most people advised us not to try to drive in but we thought we'd give it a shot. We left early in the morning, around 8am and were in the parking lot at Piazza Roma by 9! It was a bit costly, around 20 euros for 12 hours. With gas and lunch and everything, it's not a "cheap" day but, heck, it's Venice!

I spent too much time looking for accessories for my dress for Andrea's wedding in Germany but there are so many shops selling beautiful glass bead jewelry, I had a hard time resisting. The first place we wanted to visit was St. Mark's and we should have gone straight there by vaporetto instead of walking from the parking garage, stopping at all those little shops. At any rate, by about 10:30 we were at Piazza San Marco and the line wasn't too long to get in. By 11:30 the lights came on inside and it was incredible.

The other place we knew we wanted to visit was the Peggy Guggenheim collection of modern art, which includes a large number of paintings and sculptures from almost every modern art movement. We had missed seeing it the last time we were in Venice. It's in an interesting Palazzo, nicknamed Palazzo Nonfinito because they only built the ground floor (it was supposed to be 4-stories).

After getting up early and wandering around Venice all morning we ended up finding a quiet corner along the canal, sort of in the backyard of the museum and just sat and dozed, watching the gondolas and other boats drifting by on the canal.

Lunch was an expensive pizza and a wonderful plate of grilled vegetables. Next time we need to search out a more of the way place, but we think Venice is just expensive.

More wandering and then we decided to take a ride on the vaporetto as a kind of a tour of the Grand Canal and then head back to our car and head home.

Here are some of the things we saw that day. We hope to take more trips there and find some less visited corners of the city and show you things you haven't seen before. But here are our first impressions this time around.

A presto
Rosemary e Robert