Sat June 16th–Greetings from Venice!!!!

This blog was started a 7:30pm Venice time in our new favorite restaurant.    Nancy and I left Friday at 9:30am for JFK where we met Katie. En route Katie took this great picture of the Swiss alps.    After we landed and picked up our bags, we caught our water taxi, like the one below, to go to out hotel.  Katie took this picture of our driver after we entered the canal system. 

 

We arrived at the hotel, pictured below, our room  is on the grand canal, you can see it’s two windows on the third floor left, above the boat.  We walked a couple of blocks to a great restaurant, Trattatoria Al Nono Risorto, where we all had pizzas.

After lunch we took a water bus, Vaporetto, to San Marco square. We toured part of the Basilica San Marco, but unfortunately it was closing due to the installation of four new Priests.  Pictures were not allowed in it, but is has an amazing 8,000 square meters of mosaics.    The Basilica is named after St. Mark, the author of the Mark chapters from the bible.  His body was smuggled out of Egypt to the Basilica, which gave the city great prominence.   The current Basilica was built in 1063, with the mosaics added starting in 1260.  It has a distinct Byzantine style, and many items looted during the crusades, including items they stole from the, then Christian Constantinople, now Istanbul. 

We then toured the Doges Palace, pictured behind Nancy and Katie.   The Doges were the ruling class of the Venice.   From 1100 to 1500 Venice was the Mediterranean’s first super power, with their ability to make ships and have major commerce with the Ottoman empire.   At that point, there were more super rich in Venice then the rest of the world combined.   The Bridge of Sighs, behind Katie, is part of the palace.   It is not named this, because it looks so romantic, but because it leads to the dungeon on the right, and the prisoners made sighs out the window, their last view on the way to the dungeon.   Throughout the area there are statues and paintings of winged lions, a representation of St. Mark, that became the symbol of the city of Venice itself.

We walked back to our hotel, this picture shows the “road” to our hotel.   We all took naps, and then returned to our favorate restaurant for a delicious dinner.   After dinner we caught the Vaporetto water buses again and sailed up and down the Grand Canal.  The pictures below show one of the hundreds of gondolas, and the Doges’ palace as the sun sets.   The lights on the buildings were great, and we saw lot’s of people in water taxis dressed to the nines including fancy masks on their way to a masked ball at one of the mansions on the Grand Canal.   It was really neat, but, alas, we were not invited to attend.  I guess the host did not know that we would be in town.  We got back to our hotel a little after 10pm and are now calling it a night, after a VERY long, busy day.