Greetings all
I took a lot of pictures in Venice. I mean a lot. This is just out and about, but we’ll get to St. Mark’s and the various museums over the next few days.
The night pictures are from the hotel’s rooftop bar. The others are around the Piazza San Marco. This piazza is amazing with St. Mark’s Cathedral, St Mark’s Campanile, the Palazzo Ducale, the Correr Museum, the Torre dell’Orologio (which surprised me), and a bunch of neat shops under the porticos. Expect more pictures from this part of Venice. Lots more.
That canal in the top middle is the one that runs behind and that’s the Bridge of Sighs. Not the one in the distance, but the one I cropped out at the top. I’m clearly not a professional photographer.
The rest of the pictures are from the Piazza San Marco looking this way and that.
Middle left and bottom right are of the Torre dell’Orologio. As I say, this surprised me. I had no idea it was as cool as it is. The bronzes at the top are an intricate mechanism that ring the bell like any other clock tower, but do so by moving the figures back and forth to hammer the bell. We got lucky and actually got to see them in action!
More from the Torre dell’Orologio. At the bottom, we start getting the Porta della Carta, which is one entrance into the Palazzo Ducale.
The Venetian flag, plus the Campanile, and then a bunch of pictures of the outside of St. Mark’s. And check out the lamellar armor in the top right!
Why would I take a picture of a puddle? Glad you asked. That’s the incoming tide. They have these platforms people walk around on for high tide because Venice floods. They recently installed a mitigation system in the lagoon that they use for really high tides, but they just deal with an inch or two of high tide water throughout the piazza as a matter of course. Previously, the tide could get pretty high, like 6 feet, which is relevant when one realizes St. Mark’s Cathedral is only about 2 feet above sea level.
We finally get out of the Piazza San Marco to the rest of the city. They don’t allow cars in the bulk of it, in part because they didn’t allow horses and it’s really just a bunch of small alleys plus small piazzas with cisterns like in bottom left.
It’s amazingly medieval and makes me want to run D&D campaigns in Venice.
The entire city is paved in this glorious marble, as you can see with the bottom middle photo. Back to that in a moment.
I’ve now crossed the Ponte di Rialto, or Rialto Bridge. The middle picture, by the way, is some construction work. So much of the infrastructure of Venice is slid under these chunks, including most of the phone and internet cabling.
Did I get an iconic gondolier photo or what in top left?
Note the narrow street on middle right, by the way. That’s more like what most of the streets were like. Glad I lost weight!
Top middle is a picture from outside a small church, the Chiesa di San Beneto. It’s not anything special there, but that’s their baseline expectation of beauty. Honestly, we’ve lost so much as a society.
Bottom left is a farther picture of the Rialto Bridge.
Bottom right is because I’m a stinker. After walking around Venice, visiting the Fortuny Museum (pics tomorrow), and all that, we had lunch right across from the Palazzo Ducale. Was there any chance I wouldn’t send another picture to Jonna Hayden? There was not.
More pics from around the city. Top middle show piles they’re driving into the lagoon. They look used, so I guess they pulled them out and then put them back in? I don’t know, but it did look like they were driving them down, not pulling them out.
The rest of the pictures are from our boat trip out to the glassblowers on Murano (pics in a few days).
And that’s it for out and about in Venice! Tomorrow we go to the Fortuny Museum.
Side note: I wouldn’t mind living in Venice either. It really is a magical place.