Venice vs. Two Geologists and a Map

…or God Really Doesn’t Like It When You Take Pictures of His Stuff.

Somehow, I found myself with only a week left in Italy, and I still hadn’t managed to visit arguably the country’s two most important cities, Venice and Rome. On Monday, I fixed part of that. Eleonora, who went with me, is from the Veneto region of Italy and had been to Venice a number of times, so we had that working in our favor. Still, Venice is tricky, with lots of tiny roads and bridges.

We always knew more or less where we were, but it was very easy to make a wrong turn or go down a dead end road. Luckily, with Ele manning the paper map and me using my phone internet in case of extreme confusion we were able to move through the city very efficiently.

I’m serious about the churches thing. This is the first view right out of the train station.

I’ve looked pretty hard, and I can’t find any solid statistics on ranking cities by churches per square mile/kilometer, but it’s really hard to imagine a city where a higher percentage of the buildings are churches than Venice. It is very, very difficult to find yourself in a place in the city where you aren’t within view of a church. The result of this is that I took a lot of pictures of churches whose names and importance I don’t necessarily know. So I may just post streams of pictures only interjecting commentary when I actually know something about what is in the pictures.

Immediately upon exiting the train station, you cross the Canal Grande, which is pretty wide and has lots of ships crossing. Just walking along the Grand Canal, you can see nice churches and houses on the other side. After crossing the canal, we started our touring in the San Polo zone of the city.

Of course, there are also tons of small canals separating ordinary blocks of the city from each other.

We saw a nice church.

A lot of the charm of Venice was less about knowing what all the things you were seeing actually are than it was just taking in the atmosphere and beauty all around you.

The city is separated into a few main sectors. The easiest way to know you’re changing sectors is to cross the Grand Canal over a major bridge.

The first really major church we came to was the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. The church contains a bunch of interesting stuff, including the tomb of the painter Antonio Canova.

At this point, I do my rant about picture taking. I don’t know what the deal with forbidding photography in some churches is. It’s totally arbitrary, and often the smaller, less important places are way more strict about it. What, is Jesus worried he’ll be caught in a bad light? Seriously, the dude is omnipotent! He can’t take a bad picture unless he wants to, right?

Anyway, I separate churches into a few categories:

Pictures allowed: Take lots of pictures

Pictures not allowed (not enforced): Take some pictures

Pictures not allowed (strictly enforced): Take a few pictures

I may be going to hell if God really does get that upset over photography, but at least I get my photos!

Sometimes I had to go into full-on spy mode, resulting in pictures like this (in a different church):

More walking, more bridge crossing…

At this point we had reached the southern “coast” of the city, where you could see further out into the lagoon.

From here we headed north, crossing the Grand Canal again over the Ponte dell’Accademia.

Once we crossed from the Dorsoduro into the San Marco zone, we visited Chiesa di Santo Stefano, which had some features that were definitely unique. The ceiling had what is called a ship’s-keel design. It’s easier to explain just by showing the pictures. It’s the only one like that I’ve seen during my travels.

 

And then we arrived at the main attraction: Piazza San Marco. It’s huge. Like, really huge. And there are lots of pigeons. I was worried if I stood still for too long they might swarm and/or eat me. We walked across the piazza to find a super long line to get into Basilica di San Marco. Oh, no! So we took to the internet on my phone, where we bought a reservation for a couple euros, showed it to the guard, and walked right in!

Inside, San Marco is pretty amazing. Everything is gold and shiny with lots of domes, arches, and mosaics. This was another “no pictures” church, but you didn’t even have to act sneaky here. At one point a man walked by and said, to no one in particular, “No pictures please,” but in the most hopeless, defeated tone I have ever heard—he knew no one was going to listen.

While we were sitting and resting in one of the pews on the side, a choir of college-age girls congregated and started singing—cool! I could tell they weren’t Italian because their pronunciation of “Amazing Grace” was too good. Ele could tell they weren’t Italian because their pronunciation of “Ave Maria” was too horrible.

I guess some tales are too long to tell in one blog post. At this point it wasn’t even lunch time yet! I will be without internet starting tomorrow until I go home on Monday, so I guess I’ll have to finish Venice and tie up all the other loose ends from back in the USA. See you all on the other side!