Italy 2012 – Venice in a day!
The morning of our one full day in Venice we woke up a little later than we had hoped and headed down to breakfast. Breakfast in the hotel turned out to be reminiscent of an American or British hotel breakfast. Even the jam was imported from Essex, England rather than being sourced locally (the complete opposite of Capo La Gala in southern Italy where the jam, butter, meat, etc was all local and fresh.) One thing I do really like about Palazzo Stern Hotel was that you can get an Espresso or Cappuccino anytime you want, in your room, the hotel bar, or the canal terrace, at no charge.
We had a tour pre-arranged for St. Marks Basilica and the main parts of Venice scheduled for 2pm so we decided to go out, camera and cash in hand, and get lost. Getting lost is both easy and necessary in Venice. If you only visit St. Marks square you miss all of the interesting parts of Venice, as well as the reasonably priced, good tasting food. Everyone told us the best food is in the Jewish Ghetto but we never made it there in our short time in the city. If you have the time/inclination, you should check it out.
As we wound our way through small walkways, over bridges, and along canals we ran across some really interesting shops and caffe’s. As we got closer to St. Marks, we started to see Gucci, Prada, and other stores you’d see at any high end mall. The same cheap little glass items slowly increased in price until finally we were in the square.
Everything in the square is oversized, like the hotels in Las Vegas, it’s bigger in person than it looks in pictures. The Venetians built the structures in part to instill a sense of power so that others would not attempt an attack.
Okay, before I go on, I should tell you what we were told about Venice by other Italians. Essentially, Venetian shop keepers are not nice. There are so many tourists that a single shop can turn away hundreds of sales and still there will be more. Second, as you get closer to St. Marks, the food gets more expensive, and lower in quality, simultaneously. We were further advised to never eat at any place that has pictures of their food. Having already been warned, we experienced this whole picture of Venice in pretty short order and confirmed all of it to be true.
First we found a shop, right in the square, that had a couple items we liked. Specifically they had Murano glass Christmas ornaments. Since they were piled in baskets on the bottom shelf of a cabinet in a dark corner, it was hard to see them so we asked the woman running the shop if she could take the baskets out of the case. First she asked which size (by price) we wanted to look at since each basket held a specific size. But Devon wanted to see the glass patterns and colors, regardless of size/price so we asked to see all three baskets. The woman balked, and pressed us on which size/price again, but we just didn’t know since we cared about the color patterns more than the €2 price difference. Finally, as she went to open the case she stopped short and said “this is a real problem for us you know, getting all of them out,” hoping we’d give up I suppose, but we just stayed silent at that point and she got all 3 baskets out, which took approximately 5 seconds. In the end we bought a couple things despite her attitude and we just shrugged it off since we knew to expect it.
Right after leaving that shop, we decided to have a quick snack so we found a seat at a Caffe right on the square. The menu was small, the food was horrible (worse than the train food) and the prices were ridiculous. Water : €10, Cappuccino : €8 (where everywhere else we’d been barely charged €2 for cappuccino. Devon had a pizza, 4 very small slices that was actually pretty horrible, far worse than any frozen pizza at home. It was pretty sad actually. Anyway, we had to eat on the square at least once just to do it, so again, no biggy.
We still had a little more time before our pre-arranged tour so we walked up the canal to see the church that Vivaldi was involved with. For €3 each, we were given a laminated sheet with a description of each painting and were allowed inside to look around. Back outside we headed toward the meeting place for the tour, paid to use the toilet and we were ready to follow the group, wireless earpieces hanging on our necks.
Venice travel tip: don’t carry a backpack. A messenger bag is better for two reasons. 1.) the busses require you to remove backpacks and carry them by hand and 2.) The Palace and Basilica don’t allow backpacks inside. There is a little place nearby where you can check a bag for one hour but if you carry a messenger bag, you avoid the hassle.
The tour was 2 hours and talked about how Venice was formed, history of the city, current issues, etc and I felt better about Venice as a whole after. What I realized is that even though Venice is in Italy, it is not really an Italian city. It’s actually more Byzantine and European. True Venetians even use their own Venetian language.
After the tour we walked around and spent more money on gifts, went back to the hotel to change, then headed back to Rialto area to find a quick bite to eat before we had to be at Chieso de Vidal for a live Vivaldi concert put on by Interpreti Veneziani that we bought tickets to earlier. The cafe we finally chose had good food, and overall the service was good, despite a gruff “we’ll get to you when we get to you” greeting from one of the waiters. Paying our check was a hassle because just as we were trying to leave a big wind came through the area, knocking over tables, destroying dishes, and taking down a few umbrellas. The entire wait staff was embroiled in getting everything they could put away and brought inside as fast as possible while all of the patrons looked on from the inside eating area.
The Vivaldi concert was great, and they returned three separate times after applause for encore performances. After that, we again headed back to the hotel to pack and sleep as we would be heading to Milan at 7:45am.
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