Very busy day with much walking. We started with a tour of the Doge's palace, a huge pink and white marble Gothic palazzo beside the San Marco Basilica. For over a 1,000 years a series of elderly men with virtually no power ruled Venice.
The palace is packed with art and endless grand rooms but you can't escape the sense of isolation and inertia the Doges must have experienced. Exhausted and starving we headed for a nearby restaurant where we ran into a man who Carl knows from his many visits to the Vintages section in the LCBO. He too lives in Leaside and had just arrived in Venice - what a small world!
In an effort to escape the hordes of tourists in San Marco we jumped on a vaporetto and headed to Cannareggio, a section of Venice where all the people who are actually Venetians live.
There we visited the Gheto where Venetian Jews have lived since the 14th century- and, yes that's where the word ghetto originated. The only trade Jews were allowed to engage in was money lending and they were confined to a small area in Cannereggio. To accommodate their growing population they built tall apartment buildings which stand out compared to the low lying buildings in the rest of Venice - see photo here.
We visited a Jesuit church where one of Titian's great works, The Martyrdom of St Lawrence, hangs over an altar. But wouldn't you know it, after walking endless streets in the heat, we arrived to find out that the painting was out for restoration. We consoled ourselves with a gelato and a visit to Ca' Doro, a huge palazzo on the Grand Canal whose owner had donated the house filled with Renaissance paintings to the Italian state in 1916.
We ended the day with an excellent dinner at a small restaurant Bentigodi Osteria Da Francesca. Filled with locals and no English menus in sight, we had a feeling it was going to be good and we were right. We had to try that classic Venetian dish, risotto with squid ink and it was delicious. Followed that with grilled filet of beef and panna cotta for dessert-perfetto!!
My attempts at Italian are improving - I made a restaurant reservation and was actually understood. Weather continues to be very hot and very humid- no surprise given all the water. The beauty of the city continues to amaze - wandering the streets and getting lost is a very enjoyable experience! Here are some more photos taken as we walked the city .
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