Our First Day in Venice...

June 12, 2012 p.m.

So we set off on our drive to Venice.  I drove the first half of the four hour drive, so there are no pictures.  It is a shame because we were going through the beautiful Appenini (Little Alps) Mountains.  We ran into this incredible storm.  It was raining so hard that I had to pull over and stop for a while because I couldn’t see out the windshield with the wipers on full blast.  It was a Texas size storm.  We found out later that that same storm spawned a tornado in Morano, the island near Venice known for its glass blowing.  Couldn't believe the picture, which I grabbed from the local Venice newspaper website.

After going through the Appenini, the landscape leveled out rather quickly and became perfectly flat.

We started seeing more water…

And canals…

We arrived at out hotel just after 2:00 p.m. It is about a 25 minute bus ride into Venice from the hotel.  So, we checked in, unpacked, and ran to catch the bus.  As soon as we reached Venice, we went straight to the Grand Canal where we caught a vaporetto (water bus) so that we could take a long slow tour of the Grand Canal.  We managed to get four seats right at the very front of the boat...the best spot to see from.  This was our starting point down at the Piazalle Roma: 

We couldn’t believe it… Here we were in Venice going down the Grand Canal J

The famous Rialto bridge…

Where the gondoliers sing to you (but definitely NOT "oh solo mio" as that is a song from Naples)…

David says if we ever come back here, he wants to stay here, at the Hotel Marconi, right in the heart of all the action…

It was so awesome to be on the Grand Canal with all of the traffic and interesting buildings…

I love all the little side canals with the smaller bridges too…

This is coming up on St. Marks square, the Basilica, and the Doge's Palace...

The Bridge of Sighs - the view from this bridge (the upper one coming from the Doge's palace on the left where the sentence was handed out) the was the last look of Venice a convicted criminal would get to have before being executed...hence the "sigh".

 Looking across from the Bridge of Sighs to San Giorgio Maggiore...

Next we went off to look at St. Mark’s Basilica, built in the 11th century.  It's Eastern-style architecture shows Venice's early connection to Byzantium (now Constantinople)…

The mosaic floors really amazed me.  Unfortunately you can’t tell from the pictures, but the floors are rolling because parts of them have sunk more than others.  As with almost every building in Venice, the best foundation trees were at the edges of the basilica, so the middle tends to sink more than the edges...

The campanile in St. Mark’s square used to be a lighthouse, which was part of a fortress that guarded the entrance to the Grand Canal.  The lighthouse crumbled into a pile of bricks in 1902, one thousand years after being built, and was replaced with this belltower…

St. Mark’s connected to the Doge’s Palace…

We watched the clock chime at 6:00 p.m. and the little men on top move to hit the bell with their mallets.  In the 17^th Century a man was killed because he got knocked off when the bells rang.  It was the first killing of a human by a robot.  Weird…

This is the leaning tower of Venice… the weather looks a bit stormy…

This is walking out on the Riva Schiavoni to catch the slow vaporetto back through the Grand Canal and to the bus station.

This building is similar to what all of the buildings looked like in the Venice’s hay day….

The weather was cloudy, but we didn’t get rained on…

Back by the Rialto bridge with all of the gondolas nearby…

We loved this spot, a great place to hang out and watch the world go by on the Canal – it's called San Giacomo di Rialto (which is funny, because we lived on Via San Giacomo in Perugia)...

Three different floors with different architecture.  This is the Ca' d'Oro (House of Gold).  Venetian Gothic, which this is, mixes traditional Gothic (pointed arches and round medallions stamped with a four-leaf clover)with Byzantine styles (tall, narrow arches atop thin columns), filled with Islamic frills.  In its day, this would have also been painted and gilded with gold…

Finishing our Grand Canal tour going the other direction…

Then we took a bus back to the hotel and it was off to bed as the four of us were extremely tired after an emotional morning, and spectacular afternoon/evening.    Looking forward to more of Venice tomorrow J

~Mary