We had a wonderfully long sleep — over 10 hours! Woke up to rain, breakfasted in our hotel’s “American Bar” to the unexpected sound of the Eagles,
Our tour was the Basilica San Marco and the Doge’s Palace. Fortunately they were mostly indoor tours, so a good choice for a rainy day. The Piazza San Marco is enormous with a nice long portico to stay out of the rain, and we got a few good shots of the exterior.
The basilica is an overwhelming onslaught of gold, mosaics, paintings, sculpture, and intricately detailed craftsmanship on the walls, the floors, the ceilings. Such a display of wealth, craftsmanship and sustainment! Apparently Venice removed St Mark’s remains around the time Constantinople was sacked and buried them under the altar of the basilica. A team recently confirmed there are indeed human remains under the altar!
The doge’s palace is impressive in two ways: each room successively grows grander, more opulent, and more full of detailed trim, paintings and square footage. Venice in its heyday was a republic — the doge was elected to a fixed term by the nobility. In most of the paintings in the palace, the doge is portrayed kneeling — one exception: in paintings where the doge meets the pope - he is standing! No submission to the pope here!!!
After the tour, a little cold and wet, we found lunch and a few glasses of wine at a local bistro and a nap. Then an amusing venture to a post office to mail a postcard. It turns out Italians do a lot more at the post office then just send and receive mail and packages. They pay bills, send money, get cell service, and handle ID cards apparently. Anyway, to be serviced you need to get a ticket, but the categories for the tickets were completely nonintuitive. I wound up, in desperation, getting a ticket of each type as I wIted (over 30 minutes!!) for service. Time dragged on so much I wondered if people were going over their wills or something. In the meantime, people were coming in after me and going to the window but it turns out they had made advance reservations! Finally my turn came on the wrong type of transaction but after getting scolded and playing dumb, i got my postcard mailed. 45 minutes!
Back to the hotel then out to dinner (a delicate white fish braised “in paper” with a delicious white wine butter rosemary sauce. Mmmmm. Then off to a performance by a string ensemble named Interpreti Veneziani. We heard Vivaldi’s 4 Seasons and a Vivaldi cello piece, finished with a violin showcase piece by Paganini. We thoroughly enjoyed the performance The cellist, in particular, was not only a technically good player, he was also an emotive performer. I’ve seen people overdo it — imagine trying to swoon in ecstasy playing “3 Blind Mice” — but while this guy PERFORMED, what he did made sense in the moment, definitely enhanced the music and … worked. He was complimented by the violaist and the principal violinist, so the interplay of those instruments realky came thru. Well done!
No comments:
Post a Comment