Venice by Mia

Tiny alleyway

After a long night sleeping in the car at a campsite just across the water from Venice, we went across the bridge and parked inside the largest parking structure in Europe. They have it all set up for tourists, on the outskirts there are various parking areas and several different forms of public transportation to get people into the city once they have dropped off their cars. These outskirts are pretty ugly and modern compared to the actual city. Venice is like an amusement park because it looks really nice, but it there is no longer an actual town there, just the tourists and the people who profit from them. Never the less, it is a really amazing place! It’s in the middle of a lagoon, and when you are on the bridge over, it’s a bit hard to tell where the lagoon ends and the city begins, because the water keeps going. There are several canals, the biggest one is the main canal, and it has several little ones branching off of it. There are also lots of streets and alleys of various sizes (some nice and wide, others only wide enough for two people walking side by side). Everything seems to be adorably crooked and old, with faded stucco crumbling off revealing bricks underneath. The entire city oozes charm out its ears!

After we dropped our car off at the biggest parking structure in Europe we took a short tram ride to the city. Then we headed off towards St Marc’s Cathedral and Square, but we didn’t actually find it until the afternoon. Instead we ended up wandering around the city for a few hours going into any churches that looked cool and soaking in the Venice-ness. We went into St. Stefano that had a cool wood frame roof that was a different shape on the inside than on the outside. It was the first church we had seen like that, and it was really cool. Then we wandered around some more, through several piazzas and into a few more churches. We walked through the maze of alleyways, one of which ended into a canal, no guardrail! Daddy almost walked into it. I wonder how many people on bikes have fallen in there.

Picnic on a little dock

Piazza San Marco is a big square that is surrounded by porticos, the Basilica St Marco is the main thing, but off to the side there is some palace, the old mint, and two old pillars in between which they used to execute people. There is also a tall, slightly leaning, tower off to the right. It’s a really nice square, and the combined effect of the porticos, the tower, and the basilica, makes you pause when you first see it.  When we finally found our way to the piazza, it was lunch time and we were pretty starved because no one had had much of a breakfast. We looked around for a supermarket but they hide those pretty well in Venice, so we settled on some sandwiches and leftover cheese and bread. Once we were fed, we went back to the piazza to see the basilica.

Golden mosaic inside St Marcs.

The interior of the basilica is covered in golden mosaics, kind of like the ones that used to be in the Haghia Sophia. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they stole the tiles from Istanbul! They stole the statues on the roof from the Hippodrome, and the golden altar inside from the Haghia Sophia itself. The entire basilica is also designed to look like the Haghia Sophia, but much smaller of course. The floor of the basilica is tiled in mosaics, but not as much as the ceiling. We walked through once and then came back a little while later for a second round, that time paying a few euros to see the golden altar in the back. It is really golden and it is covered in all sorts of jewels and precious things, stolen from the Haghia Sophia. After that we went over to a cafe and sat there sipping coffee and hot chocolate for a few hours. The hot chocolate was amazing! It was like they had melted a bar of chocolate into the cup because it started to harden if it got too cool. Then we went back outside to resume the search for a grocery store. Daddy found some on his gps and we went out to search for it, getting a tad lost, and eventually found it next to a gelateria. That was really convenient and we got some gelato and some salad and bread and stuff for dinner. We ate it on the end of a tiny dock which was probably for the taxis. We were totally in the way but no one told us to move, which was nice of them.

After dinner we headed back toward the car. We stopped a lot to take pictures of random things like leaning towered and cute canals with gondolas in them , things that were undeniably Venice like and we would not see anywhere else in the world. When you reach the dull modern outskirts, it is just as abrupt as stepping out of a ride in Disney Land. Suddenly there are cars and sleek tram tracks and ugly block buildings instead of crooked towers, canals, and rustic buildings. It was amazing in Venice and I really want to come back some day.