The Drought’s Over in Venice!

Unfortunately for us, today brought much needed rain in Venice! It sounded & felt like a hurricane – rained all night and most of today but we’re not sticking around to see when it quits. There’s been flooding pushed onshore by high winds but that didn’t stop us from touring though. Here we are during a break in the rain by the Grand Canal.

Started the day by taking a water bus to the Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square) from the train station. All the traffic here goes by boat so there are no cars or busses like in a normal city. Here’s what the bus looks like:

Deliveries are all made by boat too – here’s a supply boat dropping off at a hotel.

The Grand Canal is Veince’s “Main Street” and is over 3KM long and over 50M wide. It loops thru the city and passes under 3 bridges: Ponte Scalzi (behind Vicki on the right),

Rialto

And Accademia

Veniced also has works of art along the Grand Canal. This skull made of pots & pans and cans welded together was strange but interesting!

The candy cane posts used for mooring boats on the canal, called bricole, are painted with the colors of the family whose palazzo adjoins to them. Here are some others and some shots of the grand canal:

In addition to the Grand Canal, there are numerous smaller side canals like this:

Despite the rain, we decided to do a walking tour of Venice that started out by the Palace of the Doge (the elected leader of Venice), the traditional seat of power for Venice when it was an independent republic.

The Palace is right next to another of the most recognizable buildings in Venice, San Marco’s Basilica.

We were supposed to go in but due to flooding, all the doors except one were closed and it would have taken hours to get in. The picture below looks kind of blurry because of the heavy rain! Another item for our next trip! :-)

The Piazza San Marco is famous for all the pigeons that flock around and onto visitors. Depending on your point of view, that can be good or bad – anyway, the rain kept them away and here’s how the square looks when nobody’s there!

In addition to the Palace and the Basilica, the Campanile bell tower rises 300 feet over the square. As our tour guide said, it’s not original, but replaces one that collapsed in 1902

Because all the main streets are actually canals, the walkways tend to be small alleys like this:

But some of the richer neighborhoods also had beautiful flower box lined walkways like this:

After winding around on the walking tour for about 2 hours and getting soaked, we finally stopped for a lunch of bruchetta and Calzone – excellent!

Well, we’re still trying to dry out and get ready for our next ride, so I guess I’ll close for now. This is another night train so we don’t have to pay for hotel!

On to Vienna!

Chao Bella & Auf Wiedersehen!