Venturing into Venice

---

Finding the Avis office in the daylight was easy and after a short walk we were at the train station. It is ½ hour from Padua to Venice that is just enough time for a cappuccino and croissant. The croissants on the train are better than what you get at Starbucks for 3 times as much money. When I went to buy vaporetto tickets asking which line we should take for the Jewish Ghetto, the ticket seller let me know that it was a five-minute walk so we began our wandering. Even with a map we managed to take twice as long to get wherever we were trying to go than it would take if you knew where you were going. The tour in the Ghetto was through three of the five synagogues in the Ghetto. Reading my guidebook on the train, I had learned that the Jews had to live in the Ghetto behind locked gates, they had to pay excessive taxes, they had to wear distinctive clothing including a yellow circle (we know what this led to), could not own property and could only engage in three professions, money lending, selling used clothing and medicine (as blood letting was known), but according to the book they had it pretty good. Living in the ghetto kept them safe from the “common people” who would have abused and assaulted them. As you can see in the attached picture that was taken immediately outside the Ghetto Square, anti-Semitism is alive and well in Italy. Relatively poor communities from different parts of the world funded the synagogues: Germany, Spain, and Greece/Turkey. They are all on the top floors of apartment buildings so skylights can provide natural light on the bima. Since Christians executed the architecture and art, the synagogues have elements that are church like. There are fewer than 500 Jews in Venice today. Most Jews who had lived in Venice during WWII were shipped to Bergen Belsen at the very end of the war; in fact they were deported and murdered after the Russians had liberated Auschwitz. When we visited Venice 20 years ago, I attended services and since we will be going to synagogue in Florence, we’ll forgo going to services in Venice.

We now had several hours before we were scheduled to meet our guide. After pizza, we happened upon a photography exhibit by a South Korean photographer, Ito Lim. After this we went to a photography exhibit by Giles Caron that we had learned about from posters in the area of the Ghetto. He was a war photojournalist who photographed Vietnam, the ’67 war in Israel, Biafra and Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge presumably murdered him at the age of 30. The exhibit contrasted black and white and color photos that were taken one immediately after the other. The building and garden gave us a peek at what is behind many of the high walls surrounding buildings in Venice. A lovely setting for disturbing images of death and violence.

A break before meeting Fiona, gave us a change for gelato, salted caramel, the new pistachio.

Fiona started the tour in the Scuola San Rocco. The Scuola were organizations that were set up as guilds by regular citizens to provide assistance to people who lived in a specific area and needed help because of the plague or plain old poverty. San Rocco is the patron saint of this Scuola that is one of the largest and most successful in Venice. In the same manner that wealthy families built grand palaces to demonstrate their wealth and power, the Scoula did the same. As with all art of the period it is religious art. Bellini worked on the building for years creating the frescos. The scale of building achieves the objective of being awe-inspiring.

After the Scuola we went to the Academia where she walked us through four centuries of Italian painting beginning with art inspired by the Byzantines that is completely flat with gold leaf backgrounds and posed images with minimal expression. By the end of the Renaissance there is perspective and images of people that have individuality and emotion. The Renaissance enabled artists to focus on human beings as human beings.

We had dinner at the apartment: Gnocchi that were light and fluffy with meat sauce, Bisol Prosecco and desserts form the night before. When I get home, I'm going to try to recreate the gnocchi since I have never had such good gnocchi and didn't even know they could be this good.



By bedtime, I had a cold.

---