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Published: June 17th 2006
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Venice
Piazza San Marco Venice, Italy:
Venice is beautiful. It is just as amazing and unique as everyone says it is, and even more so. You can really see how Venetian architecture has permeated the world after being in Venice for a few days. The best advice we got, and absolutely the first thing I will tell anyone going to Venice, is to stay near the train station! You do not want to be lugging your bags around the city and over the canals! And taking a water taxi is very expensive, so just stay close to the train station, and the city is small enough that you can get anywhere you need to fairly quickly. So when we arrived from Florence to the main station, we walked to our hotel which was only about 100 meters from the station. Hotel Moderno it was called. When we first saw a sign for it, it had an arrow pointing down what I could only describe as an alley, but I’m not sure it was even big enough to be called an alley. It was only about a foot wider than I am, and I wasn’t sure we would even fit in the space with our
Venice
The view from the train station. bags! The reception area was separate from the building with the rooms, so after checking in, we had to walk back into the “alley” with our bags, only to find that there was no elevator to go around the small and tight staircase up to the rooms. Originally they had us on the 3rd floor, but after some quick maneuvering, we were on the first floor, but we still had a flight of stairs to climb. When we finally got into the room, the air conditioner was broken, the telephone had no dial tone, the window wouldn’t open all the way, and the towels on the bed had holes where what looked like rats had eaten through them. So we immediately took our bags back down the stairs and into the reception to complain, but again the language barrier proved successful in preventing us from getting our frustration across to the old lady at the counter. After some time of trying to find internet and a telephone, we got a hold of hotels.com and argued with them until they agreed to upgrade our hotel to any hotel we could find and they would pay the difference up to 100 USD
Hotel Moderno
read the blog per night.
So within the hour, we were in the 4-star Hotel Bellini on the Grand Canal in a beautiful room with a Murano glass chandelier and fully intact towels! We showered off and went into the city to check out first the Rialto Bridge and Piazza San Marco. The Rialto Bridge is interesting, but nothing like the Ponte Vecchio for me. Just another bridge with tourist shops on and around it. I’m pretty positive I saw Justin Barstein, who I know from Birmingham, but he didn’t hear me when I yelled his name and when I went looking for him I lost him in the crowd. San Marco square was really cool too, but once you’ve seen the pigeons and taken your pictures, you are ready to leave. I’m glad we got to see these two historic landmarks first hand; they will take on a new meaning when I see and hear about them in the future.
The next day, our hotel, in partnership with the city of Venice and the Murano glass blowers, arranged for a water taxi to take us to the Island of Murano where we had a private tour of a glass blowing
Murano
My newest possession. factory and its showroom. The water taxi was great, and the whole thing cost us €5 instead of the more than €50 that it would normally cost to take one of the taxi boats. We got a great view of the Grand Canal and Venice, and it was much faster than the public waterbuses. In the factory, part of the CAM group that has more than 160 different factories in Murano, the glass master there was a specialist in making goblets and drinking glasses. We got to watch the master at work, making 2 or 3 goblets of a beautiful red color right in front of us. He had 2 apprentices with him, and apparently it takes at least 20 years of training and apprenticeship to become a master, and every master has a specialty and will only work with certain colors. One of the masters in the CAM group is Maestro Pino Signoretto, who was the man in charge of the operation that created the $10 million reception area ceiling at the Bellagio Hotel. The showroom was magnificent, and they had all types of glasswork from big to small. After much deliberation and comparison between all of their works,
I finally decided on a large glass bowl that I bought and had shipped back to Nashville. It is beautiful, and I’m not sure the pictures do it justice, so you will have to come over and see it for yourself. It will have to reside in Nashville, however, until I have a place of my own that is big enough (and safe enough) for such a piece of artwork.
We spent the rest of the afternoon at the beach on the Island of Lido to the south of Venice. This was a great way to spend such a beautiful day and the beach was packed with people. We returned to the hotel and relaxed for a while before leaving again for the evening. We walked through the Jewish Ghetto and the Ghetto Nuovo, both of which are heavily populated Jewish areas to this day. They also had a Lubovitch community center of Venice, which was definitely an unexpected site.
Before we left the next day, we went on a tour of the San Marco Basilica and did some final sightseeing of Venice. The Basilica is beautiful and the ceiling is covered nearly entirely in gold. During the
middle of the day, the San Marco Square is packed with people and pigeons, and definitely a sight to see. All in all, Venice is one of my favorite cities not just because it is such a pretty city, but because it is small enough to get around easily but still packed with people everywhere to make it feel like you are in a much larger city. There is so much more to do and see in Venice than can possibly be done in only a couple of days.
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