We boarded the train in Florence, bound for Venice. We had seats booked in rows 7 & 8 (facing each other) and amazingly discovered that Denise and Graeme had seats booked in the same row! We knew we were all going on the same train, but didn’t know we were seated adjacent to each other!
What can I say? We have a superb Travel Agent. 🙂 We had a great trip to Venice. We arrived to fog in Venice; it was only foggy as we got close to Venice, the fog was only over the islands of Venice! It didn’t take long to lift, and was gone an hour or so after we arrived. We waited in line for some time to get the vaporetto (water bus) to our accommodation.
Once we were on the vaporetto, we only caught glimpses out the sides as the boat was packed, with standing room only:
We got off at our stop, Ca’ Rezzonico and made our way over 2 canals to our accommodation, enjoying the scenery as we went.
We had arranged to meet the Calcotts at 1pm in San Marco square so we immediately left our accommodation and made our way through the narrow lanes to San Marco.
We met up with the Calcotts and decided to go and look in the Ducal Palace.
This is the courtyard inside the palace:
Inside the palace was full of art once again. In the photo below Jason and Lily are standing beside a huge fireplace on the left. I don’t know how you’d reach things on the mantlepiece!
There were several huge halls. This building was used as the centre of government and the judicial court in the past.
We walked through the inside of the famous Bridge of Sighs. Looking out from the bridge you could see the fancy Ducal Palace on the left, and the not so fancy prison on the right:
Inside the prison had many small cells, with very small doors to get into them:
Looking back at the Bridge of Sighs:
There was a lovely view of Venice from inside the palace:
After going through the palace we said our farewells to the Calcotts and carried on exploring Venice by ourselves.
There are SO many of these lanes in Venice, it is very, very easy to get lost as so many of the lanes aren’t on maps! It’s really like a maze.
And some of the lanes are like a corridor, only 2 people wide. It is just SO beautiful here though, there’s something picturesque, rustic, and beautiful everywhere you look!
We went into this little shop that sold ceramic masks. The masks were for sale everywhere, but this little shop was special because the shop owner was in the back decorating the masks herself:
There was the occasional ugly face amongst the beauty of Venice!
And lots of town squares (platzz) with tables and chairs, and sometimes an antique stall or two:
We left this square and decided just to wander and explore:
An hour later we noticed that there wasn’t any tourists around any more, in fact, the streets were pretty deserted:
This tower was interesting, it had a definite lean to it!!!
By this time we had only about an hour of daylight left and it was official: we were lost. Ha!
Clearly we were in a residential area of Venice:
Mike used the GPS on his phone to try to find our way out, but what we hadn’t counted on was the narrow little lanes blocking the satellites so that the iPhone was almost useless and kept sending us one way, and then another. Eventually we turned up here in this square… where I recognised the antique stalls on the left; we had gone in a large circle, only to end up back in the same place! When we first left this square we went up a lane up on the right, but returned to it here.
By this point Mike’s phone had been working overtime and was getting a low battery so we resorted to the old way and bought a map. 🙂 It wasn’t always helpful either, because there are just so many lanes that not all of them were on the map. As we wandered in the direction we thought we were supposed to be going 😉 we saw this person covered in flowers for some reason:
And we crossed over the Rialto bridge:
And finally got back to a square that we recognised near our accommodation, so we stopped and ate our dinner just as it was getting dark and after Mike’s phone had died!
We knew that Venice is known for getting lost in, so hey, we had to do it too. 🙂 Just as well Mike’s feet were a lot better today!