Venice: Rialto Bridge, St. Mark’s Cathedral and Tower, Doge’s Palace

This is the first day of my first overseas trip since COVID shut things down. This trip starts with a visit to Venice (Venezia*). I am as thrilled to be here as an innately morose, neurotic, pessimistic person can be while travelling during a pandemic.

To get way too picayune and pedantic, I took an overnight flight. When the plane reached the Atlantic, it was well before midnight local time at that longitude. So, technically, the first day of my first overseas trip after the the pandemic shut things down was yesterday. If you’d like even more boring and irrelevant information than that I could try to find out the brand of pepper served with the meal on the plane. But, never mind. You’re probably not interested. And if you are, what the heck is wrong with you?

I think this is my fourth time visiting Venice. Even in just my first half-day here on this trip, this city’s beauty reminds me of two things:

1. I should have been here way more times than that by my age. The city is a knockout.
2. I might have visited Venice more than that, but at my age, I forget and lose count of things.

If only to protect Venice, we humans need to find a way to stop sea levels from rising much further. I’m not a scuba diver. I don’t want Venice to be permanently underwater.

And, yes, I recognize the hypocrisy of that statement. I flew here on a jet that spewed considerable greenhouse gases into the air. But, in my defence, I lost about fifteen or twenty pounds since my last overseas trip. So the plane probably burned a couple fewer molecules of jet fuel to fly me across the Atlantic this time than the last time I made that crossing.

Apropos of pretty much nothing, you might have noticed that I used a variation on “visit Venice” four times already in this entry, including this sentence. The redundancy probably annoys you. Sorry about that. I could have mixed it up a bit by changing one or two usages to a variation on “trip to Venice” or “in Venice,” but I’m trying to accumulate frequent alliteration points. For every twenty points you get to use one cliché guilt-free.

Hey, those are the rules. I don’t make them up. So, “visit Venice” it is. (That’s six.)

Venice Airport Transport

I know of three ways to get from Venice Airport (Marco Polo Airport) to the city: A bus or taxi can take you just to one outer fringe of the centre of the city. Or boats can take you to a few stops in the city’s beating heart. I didn’t know about that third way, the boats, until someone who shall remain my sister told me about it. I’m glad she did. I probably would have taken a taxi or bus otherwise because the availability of the boats isn’t obvious at the airport.

But in the heart of Venice, vehicles are boats. And only boats. So there can’t be a more quintessentially Venetian way to get from the airport to the city than by boat. My hotel isn’t far from the terminus of the road for motor vehicles, so a bus or taxi might have involved a little less of a walk. But, the boat felt more authentic.

Rialto Bridge

As is my wont, I did a fair bit of wandering today. Some of it was even intentional. A lot of it was because I didn’t check the map closely enough to see where the bridges were over the canals I needed to cross or where “streets” dead-ended. (“Street is in quotes for the benefit of people who think it can’t be as street if it allows only pedestrians and a few pushcarts.)

One sight I intended to and did go to was the Rialto Bridge, because, what’s a visit to Venice (seven) without seeing Rialto Bridge?

That was a trick question. A visit to Venice (eight) without seeing the Rialto Bridge is a visit to Venice (nine) without seeing the Rialto Bridge.

Actually, I went to and over the Rialto Bridge twice. But the second time was an accident, not an intent.

Rialto Bridge is as stately as ever. The white bridge crossing Venice’s Grand Canal has three pedestrian lanes: Two on the sides and one in the middle. Two rows of shops have their doors facing the middle pedestrian lane. There are no car lanes because there are no cars. Venice, remember. No cars.

St. Mark’s Basilica Bell Tower

St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice has a bell tower (campanile). It’s not physically attached to the basilica. But there’s not much space between the two.

Surprisingly, I can’t recall going to the top of the bell tower on any of my previous visits to Venice. It’s not surprising that I can’t remember. I forget, did I mention that I don’t remember things as well at my age as I used to?

What’s surprising is, if I’m right about not having gone up the bell tower before, that would have been very uncharacteristic for me. I love climbing towers. It’s not just the views that I love—although definitely that too. I love the challenge of climbing the tall, often narrow, old staircases of tall towers built before the invention of elevators. It proves to me that I can still do it. One day, I won’t be able to.

I went up this time. I was cheated. Not about the views. They’re spectacular. But there was no climb. They retrofitted an elevator into the centre of the tower. I imagine it’s where the stairs used to be when the campanile was built in the twelfth century and then rebuilt in the sixteenth century. I couldn’t see any doors to stairs. Nor was there room to fit a staircase.

When I got to the top and it became clear that there couldn’t possibly be any stairs, my neuroses kicked in. There is only one elevator. What happens, I wondered, if the elevator breaks down while people are at the top? Worse, what happens if the elevator breaks down while people are at the top and a fire breaks out?

Thoughts like those make it difficult to muster the full awe that the views deserve.

St. Mark’s Basilica

If you were a regular reader of this travel journal before COVID put it largely on hiatus, you’d know that when I visit old European cities I like to visit their centuries-old churches. I find them impressive, if only because their architects and builders build such mammoth and overpowering structures with few of the modern-day construction equipment.

That’s amazing to me. Not amazing enough to make me believe in God. But, still, amazing.

There are already way too many descriptions of old European churches in this journal, so I’ll keep this entry on St. Mark’s Basilica (Basilica San Marco) short. It’s an impressive old church.

A couple of the unique features of St. Mark’s Basilica are its Pala d’Oro and its exterior balcony that affords good views of St. Mark’s Square.

The Pala d’Ora is a large double-sided artwork behind the basilica’s high altar. One side is particularly spectacular, with intricate ceramic depictions on sheet gold. I wasn’t able to get a good picture of the Pala d’Ora. So you’ll just have to go to Venice and see it for yourself.

The exterior balcony that affords good views of St. Mark’s Square is an exterior balcony that affords good views of St. Mark’s Square. Duh.

There is an entrance fee for the basilica. But it’s cheap. Only €3. However, if you want to see the Pala d’Oro, there’s an extra fee for that (€5). And there’s also a separate fee to go to the balcony (€7). However, to be fair, that €7 additional fee also includes access to an interior balcony that overlooks the inside of the basilica and entry to a small museum that houses a few tile mosaics, sculptures and archeological finds.

Italy does not bury its head in the sand when it comes to COVID. Except while eating at restaurants, masks are still required indoors here. And not just any mask. Most places require FFP2 masks, which are equivalent to our N95 masks. (So far, everyone has accepted the N95 masks I brought with me.)

The only exception I’ve seen to the only-FFP2/N95 masks rule was at St. Mark’s Basilica. There, a sign out front said they’d accept either FFP2 or surgical masks.

Surgical masks aren’t as protective. Did they think that, because it’s a house of God, God will make up the difference in protection? If God wanted to be useful in that regard he shouldn’t have let SARS-CoV-2 infect us in the first place. Just saying.

Doge’s Palace

The Doge’s Palace (Palazzo Ducale) is the former palace of the doge of what was then the Venetian Republic. The doge was the highest of the high mucky mucks back in the day.

Built in the 14th century, the Doge’s Palace oozes old-world charm. And when I say “old world,” I’m talking even before Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

And it wasn’t just his residence. The palace also contained rooms for administration uses, a senate meeting room, council meeting rooms, an armoury, and a prison. Except for the prison, the rooms were all richly decorated. I mean “richly” in both senses of the word.

Art adorned most of the walls. Many of the ceilings were sculpted and painted. I don’t mean painted eggshell white. I mean painted with ornate images.

The rooms deserve more complete and more colourful descriptions than I’m giving them here. However, two things hold me back from taking it much further:

1. I’ve always been descriptive-rendering-challenged.
2. I didn’t sleep much on the plane coming over and I went to the Doge’s Palace after doing all of the above stuff. I am jet-lagged and near-catatonic tired. That probably also partly explains my terseness in the St. Mark’s Basilica section above. That and the descriptive-rendering-challenged thing.

The behind-glass displays in the armoury taught me that grown men of that day dressed up in metal costumes and played games on narrow, almost two-dimensional, wooden toy horses. Although, I might have misinterpreted the display. Did I mention I was and am tired?

I will add that one of the large rooms, Salla dello Scrutinio, contained a temporary exhibit by a contemporary artist, Anselm Kiefer. He designed his installation specifically for the Salla dello Scrutiny. It covers pretty well every square centimetre of the room’s walls.

His installation is both subtly and profoundly dark. It is textural and three-dimensional. Profoundness imbues the work. It would pair well with a bold full-bodied red wine, with a hint of oak and undertones of tobacco and cherries. That likely makes sense only to someone as sleep-deprived and descriptive-rendering-challenged as I was when I saw it and am now. I clearly don’t have a clue as to what I’m talking about.

I will also add that, unlike the rest of the palace, the prison is, as you would expect it to be, bleak. It houses the famous Bridge of Sighs (Ponte dei Sospiri), an enclosed bridge that crosses one of Venice’s canals. The story goes that the bridge got its name because prisoners sighed as they took their last glimpse of Venice through its windows as they walked over it into the prison.

And, with that, I’m going to sigh and go off to sleep, but feel free to continue and read the following, which I wrote earlier.