Italy
Venice
Day 1.
In a water taxi into the city we see Venice ahead of us, luring us forward. We are like children at a birthday party, desperately eager to find out what presents and fun she will give to us.
Red, yellow and orange and crumbling bricks, palaces, hotels and homes. The sound of Italian voices, tourists and beauty everywhere.
We threw ourselves into Venice, marveled at her streets, passages, dead ends and bridges, her squares, wine drinkers, her crumbling and impossibly floating streets cut by hundreds of canals. Vivaldi, the expression of history, art, the gelato. It’s almost too much!
We’re in the air
And we don’t care
We’re on our way to Venice
On the ground
We’ll get around
By boat, and skip in Venice
The bustling town
Won’t let us down
For there shall be no menace
It’s food and drink
And wine and fish
As we explore dear Venice
Day 2.
Canals and passageways. The Doges Palace. We continued to explore this amazing place. The first leader of Venice was elected, we haven’t discovered what happened to the last Doge. I read that when Vivaldi lived here and taught music to orphaned and illegitimate girls that there were 150,000 Venetians in the city. One third of them lived lives of pleasure. This has been a city of pleasure for a very long time.
The corridors of Venice
Have an air of menace
These tiny streets
That wind and weave are really hard to conceive
The walls lean in
The passages narrow
The men they move about with barrows
It’s like a dream
And lost you’ll be
Of this there is no doubt
But surely there’s
No other place
That I would be without
Day 3.
The pleasure continues. In a lift we zoomed up to the top of the bell tower in St Mark’s Square. This is the place where Galileo demonstrated his new-fangled telescope to the wonder of the Venetian merchants.
Next, we visited an 18th century palazzio “Ca Rezzonico” that is now a museum filled with art, painted ceilings, porcelain, marbles, frescoes and the faces of ancient Venice that looked back at us from all the art. Lots of naked women were represented, but unexpectedly also some naked men drawn by a rare female 18th century artist.
Our day ended with opera; we saw Madame Butterfly in a wonderful opera house where we could imagine many tourists to Venice were entertained over the centuries.
It’s goodbye to thee
And sad indeed
That we must leave behind
The place that kept us warm at night
That lost us in its labyrinth streets
That floated us on canals of dreams
That saw us climb its tower so high
T’is truly sad indeed
That this’s the day we say goodbye
Until next time we meet