European Vacation (Venice)

Our next destination was Italy, so we drove through the Austrian Alps

 

and countless tunnels 

(in Europe they don't go over and around mountains, 

they go through them) 

and entered Italy for our first time. 

And why not? 

In the last two centuries, young men of means were expected to undertake the Grand Tour. According to Dr. Samuel Johnson, "A man who has not seen Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see." Boswell's Life of Johnson. Why Italy? As Orson Wells explained in The Third Man: "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed--they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of peace and democracy, and what did they produce? 

The cuckoo clock." 

So to Venezia we did go..

We found our bed and breakfast place in a little suburb of Venice called Dolo.

(the view from our room)

After we got checked in, we took the bus to Venice.

Being in Venice is surreal, the streets really are canals filled with water and the taxi cabs are boats.

 

We sampled our first "Italian" pizza

 

and our first official Italian gelato

 

 We ate dinner in a streetside cafe and

 

wandered the streets until dark

 

 

 Then we went back the next day and wandered some more.

First we had a tour on the Vaporetto (water taxis)

 

The Rialto Bridge

 

The Bridge of Sighs

 

 

 

 

 

 

We got off at St Mark's square. Mark's bones

 (the Mark from the book of Mark in the New Testament)

are supposedly buried in the church.

Thus the name

What a place, the architecture is amazing!

We wandered, and ate

and wandered some more

and took a lot of pictures.

This is what happens when you try to kick the pigeons

What a place!

 

One more gelato before we go

We had a Grand Tour -definitely worth a visit!