Venice!

Trains in Italy go so fast that Marc's water bottle exploded when he opened the lid!

I

t's true, there are no words to describe Venice. 

I also won't talk about the €110 lunch we got scammed for. And in the off-season! We're just going to remember how delicious it was, sitting at a cafe on the ancient cobblestone streets with wine and sunshine, feeling pretty darn content. 

A 48-hour side trip from Florence, and the best sleep we've had so far, in a tiny hostel, best breakfast, coffee and company thanks to Umberto, our host. 

The mileage on our feet on these 2 days! Fun fact: there are no cars in Venice! Everything is accessed by Vaporetto, or public boat, boat taxis or gondolas! 

Sadly, Umberto lets us know "Venice is now for tourists, there is no 'local' Venice. We all work here, but live elsewhere."  Still, beautiful. We don't go inside anything, nothing is free. We spend 2 days wandering the labyrinth, sometimes barely wide enough for one set of shoulders.

Here we go, first up, Gondolas!

Gondoliers! They too need rest, check their cell phones while oaring or not. 

The Grande  Canal, or Main Street, Venice:

And it is a working town, so there is boat chaos! 

We buy our 24-hour Vaporetto tickets that lets us ride the public boats, and we travel down the main canal, alighting at a park station where we eat our picnic lunch brought from Florence. We hop back on to find the main Piazza, a glorious square that floods 200+ times per year! I make Marc sit for the obligatory espresso in the sun = €18 ! Hence the face.

And of course, a chance to feed the birds....

We check in to our hostel, drop our knapsacks and head back out, find a cheap dinner where we attempt to make sense of the labyrinth. It's really quite an engineering feat, this Venice.

We stumble around a corner and come upon a handmade sign that reads, "Welcome to the world's most beautiful book store!" It is stacked to the rafters with new, used, and barely held together books.  A gondola in the middle of the store filled with all sorts of cast-off reads. It is a museum more than a book store, and the owner is a stout old man, speaking perfect English, who loves our  choice of a 100 page quick read of 'How Venice was Built' for €5. He tells me to go through to the back where his book garden will surprise me!  Indeedy! 

We stroll some more, keep hopping on and off the Vaporetto,  return to the Piazza, it's  so beautifully lit, and come upon the barge that is off-loading this year's Christmas tree for the Piazza.

the next morning, we're off after fond good-byes to hostel-Umberto, to find a little place we've  read about. Somewhere here is the Gondolier Shipyard, where, if lucky, you can peer in and see them at work. We sleuth the maps for familiar landmarks based on the story and realize the back-side of Venice is where it's at! How perfect for us!, and it makes us laugh.  Without too much difficulty, we find it, and indeed, it's open, with a film crew outside interviewing one of the gondoliers. We hang out here for about 30 minutes, completely happy. 

Our last stop before catching our train back to Florence is the Jewish Quarter. A speckled and troubled history for sure, as elsewhere in the world. But with the Renaissance sweeping Europe in the 15th and 16th cenuries, they partipated in Venetian society (with limits), contributing  new ideas on religion, humanist  philosophy and medicine. By the 17th century, Ghetto Literary Salons were where all the intelligentsia could be found, no matter their faith, and it was Jewish leaders who brought everyone together.  Things changed obviously under Mussolini and then WW2. Out of 4,000 inhabitants at the start of the war, only 37 returned. Today, Jewish families are spread out around Venice, but still return here for schools, synagogue and a place for meeting socially. There's also a very poignant memorial, and you can somewhat feel the grief and history in the streets. Incredible.

Lastly, water bottle fill-up fountains, and boat parking. 

And when we see you: sewage and fresh water: Venice style! 

Ciao bella(s)!

And our first selfie of our lives!