(it’s the best way to explore Venice)

(April 20 and 21, 2014)

Our time in Venice was lovely, and very different from other cities. For one thing, J came down with a cold, which meant that we wanted to throttle back on our activities a bit to let him rest up. For another, Venice is not the art/museum intensity that our other places were. This is a city for walking around, finding hidden corners, and for smooching in secret places.

And that’s what we did.

We woke up to Easter Bells and had a slow morning of just puttering around and then having breakfast. The weather was variable, and we figured not much was open, so we decided to go for a walk around the city and get lost.

It was huge fun! We’ve got a great map — MapEasy’s Guidemap to Venice — and it made figuring out where we were at any given point fairly simple. We basically spiraled out from our neighborhood and eventually crossed over to the ‘main’ area where St. Mark’s is. We didn’t actually go there, but wandered in the area around it, and then over into the northern part of our neighborhood and eventually home.

No vaporettos, just bridges. It was great. We even had a treat of a lovely trio of musicians playing exquisitely.

Lunch was pizzas at our local joint, Taverna Buffa. Because it turns out that although I’d been told ‘everything’ would be closed on Easter, in fact many many many places were open and we didn’t need to shop at all.

Back home, we spent a quiet afternoon and evening watching our Surface (47 Ronin — a truly gorgeous movie — and several episodes of the first season of Dr. Who). Dinner was prosciutto and cheese on toasted bread. Delicious.
*   *   *

Easter Monday is a big holiday in Italy, many places that were open on Sunday the 20th were closed today; moreover, the weather was kind of mucky — overcast and drizzly. So we opted to sleep in and not emerge from our apartment until nearly noon. From there, we wandered the city again, poking into nooks and crannies; just looking around.

We’d fallen in love with a new kind of mask, done in a steampunk style. It was clearly mass-produced, but an unusual design and so very much in our oeuvre, if you will. We were very tempted, but held off to think about it for a day or two.

It was another evening of watching Dr. Who and relaxing in our apartment.