Sightseeing while Half Asleep

Thursday, June 6

Last night sleep was not in the picture.  Sleeping with the windows open in an Italian city, especially in a quiet neighborhood, is a contradiction in terms.  For starters, the apartment directly across the narrow street had a dinner party until 1:30 AM.  Then shortly after they gave up, someone rang the bell on our B&B.  The (off-campus) manager answered, ticked off that someone called him so late at night.  The person and her friend needed a place to stay for the night, being lost, and schlepping their suitcases around.  The owner wouldn't admit them, pleading "no vacancy," and couldn't anyhow since he was physically elsewhere in the city.  The discussion went on and off over an hour until they went away.  We finally decided that closed windows to block the noise would be better than open windows with ventilation.

The next morning we couldn't drag ourselves out of bed until 9:30.  We demanded a controller for the air conditioning, which is normally not turned on until at least July. Tonight we sleep with the windows closed.

Today we are going to the island of Murano, where the famous glass is manufactured.  Glass making was a dangerous industry, with hot furnaces that could cause disastrous fires.  The Venetians moved the threat to a remote island in the bay to protect the densely populated city.

The doors to some of the workshops stand open so that you can see the artisans and the banks of furnaces where they work.  At arts and crafts shows in the US you occasionally get to see glass-

blowers fashioning small trinkets.  On Murano, we saw the artisans heft 20 and 30 lb. globs of molten glass into and out of the ovens and, working in tandem with others, meld pieces together into a meaningful figure.

The glass ends up as a two-foot tall violin or as a half-inch long insect.  Or a piece of fruit or a piece of wrapped candy.  One display was an entire baroque orchestra, dressed in tails, with instruments and sheet music.  Perhaps the cutest set we saw in a shop in the ghetto.  In a chess set made of Murano glass characters the Ashkenazim faced off against the Sefardim.

When we got back to Piazza San Marco in the afternoon, after lunch in a small restaurant on the waterfront, we noticed that there was no line in front of the cathedral, so we went in.  The gilded mosaics are almost too much to comprehend.

The Venetians build churches in gratitude to Gd for ending the plague.  They were very grateful.  You can stand at the portal of just about any of the nearly uncountable churches in Venice and practically spit on the next church.  You cannot turn a full 360° pivot in the city of Venice without casting your eyes on a church.

After our daily gelato, we made our way to the stazzione to purchase our ticket for tomorrows trip out of Venice to Verona.  For dinner we stopped in a little restaurant on the way to our B&B, and I had a dish called "sardine col saon."  It was a delicious cold dish of marinated sardines, onions, white raisins, and pignolia nuts. 

By the way, please note that my dinner companion is drinking a glass of wine.  How often do you see that??!!

While it is seldom the case that the food we eat while traveling is excellent, it is occasionally true that it is memorable.  We eat or drink things on our travels that we can't get at home. 

In this particular restaurant -- similar to many -- there was a drink tap with its 5 drink selections.  Besides Coke, the other four taps were: a bubbly wine, a Venetian Cabernet, a beer, and another soft drink.

After depositing my companion at the B&B, I successfully explored our neighborhood to find a route to the vaporetto that didn't required climbing steps.  I found an alley that led to a walkway that mounted two large pedestrian bridges -- but both bridges had ramps.  That's how we'll walk tomorrow.