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Wednesday
14th September
I’m booked onto
an easyJet flight from Gatwick leaving at 6.55, so even with some
extremely good friends living nearby (thanks again, Carole) I’m still up
well before 5.00!
Sitting around
waiting to board at around 6.30 it occurs to me that I’ve never before been
in a crowd of so many people so early in the morning. The whole easyJet
ticketless thing works smoothly and we’re up and away on time and I even
have a window seat. At Marco Polo Airport I take a savvy friend’s advice
and spurn the noisy, smelly and slow Alilaguna boat and take the bus – ACTV
No.5 costing 2 Euros and taking less than a half hour to the Piazzale
Roma bus station. A short walk to my hotel on the edge of the Ghetto, and
I’m out pounding the fondamente and buying lunch well before midday.
The
Ca' Pozzo hotel is at the end of a somewhat
odorous covered alley lined with restaurant side-doors, and with a fish stall at its entrance during the day, and
smelling somewhat zoolike at night. But the hotel when you reach it could
not be more of a contrast – clean and shiny and modern with some of the
most pleasant staff it’s ever been my pleasure to be looked after by. I
recommend it whole-heartedly (except the fainthearted might find the
whiffy passage a bit of a turn-off) and that’s a first for me and
Venetian hotels. But back to our hero, who has now bought lunch and is
strolling along the Fondamente Nuove nibbling his olive and cheese
focaccia and gazing out across an expanse of lagoon filled with boats
towards San Michele as the comfortably hot sun beats down. Sigh! I
do a long loop down to San Marco, of course, and then back up to my hotel
for a rest. In the early evening I walk down to the Rialto and in a fit of
laziness resort to a filet-of-fish meal at MacDonald’s – a bit shameful I
know, but when you’re traveling on your own sometimes a quick fill is
preferable to the whole restaurant sitting and waiting thing. Send a few
expensive e-mails – internet access can't be had for less than 10
Euros an hour in Venice, it seems – and then to bed. It’s been a long
day.
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The entrance to the alleyway leading to the Ca'
Pozzo is to the
left of the entrance of the baker's with the glowing window far right.
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That's the Ca D'Oro and its vaporetto stop to the
right
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Thursday
15th
I’d left my
window open, as it looked out onto a quiet, if scadgy, courtyard and so was
awoken by some typically clanky Venetian church bells at 8.00am. Not the
worst alarm call in the world. Eat a good breakfast, and then stroll up to
the railway station to try and buy a Venice Card, which gets you various
museums, some discounts and all vaporetti and toilets, for varying
periods. The woman in the kiosk tells me she has none but the next kiosk,
which is literally two steps around a partition for her, has them, and a
queue of 14 people waiting for hotel reservations. So helpful. She also
doesn’t tell me that I can get them from the vaporetto ticket office
which is 26 seconds walk out of the station, so I have to discover this
myself, by accident, on Friday evening.
Sigh! Anyway, back to pleasure and my first church of the day – S.Giobbe.
It’s run-down, of course, with exposed brickwork, but some nice grey stone bits too. It’s most notable for the quality of the art which it
once contained, but which now graces the grand second room in the Accademia
Gallery. Through the ‘backstreets’ of Cannaregio towards S.Alvise,
stopping off at a neighbourhood shop that sells the divine San Bernadetto
water for 40 Eurocents, which is about a third of the cost of a bottle in
the main tourist drags. At S.Alvise I’m told that the church is closing
in 15 minutes for a funeral, and so I can have a quick free look around.
This is one of the churches run by
Chorus and so you pay to get in, but
the churches are well maintained and you can also buy a pass to get you into
all of them, which I do. Each church has a number and with each visit your
card gets that church’s number crossed off, so it appeals to the
collector/train spotter in all of us. I leave
the campo outside the church as the funeral boat arrives. It’s not a
black and ornate boat with plumes, unfortunately, but is sombre enough.
Along a few canals and next appears the handsome and lightly gothic façade
of Madonna dell’Orto, looking mighty fine in the sunshine. I go in for a
sit down and some paintings by local boy Tintoretto. He’s not one of my
faves, but he manages to do the Venetian colour thing with a darker edge
that’s always worth a look. I head off towards
another favourite church, Santa Maria dei Miracoli, stopping off at what’s to become my most fertile
photographic spot of the trip, and so the scene of many loiters during the week
– the bridge at the end of the Fondamanta della Misericordia. Miracoli jaw-droppingly
lovely inside, and an essential visit on every trip. I walk to and over the
Rialto and get another olive and cheese focaccia and go sit on the
steps of S.Silvestro to eat it. A very pleasant spot, with attendant starving
pigeons, until two people come and sit on the steps further along and
light up cigarettes. So ends my sit. Heading off towards S. Polo I buy a
marzipan cake and find some canal-side steps up a quiet calle to eat it,
and then some more smokers come and sit nearby! After S. Polo I make for
the Frari church, but need ice cream, so get myself a fior di latte and
limone and sit on a low wall facing the Scuole di San Rocco to eat it and
listen to the busking guitarist. My need to pee shortens my visit a bit,
but I make time for one of my most loved Giovanni Bellini Madonnas –
sitting rapt in the Sacristy with the breeze from a nearby open door
playing across my toes, as the sound of the guitarist wafts in and I
realise I’m now just behind the spot where I was just sitting and eating
my ice cream. After a rest back at the hotel I head off towards Campo S. Barnaba and a recommended cyber café – but it’s just as expensive as
my hotel and they need to see my passport (which I don’t carry around
with me) to prove I’m not a terrorist. Have a pizza and salad and wheat
beer at a restaurant called Arca I’d frequented on my last trip, and do
some strolling in the dark with a cocco and limone ice cream. I stroll up
to check out
the views of the Grand Canal from its junction with the Canale di
Cannaregio, and try not to disturb a solitary couple curled up under a lamp with food,
wine and a
game of draughts (aka checkers) in progress.
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Friday
16th
After breakfast
– the crusty white roll with butter and blackcurrant jam becoming an
essential part – I walk via S.Canzian to Campo Santa Maria Formosa, and its
nice compact church. Then into the Fondazione Querini Stampalia to admire
some ‘new’ Giovanni Bellinis, and other stuff. I then wander off up to the
Garibaldi gardens to sit and eat a spinach and cheese pasty thing and
watch people pass by, some of them seemingly not entirely well mentally.
It’s a Biennale year and as I want to see inside the Arsenale, and the
bits the Biennale uses are the only areas you’re ever allowed into, I buy a
ticket and so have a look around the main exhibition pavilions in the
gardens to get my money’s worth, as it were. The pavilions themselves
are architecturally interesting, but the exhibits leave me cold, mostly. One darkened space contains a bank of
slide projectors sending images into the corners of the room, but as the
slides change you realise that each projector has
exactly the same slides. Hmmm. A pavilion full of a labyrinth of wooden steps has
a sort of pine Piranesi charm, but that’s about it. I do the long walk
back to my hotel - foolishly as tomorrow’s blisters will prove - but San
Giovanni Grisostomo, a church that had scaffolding inside and out on my last
visit, is open and so I get to tick off another Bellini, if a slightly
murky one. After a rest I try the kiosk in the station for the Venice Card
again, but it’s closed, and only then do I spot that the vaporetto
ticket huts out front sell them. I get a three-day one that’ll get me onto, it
turns out, a fair few vaps, and into the Correr Museum and Ca’ Rezzonico
over the next few days.
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Saturday
17th
Catch the
vaporetto to the Ca’ Rezzonico stop and walk to Santa Maria dei Carmini, which
is gloomy and dusty and fine, and then to San Sebastiano which has some
impressive frescoes, by
Veronese. Frescoes are rare in Venice, as the damp atmosphere doesn’t
help the quick-drying the medium demands, so these came as a bit of a
shock. On to San Nicolò dei Mendicoli, which had a mass in progress, so I
spent more time typing its name just then than I did visiting! Back to,
and into, Ca’ Rezzonico, and I decide to try the audioguide. A
longish wait, three players and two sets of batteries later I’m equipped
and start my tour. It’s actually a pretty good guide although, I realise
later, it mentions the Brownings not once. Robert Browning’s son buying
the palazzo, and the family’s time there, is mentioned in most guides,
admittedly as the last episode of interest in the palace’s history, so to
not make mention is a little eccentric, or at least Italo-centric. There
are some frown-inducing bits of lost-in-translation description, which are
at least entertaining. My favourite was a portrait, by Rosalba Carriera, I
think, described a revealing the sitter’s ‘pungent sensuality’. And
later we are told to admire ceiling paintings representing the four senses
‘although taste is missing’. The
top-floor gallery contains much poor art, but has some good vistas up and down the Grand Canal.
Walk to
the Salute,
and as I photograph the usual views across the canal towards San Marco I
notice a group of people on the church steps getting naked, or at least
topless, changing their clothes from a couple of big suitcases. Funny how
a topless woman is less exciting when you initially think she’s a man. Walk back
towards the Accademia and nibble a slice of artichoke pizza sitting in
Campo S. Vio, with it’s superb views across the canal to Palazzo Barbaro
(where Henry James often stayed) and palazzos east. Having read much
fiction about HJ,
and his relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, in the past year I
had a - borderline ghoulish - desire to find the palazzo where Miss W
had committed suicide, by jumping out of a window.
The Palazzo Semitecolo is to the left of Casa Salviati as you face across
the Grand Canal from the Santa Maria del Giglio vaporetto stop opposite, and I’d just walked past the back of it before buying
my pizza. No courtyard could I see, though, just the calle behind the
crumbling palazzo, which seems to have been unoccupied for a good while.
Update - this calle does turn out to be the pavement
that Miss Woolson fell to. See here.
I cut down to
the Zattere, the fondamenta that faces Giudecca, and visit
the Gesuati church and the more modest Santa Maria della Visitazione, on
the way to Nico for one of their fine gelati. I admire the Swiss chalet
charm of the San Trovaso gondola workshop, as I eat my cocco & limone,
and then visit the same-named church, where an organist and singer are
practicing Ave Maria and such like. I make for the Accademia boatstop and
head back to the hotel to rest my throbbing feet. There had been some rain
today, after three hot sunshiny days, and out walking this evening I get
caught in a thunderstorm that borders on the biblical, but furnishes me
with a fine photograph, I think, of a rain-lashed Piazza.
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