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| [I'm going to retain the as-written slightly-loopy style, because I enjoy the authenticity. Enjoy] I slept! 9-3.30 and 4-9, it was great. A little scary when I thought the 3.30 was gonna be it, but I started a new audiobook and it did the trick. After breakfast we headed over to San Marco Square to see the cathedral! The cathedral had a massive line. Massive. We looked around the square and watched the tidewaters (new moon = big tide) begin to rise from the drains around the square. We also checked out the clock tower, but the entrance is a tiny locked door that says nothing about access. So we went to the museum to by tickets to the clock tower! [My mom loves to do research and I love to send it. It works out amazingly] And the Doge's palace (so we could skip that line [another hack from the research. Go mom!]). And while we were there, might as well hit the museum!
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The museum was massive, a Napoleonic restoration of the old governmental building. Marble floors, intricate everything, etc etc. The museum was divvied up into multiple sections. Weapons, old maps, almost every coin ever minted by Venetians, A canon with an open breech, models of boats, pottery, and soooooo many paintings I couldn't begin to care about, especially as my legs were beginning to hurt. At the end we blitzed through the palatial chambers for the Napoleonic governors and maybe some Hapsburg noble. Very much Versailles-light.
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After the tour of the museum we still had some time before our 2pm clock tour, so we grabbed sandwiches at a local shop (paninis make so much sense now, they can have delicious and cheap sandwiches premade, then reheat them in a few seconds and sell hundreds). We ate by the grand canal, learned we were not allowed to eat while sitting, and stood awkwardly while we enjoyed lunch. Clock tower time! We walked back to the museum to meet up with the tour guide and 1 other guest (I can't believe there were huge lines for every other tour and only 1 non-Farrell for this tour - which is only offered once or twice a day). We all walked back across the square, and up to the small door which she unlocked with an ancient key. Inside the tower we learned all about the clocks history and operation. Up until 1999 the maintenance crew lived in it, but in the last modernization they installed a wall of PLCs, high power stepper motors, and automated most of it. [If you're an Electrical Engineer that made sense, if not... it's high-power high-reliability hardware usually found on assembly lines] |
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We got to watch the giant wheel-of-fortune "digital" displays change in front of us, and then headed to the top to see the giant statues, These giants (later renamed the Moors as the copper tarnished to black) were 2meteres 50cm tall [8'2"], and struck the bell with their sledge hammers before every hour (the other clocks in the square would chime the hours). The view was incredible, the whole square, and the surrounding streets. Apparently if the weather is clear enough you can see the dolomites, but they were not in evidence at this time. (Also mention the solar clock, later simplified)[The clock used to be even more badass, but they gave up on that complexity]. Then we went down a level to the side wings/roofs, from where we got to watch one of the moors strike the clock. Great tour, 5 stars, etc etc.
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Next on the list was the Doge's palace. The Doge was the elected head of Venice, which essentially made him the leader of half the world's trade. Which sounds like it would make him a very powerful person, but he was elected, and the nobles were keen to keep him in line. So essentially everything was ran by committee, and the palace was devoted to rooms to both emphasize the committees, and the power of them. Entering, you would walk up gilt staircases and through the armory to your meeting room, where the various committees convened. If you were in trouble, they would put you in a dark room with imposing painting, and then you would walk through a dark door immediately past the pathway to the prison, to remind you of your uncertain future. Rumor has it they would torture prisoners nearby so you could hear their cries (and if there were no prisoners in need of torture that day, they felt no shame in hiring an actor - at least according to the tour guide I eavesdropped upon).
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| Great Hall (Brian) |
The last stop in the palace itself was the massive great hall - a single room, one of the largest in Europe at the time, for all the nobility to meet to discuss the events of that week, and painted around the edge of the room were all the Doges of all time - except for the one who tried to stage a coup.... His portrait was conspicuously blacked out as an eternal reminder that the power rested with the nobility (Until, you know, Napoleon decided it didn't).
 Bridge of Sighs - Ext (Brian) |
Leaving the palace we crossed the bridge of sighs, where you would sigh as you caught your last glimpse of the outside world on the way into the prisons. The prisons were fun to wander through, covered with tight doorways, excessive steel bars, and a few amazingly good stonecarvings prisoners scratched into their windowcells [edit: window-sills. But windowcells is rather apt] to kill time. After the palace, we went to dinner. We put Ethan in charge and he chose a promising street, and eventually selected one that offered patio seating. The patio was a courtyard, actually connected to the network of streets via an alley (from which a lost tourist wandered at one point). It was great weather, interesting surroundings, and mixed food. The bruschetta we started with was amazing, the ravioli and mixed seafood quite good, and lasagna was fine. ("No, it was meh" - Mom, interjecting live while I type). |
After dinner it was sunset, and having learned that the bell tower had an elevator and did not require us to walk up 50 flights of stairs, we decided to hit that! The line was immensely shorter than earlier, only a few elevator-loads, and we made it up and exited the lift as the bell tolled. For whom? me? this joke is terrible rephrase [editor: nope]. Either way loud AF but fun AF. We then wandered the perimeter of the tower taking photos and panoramas, and the light was ideal. Perfect mix of great sky and enough lighting for the rooves and canals to pop - and even highlight the previously invisible dolomites. It darkened as we did laps of the tower, admiring the bells and the plaque where it noted that Galileo "expanded the horizons of mankind" on this point (we had to look it up to make sure, but this was where Galileo demonstrated the first celestial telescope to the nobles and the doge ((innovating on the English design of the terrestrial looking-glass invented a year prior)) ). As it got truly dark, we headed back down to start our journey home.
Fed up with walking, and finally done in San Marco, we decided to take the boat home. We bought two-day passes so we could jump on the vaporetto (the busses of the canal system) whenever we wished, and we rode it through the darkened canal. Due to the elections, the stop nearby our apartment was closed, so we chose to keep going and bailed at the Rialto bridge. We then started walking back to our hotel, made a wrong turn, and suddenly realized the amazing replica of the clock tower and the moors before us was so accurate because it was the same exact tower with the same exact windows we looked out of earlier that day. What I thought was a straight canal with minor kinks was in fact a horseshoe canal with a massive bend, and we managed to travel to within a few hundred yards of our embarkation point. So we walked back through San Marco square to our apartment, getting some cannoli on the way. 14,000 steps, but a very interesting 14k steps.
We've realized that Venice is now entirely tourist-driven. The workers and volunteers typically don't even live in the town, and the locals have launched a campaign called 49,999 to have them declassified as a city to avoid higher taxes (I think. Total guess as to why, but they really don't want to be a city). So in short 500 years have seen the powerhouse of western civilization reduced to a much more interesting version of Disney world. That could be worded better fix that. [Nope.] Done. Ctrl-S.
And we're back! Surprise!
 | After unwinding and journaling at the hotel, Ethan and I decided to go back to San Marco to watch it flood again as the tide hit, and watch the the bell ring 132 times at midnight. Now that we finally knew the path to San Marco, we were able to make it to the square in 10 minutes, much quicker than our previous times [25 minimum]. We watched the flood waters rise, listened to the band at the restaurant play their final songs, and hung out until the stroke of midnight. The Moors struck their 12 strikes, and then waited for the cacophony. Instead, the Bell tower struck 96 times and the two little dingers on the clock tower we were promised never even fired. But we did get some great flooding and with the night lighting, we got some amazing shots. And so once again we took the hike to/from San Marco, snagging some more night shots along the way. |
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