In the morning we packed and said goodbye to Orlando and all the wonderful people at the Castello di Monterado. His grandmother is a painter and one of the rooms in the castle his her studio.
Orlando also showed us the family chapel. The bishop will not allow Mass or even weddings to be celebrated there, so they keep it as a historic place.
Our first stop of the day was about two hours away in Padua — or Padova as the Italians say it. I had always wanted to see the Scrovegni chapel there. This simple little family chapel is generally seen as the beginning of Renaissance art. It also has a great story. Reginaldo Scrovegni was a money lender at a time when the church prohibited charging interest. Dante consigned the poor man to one of the lower circles of hell. When he died, the church refused to bury him. So his son Enrico build this chapel to both bury his father and to make up for the dubious family fortune by creating a beautiful space. He commissioned Giotto to decorate it with frescos. The paintings generally are done in that rather flat medieval style.
But when you look closely, particularly at the faces, you can see something new is happening. There is more attention to real human emotion. The figures in the art seem to be interacting with each other. Look at this scene from the Garden of Gethsemane where Judas is about to betray Jesus with a kiss. Jesus and Judas are looking at each other in a way that would never happen in older Christian art. They are recognizably human.
Giotto also pays close attention to fabrics and to light and shadow, all hallmarks of Renaissance art.
Of course, he also preserves some of the best medieval elements. We loved the devils from the last judgement scene.
Just because it was nearby, we also stopped at the Saint Anthony Basilica. This was and is one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in Italy. On the outside, the building is a jumble of different styles.
It does not get much better inside, but there are some amazing parts to it. This is the tomb of Saint Anthony, and people were lined up to touch his sarcophagus and to kneel and pray there. Pictures were strictly forbidden, so we had to pretend to be checking our audio guides on our phones to snap anything.
We drove about another 30 minutes into Venice. It was not altogether easy finding the drop off for the car. We knew that it was at the Mestre train station on the mainland. I finally went into the station to ask somebody. I hope none of you reading this ever has to spend time in that station. I have been in much nice second-class bus terminals in Mexico. I did finally learn where the car drop off point was, and with the help of the GPS we made it there. Neither of us were particularly sad to let the car go. A pleasant man at the Maggiore office there agreed to take us into Venice for 30€, about what the guide books had told us was the going rate. Driving from the mainland across the causeway into the cargo dock area is not the most romantic way to come into the city, but it work. We were met at the there by somebody from the hotel who walked us about 200 meters to our accommodations.
John found the Locanda Avogaria hotel online. And, I will admit, it looked interesting on a computer screen. Once we were there, he still rather liked it. I have never so detested a place we have stayed in my life. (Well, yes, there was a place in Montreal where I spent a night when I young. Let’s just say that the plumbing didn’t work in the bathroom. That was even worse that this, but at least it was cheap.) John loved the bedroom decor with heavy dark brocade on the walls and matching drapes. I found it pretentious and oppressive.
He adored the faux Renaissance ceiling. I thought that LED lights on a wire was a particularly stupid touch.
There was a small attached sitting room. The wainscoting on the wall had this bizarre pattern, and the window treatment - at least to me - looked like it was supposed to be over the throne in some cheesy Hollywood movie. John like it a lot. The string you see on the ceiling connects a chandelier on the right to an electric plug on the ceiling. I guess exposed wires on the ceiling is just tres façonable. As you can guess, I thought it was stupid.
I didn’t take much to get me to leave the apartment and start walking around Venice. The city is extraordinarily beautiful, at least from a distance. Up close you notice the dirt and the centuries of deterioration a little more. We managed, somehow, to arrive at the campanile when there was almost no line at all. The views from the top are stunning.
And so are most of the view you seeing just walking around.
What is harder to capture in photographs is the oppressiveness of the throngs of tourists. Walking through Saint Mark’s Square in the late afternoon is like being on a New York subway at rush hour. There were many Americans, of course, but also quite a few Brazilians, who manage to be even louder and more obnoxious than the Americans. The Japanese were there in large travel groups. We did find this Chinese couple, accompanied by a herd of photographers, obviously here for a spare-no-expense honeymoon. Such is life under communism these days, I guess.
We went back to the hotel and napped for a bit. We went out later in the evening for a pizza and a salad at a nearby square. Everybody was watching the World Cup, and this time they were cheering for the Americans over the Belgians.
