Today we tried to get to out of the apartment early to see Venice before the crowds arrived. It is not easy to get six people ready early in the morning, particularly when three of them are former actors, not a group of people known for doing their best work early in the morning. Piazza San Marco is normally a tourist nightmare, a place which makes Times Square seem subdued in comparison. But John and I knew that in the very early morning the Piazza is quiet and you can appreciate the beauty of the buildings and open spaces. The only hustle at this time of the day is the movement of the deliverymen with pulling carts of supplies to the cafes about the square.
Saint Mark’s Cathedral are often lost later in the day amid the thousands of people crowding about to see them. In the early morning you can appreciate their distinctive architecture.
There is something just extraordinarily beautiful about the Venice on early summer mornings. The light that inspired generations of painters still shines on this city.
A couple of the women in our group fell for the offer to feed the pigeons.
John tried to warn them that this was a scam, but they finally had to pay several Euro for a handful of bird seed. High atop the winged lion, the great symbol of the Venice, a seagull surveyed the scene as if to say, “It happens every day."
As some in our party had never been through the Doge’s Palace, we decided to go through this together as a group. Here Giles, Sherry, Jill, and Ray all admired the Golden Staircase leading up to the various state chambers.
Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta, the Serene Republic of Venice, lasted for nearly a thousand years. But it was not a republic in a modern sense, although there was no monarchy or hereditary prince to govern the city. Venice followed a mixed government model, combining a kind of elected monarchy in the doge, a hereditary aristocracy in the senate, and a democracy of the oldest Rialto families, no matter how little money they had, in the major council. Niccolò Machiavelli considered it a near perfect form of government, and that, I think, suggests that there were some problems with it. The real power in lay in the republic with the richest families and they more or less ran the country for their own benefit.
The Doge’s Palace was the seat of all the different branches of government which were not in the end particularly separate. There were various councils that were tasked with different administrative and judicial functions, but all were members of the Great Council. That group met in the largest room in the Palace and one of the most magnificently decorated one.
The Doge’s Palace is also directly adjacent to the Duomo, the cathedral, and Venice was certainly not a republic in the modern sense of a secular state, either. The Doge and the Council enforced Catholic belief, and was at least charged with upholding the moral standards of the church as well.
The government did this with somewhat less vigor than most of the churchmen would have liked. Venetians were famed for their somewhat flexible sense of morality, particularly in matters of love. This was, after all, the city of Giacomo Casanova!
After our tour, we split up for a bit. Four of us went off to Murano, the island famous for centuries for the production of Venetian glass. All the guidebooks had warned us that the glory days of glassmaking here were long past, and that most of the glass on sale in the various shops here was imported from China or Indonesia. All of that was no doubt true, but this island, one of a cluster of three in the northern part of the lagoon, was lovely. We probably would have happily wandered about it more, but by this time it was about noon, and we began to appreciate why even here in the north of Italy the residents used to retreat to their homes to escape the midday sun. We first paid a somewhat perfunctory visit to the Museum of Glass and then retreated to a restaurant and had a lovely meal. Afterwards, we wandered about a bit more, poking our heads in shops and a ninth-century church.
We were all a little tired, so we went back to Lido to nap in what we had come to think of as our Venetian palazzo.
In the evening, we all went back for one final visit to the historic center of Venice. Three of us went off to wander through the quiet back streets and canals of the city as the sun began its descent. David Lean, the great British film director, called this time of day “the golden hour” for a good reason. Everything seemed bathed in lovely gold light.
We all set, save Sherry, for dinner on the island of Guideca. John and I knew that there were a few cafes on the quay not far from San Giorgio where you could sit by the side of the water and see Santa Maria della Salute in the as the Venetian sky turned from blue to purple to black. We had a good meal but a magical evening there.
Tomorrow, our journeys continue and we are off to Milan.
