Our walking tour of Venice started where we were dropped off by the tour boat. We are east of the city center a couple of blocks. You can see the tower of San Marco and the doge's palace center and to the left in the photo below. Also between the tower and the palace is the statue of the rider on horse back that we had seen from the boat. The lady with the flag and sword sitting on a winged lion further below is at the base of the horse and rider. We would spend the rest of the day wandering around central Venice exploring narrow streets (actually walks) seeing lot of interesting buildings, plazas, canals, and bridges.
Fairly quickly on our walk we encountered canals and bridges. This would be as common as walking in a city and crossing an intersection every city block or so.
Since many of the bridges have steps the Venetians have devised an interesting way to transport goods around the city. There are porters everywhere they use these interesting hand trucks with a large set of wheels at the axis point but then there is an extension out in front with some smaller wheels. The porter approaching the steps lowers the handles slide the front wheels on to the first step, raises the handles pushes the load onto the step, lifts the load and teeter totter the load up the steps. I saw boxes of produce, books, sacks of cement all being transported around the city, mixed in with all the locals and tourists. Remember there are no trucks or cars in the city, just boats and these hand trucks.
Here we have walked to a point in front of the Plaza of San Marco. Above is the view to the left with the San Marco tower. Below and looking to the right is the Doge's Palace which we will tour tomorrow. In the distance beyond the Doge's Palace on the left is the Basilica San Marco (church) which we will also see tomorrow.
The photo below is one I picked up from the Internet that shows flooding that occurred a few years ago and is the reason for the discussion of flood gates at the harbor entrances. Assuming the tables are about 30" high, the space where the people are standing in the photo above the water would have been two feet deep. Not so good for tourism and I suppose a couple of feet of sea water in the the palace, churches and most of the shops would have been a real pain.
But today no floods, lots of people and a very pleasant afternoon.
We headed on past the San Marco Plaza down a couple of narrow passage ways which opened on to a another smaller plaza that had the church below along one side.
This was as ornate a church as we had seen anywhere else.
I suppose the church builders anticipated that another building would be constructed right beside it so for all of the fancy decoration on the front the side view was rather plain.
Onward on over more canals, more churches bell towers and plazas.
The buildings around the plaza had interesting window details. Out in the center of the plaza were vendors selling all sorts of things. This one was quite colorful. Apparently masks are a big deal in Italy. We saw whole store front shops that sold nothing but masks.
Here are a couple of details on the church.
All along on the trip we shot photos of interesting window, doors and light fixtures. Perhaps at some point I will gather up several of them into one location, but for now here is one that I sort of liked. Perhaps the photo could become a mat for a photo set in the oval. Below is a narrow canal, perhaps 12-14' wide. Most of my shots of canals illustrate that they were more or less in the shadows. In the distance the light bleached out the view. Even so there were a lot of interesting canals.
Here is another nice plaza. The statue two photos above is at one end of the plaza above and below.
Since Clarice, Jon and Renee were on other tours and not with us I had to settle for a picture of total strangers doing synchronized leaping instead.
We came upon another interesting church and a nice garden entrance into an art museum.
Beyond the art museum we went up onto one of the main bridges over the Grand Canal.
The view up an down the Grand Canal were classic views of Venice. We were heading to the far side of the bridge to catch a water bus, like the one below left, to take a ride up the up the canal for a ways and see other areas of Venice.
Some buildings had elaborate decoration like above in classic oil paint and gold leaf and some buildings like the ones below that look like any small town anywhere.
First we headed out to the southeast end of the Grand Canal which we had seen a couple of times earlier in the day, but not from this perspective. The domed structure is the Basilica Santa Maria
I thought that the use of the pinkish color on the buildings back down the canal looked kind of interesting almost as if it was highlighted by the sun, except it is on the shady side of the canal.
Some of the building entrances off of the Canal were pretty elaborate.
Above is the Basilica Santa Maris, quite decorative. Below a nice sailboat tied up and ready to go.
Above is the church complex we had seen earlier in the day on the narrow island across the main waterway.
We got on a different water bus headed the other way going up the Canal. Lots of different building facades and colors.
Every so often a fleet of gondolas would float by.
Here you can see that there will be a turn in the Canal to the right. On the map of the previous post you can see that the Grand Canal is a backward "S" shape in the middle and we are heading for that spot.
The view above is looking around the bend in the canal with the long range perspective. Below pretty typical buildings along the canal.
Off of the main canal were multiple smaller canals leading into the neighborhoods.
It looks like the density of boat parking is an indication of the popularity of the buildings in front of which the boats are parked. The photos a couple of views above don't have any boats.
This bridge is one of the more famous bridges over the Grand Canal. The area had a lot of interesting shops and restaurants.
The bridge had stairways on both sides of the central covered area.
There were lots of interesting details and it is obvious that the clearance under the bridge would limit the height of the boats that would be able pass through. My guess is that in the days that this bridge was built boats with mast would have been impractical in the canal and the gondola type of boats was what would have been used to service the buildings along the canal.
We moved off away from the bridge and into some of the shops and plazas nearby.
This area above is the transition from the canal to the right and a large plaza to the left that gets transformed into fish and farm markets. We would be stopping by here the next day with Clarice, Jon and Renee.
We headed out through the passage ways, arches, plazas and over canals to explore a bit.
I liked this shot above because of the materials, brick, stone, wrought iron (probably made by a blacksmith) and the overall lay out with the off set in the path.
It was interesting how a spot of color when one building was painted a bright color seemed to brighten the whole scene.
There was a wide variety in window design.
Some canals had walkways beside them some covered like the one above, others like below were accessible only by boat.
There were some pretty creative ways of getting across some the canal.
I spotted this sad little boat, pretty well weathered but obviously still usable once the water was bailed out.
Every so often one of the many towers in the city would be peeking through an opening between the buildings and in this case the trees as well.
Here was another open clean plaza
This plaza had one prominent tree in it.
I thought this shot was interesting looking up beside the tower to see laundry drying on the balcony.
Some canals were plenty wide to accommodate both parking on both sides and a passage way for traffic.
This painting above was in the window about the door at the end of a narrow passage way. The high lighted picture was quite obvious in this otherwise drab alley.
One of the interesting things about the city and its layout is that there would be church right across the walk from the drab little alley with all sorts of stone work and the next thing we would see is a shop selling masks
The character above was depicted in a lot of art dealing with the black plague. below all sorts of character faces.
From the plaza we headed back to the Grand Canal caught a water bus and headed back to the center of the city. We passed by several of the same buildings, but this time in different light.
I thought that this view was nice and then when the small boat entered the scene a couple of moments later it was worth another shot.
Here we are back where we are back where we had been earlier in the day.
We crossed back over the bridge took some shots up, down and beside canal
You can see by the shadows that it is getting to be early evening.
We had reservations to take a gondola ride later in the evening and we wanted to find the place where we would start. Below a nice shot of clear blue sky and earth tone building materials.
We caught up with Jon and Clarice as they were heading out on their gondola ride.
My Camera wanted to focus on the post and not the people.
About an hour later we were on our way in a gondola. The Gondola tour lasted about an hour and we were out on the Grand Canal for a while and then back through some of the many narrow canal off of the main canal. The Gondoliers wore the traditional blue and white striped shirts. As you can see in the photo below the sun was setting and getting any good photos was going to be a problem.
We got a couple of we were there photos.
The Gondola tour was a whole group of boats more or less moving along as a unit. The singer and accordion player were actually pretty good.
The singing of a mix of popular and romantic songs went on for the whole hour.
In the photo above you can see that there is an odd shape arm sticking up to off of the side of the boat. The arm was actually a very carefully crafted piece of hardwood that would allow the Gondolier to push pull paddle and guide the boat along the route.
We were loosing light fast. I took perhaps 30 shots but only about a half dozen turned out.
Here we are heading back into some of the narrower canals.
Where there was some light I could get a halfway decent shot, but near the end things got pretty blurry.
We had been in Venice about 12 hours at this point. I think we did a pretty good job of getting an idea of what Venice is about. We still had two or three miles of walking to get back to the ship ahead of us. It was a long day.
