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The splendiferous Hotel Bonvecchiati provided us free with stationary, soap, shampoo, postcards and a nice black-ink pen, plus bathrobes, slippers, a taxi-ride to the glass-blowing island of Murano and (very kind) the service of finding a hotel for us when Eric didn't check the date on our reservation and had us show up one day early. So we stayed the first night in the Hotel Casanova, which turned out to be a steal at $140 a night, with a view out the window straight down the street to the Grand Canal and a vaporetto (a sort of public waterbus) stop.
Rick Steves, the guidebook writer that we actually liked (and finally could use in Italy, since we only had his museum guide and his Italy book) had some good lines about the vaporetto ("How's your driver? Smooth dockings? To get to know him, stand up in the bow and block his view"), the large motor buses that chug up and down the large canal leading through the center of Venice.
The Grand Canal was brownish-green in color, and filled with an interesting mix of boats that followed absolutely no traffic rules (look out for bigger boats worked well for most, although the vaporetti were the largest and so only looked out for cell-phone-talking gondoliers and other vaporetti, and even then not very carefully, and usually only to wave hello at the expense of watching the canal for smaller boats, which got sucked into the propeller). In between gondoliers and vaporetti, ferry boats, taxis, police boats and random barges with big boxes on top scooted around trying to get work done while a) talking on a cell phone, b) holding a conversation with someone on shore or c) both. The easiest way of driving here seemed to be to pay as little attention to actually driving as possible - sort of like Los Angeles.
But the vaporetti were big, and what's more, crowded, especially after a train came in. We stood with our luggage the entire half-hour ride from the station to Piazza San Marco. The pedestrian-only streets were also lined with people, making it impossible to get anywhere quickly unless you knew the back alleys or had running-back vision.
Piazza San Marco in the evening had a film-like romantic air, with sidewalk cafes and dueling musicians. When we arrived some guy was jamming on the clarinet with back-up violins, piano and bass; the next day he had switched to accordion. Venice sells its romantic-ness $250 for a gondola ride, $20 to sit and listen to the musicians with a cappuccino, and at least $20 per person to eat at any of the piazza restaurants.
Our first night, a major storm moved in, and we sat in the hotel room and listened to raindrops splattering the windows like grasshoppers on a drive through King City. After it stopped, we wandered for a while, and found a panini bar, a big church (not St. Mark's) and an excellent gelateria. We did not get lost (for a picture of Eric not getting lost, see right).
In the morning, we went to the Doge's Palace. It was cold and hostile, which is fitting for a place that served as the seat of executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, and a place where people could turn in other people as spies simply by dropping a note with their name in the many handy drop-boxes located around the palace. The rooms were massive, and most decorated with thick red wood chairs and glorious religious-themed paintings with double meanings. In the gigantic chamber of nobles was the largest oil painting in the world. It was, in a word, big.
Most exciting was the Bridge of Sighs. The palace was used as a courtroom, and convicted prisoners (convicted means most, and probably all, prisoners) were led into the dungeon across the canal. To get there, they crossed the thick stone, completely covered and very claustrophobic bridge, with is lit only by two clover-shaped windows cut out the side. Supposedly, prisoners got one last look at wonderful Venice before serving out the Doge's wrath downstairs, and sighed. As we passed, we got one last look at a fat lady in a red shirt pointing a camera at us as several hundred tourists squeezed in on her in a critical mass, and sighed. Eric tried to glare at them and make them move, but it didn't really work (too much tourist inertia).
The dungeon was much less exciting than one would hope - no rats, bones, or even torn-up cots. As prisons go, the Alcatraz tour leaves much more to the imagination. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a bunch of undecorated stone rooms with thick doors and barred windows. We could have been in the basement of a monastery - although Eric says he understands those often have beer, and this didn't even have that.
Feeling like we'd seen most of what we wanted to in Venice, we asked on the last day about the hotel-sponsored free boat ride to Murano, a nearby island famous for glass.
We were ushered to a taxi near the Accademia, which took us to the island, where we were greeted in English and led off the dock to another man, who took us into his glass factory, ordered the surly-looking crew to make something (a vase and a horse), then led us through samples and into the gift shop. We expected to get charged for something the whole time, and so were overly paranoid, and we walked out and discovered that the hotel's generosity had only extended as far as getting us into the gift shop - it wasn't a round trip ticket. If we had bought something, our guide probably would have been happy to call the taxi again. And we still have no idea who the random English-speaking guy who took us from the hotel to the taxi was. Not a hotel employee and not a taxi driver. Strange. And what about the guy who met us at the dock and led us to the glass guy? The one who looked like the well-dressed Nazi who meets Marcus Brody in Turkey in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?
We looked for a spot to picnic, but ended up in the wrong part of town, away from all the tourists, in a spot where people actually lived (Run! Run!). There were no benches anywhere, and when we eventually found our way back to the tourist drag, there were no benches there either. So we took the vaporetto back to our room and had our mozzarella-tomato sandwich combination there.
After another nap, we headed out in search of a wine bar across the river. It was closed, but the place next door gave us a canal-side table and two glasses of good champagne for $3, which was a pretty good deal. We sat for half an hour and watched a group of local dogs play with each other near the canal.
After champagne, we headed to a local bar and ordered fragolino, the strawberry wine. It tasted like strawberry soda with a touch of alcohol, and smelled great. Dinner, however, was a disaster. A thunderstorm moved in with loud thunder and big lightning, so we stayed close to home at a self-service pizza place that was, truly, terrible.
