Venice: The City of Dreams

(source)

Well, I seem to have gotten sidetracked with my Euro trip recaps, but I’m back today with a post about the last place I visited during my vacation last month — the beautiful city of Venice!

While I experienced a combination of cool but sunny, then gloomy, rainy weather in The Netherlands, Germany, and Austria, Italy was perfect: bright sunshine and in mid-70’s during my stay there.

We stayed on the Lido of Venice, which was just a quick ferry ride away from all of the action on other islands via one of these bad boys…

I found that hotel prices were pretty damn expensive on other touristy islands. The Lido was a bit more reasonable, and after some research, I chose a place called Albergo Quattro Fontane.

[Side note: The above picture cracks me up, as everyone in Venice, and really in Europe in general, rode their bikes around while dressed super nice. I’m not sure how the women so elegantly rode bikes with dresses on, and don’t think I could pull it off so well!]

The hotel was really close to the beach, and about a 10 minute walk to the main dining area on the island and the transportation center. Our room was super small and I barely had room to open my suitcase, but it was clean and offered a couple of amenities not found elsewhere: free wifi and breakfast….and not just any breakfast – an awesome breakfast!

I’m not a European breakfast fan, and was so happy to find lots of fresh fruit at the breakfast buffet. I practically screamed, “Pineapple! Peaches! And KIWI!!” when I saw it.

We started our mornings leisurely enjoying our meals on their pretty garden terrace.

After breakfast our first morning, we hopped on the ferry over to see Piazza San Marco. I liked checking out the scenery on the ferry rides. Some of the yachts around were outrageous!

As expected, the piazza area was crowded and absolutely beautiful!

We waited on line to go inside the church of St. Mark. Visitors were asked not to take pictures once inside, but trust me when I say, it was absolutely gorgeous! There was a service going on, which was pretty neat. Even though historical church stuff isn’t really my thing, I couldn’t help but be amazed at some of the historical pieces they have on display throughout the church.The one thing I did snap a quick picture of was these bronze horse sculptures, which have been attributed to a 4th century BC Greek sculptor.

From up high in the church, there are great views of the piazza. One man we had met earlier in our trip had said that, “Piazza San Marco has as many pigeons as people!”

Some people were feeding the pigeons, which is not something I’d like to do but is certainly interesting to watch.

After our visit to the church, we got away from the crowds a bit and wandered around. Venice is such a surreal looking place. All of the little bridges and old buildings look like they’re out of a painting. It really is an amazing city to see!

Pretty much the only thing I had concretely wanted to do in Venice was go on a gondola ride. Even though it’s a little pricey, I though it was so worth it.

Being our usual curious selves, my hubby and I asked the gondolier a lot of questions and found out some interesting stuff. Venice has a set amount of gondolier licenses (it’s somewhere around 430), and licenses are essentially passed down to sons or close family friends. Our gondolier said that he started training for his job when he was just a kid, and that gondoliers must go to school to learn a bunch of different languages to accommodate tourists from around the world. The gondoliers actually own their gondola, and females can technically be one, but none have yet to be.

I said something to the gondolier about how his daughter could be the first and his response was something very traditional Italian like, “Every gondolier wouldn’t mind having a woman gondolier around, but no one wants their daughter to be the first. Then she’d be working around 400 men all day long, and that would not be good!” Too funny.

After our awesome gondola ride, we relaxed on a restaurant patio, and split a pizza and some wine. Later on after I repeatedly told my hubby how fabulous gelato is in Italy, we split a cup… and it was heavenly! For dinner that night, I had a mushroom calzone, which came out looking ridiculously large, but then shrunk down as soon as I cut into it. Afterwards I treated myself to dessert #2, a warm, gooey chocolate cake. While I managed to eat pretty healthy elsewhere on my vacation, in Venice I allowed myself to eat whatever my heart desired, and everything was so delicious and worth it. Good thing we were only there for a couple of days! 🙂

In planning this vacation, I at first wasn’t thinking of going to Italy, only because I’m in love with the country and would like to do a trip exploring a lot of Italy one day in the near future. But, after seeing that Venice was only a couple hours away from where we were staying in Austria, I couldn’t resist making it the last stop of our trip. And I am so glad that we ventured to Venice! It is truly a breathtaking place to see, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

I’m also thankful for the great weather we had, because now it’s flooding like crazy there…

…though I do think it’d be kinda fun to be these people:

(source of flood images)

If you missed any of my other recaps from last month’s trip and would like to check them out, here are the links:

– Wine, Pizza, Tartufo, Oh My! My First Dinner in Venice

– Vegetarian Living in Austria

– The World’s Largest Ice Cave: Austria’s Eisriesenwelt

– A Natural Wonder: Austria’s Liechtenstein Gorge

– Exploring Cologne, Germany

– Memorable Eats & Drinks in Amsterdam

– Amsterdam’s House of Bols

– Snapshots of Amsterdam