Making the most of the daylight hours we went sight seeing.
Our first stop was San Marco square and the beautiful church where we were required to pay to explore each nook which made us choose the sections we wanted to see. One of these was the storage catacomb of religious relics including a small delicate hand entombed in a glass cylinder. Other body parts (bones and teeth) were less identifiable except where they had been encased in a decorated metallic leg or arm with the holy bone displayed in the appropriate spot.
There were many groups of tourists and their guides huddled together around Venice sights. We had our own personal guide Kylie, informing us of details and when to shove in to miss the queues and tourists and it worked a treat almost without frustration and cursing (from Kylie).
We then went into the Doge Palace where we read about great Crusades, integrated races and ethnic cleansing told as victorious battles carved in stone and marble, paintings on ceilings, tapestries and walls all in the name of religion and righteousness and concluded that nothing much has changed.
From this grand splendor across the Bridge of Sighs march the condemned to their goal cells or us tourists. Glad we have tickets out of here. Its a maze of narrow corridors, tiny but solid wooden doors, a wooden bucket and if you were really lucky a wooden board on stone blocks. I have a feeling that you could become forgotten quite easily as the corridors were like a maze and the only evidence that they were occupied was the age old graffiti carved on the walls. Some were more recent as the goals were only shut down in the 1920s.
From San Marco square we made our way to the vaporetto to go to the island of Murano.
The icy wind slashed at Silvia’s face as she madly took photos on the deck of the boat and freezing into place as we headed for the island where the famous Murano glass is made into beautiful creations. Once we got off the boat we were shepherded towards the glass factories but fortunately diverted to find some local food.
There we were greeted like family at the local eatery with pats on the back , hand signals and traditional S shaped biscuits that need to be dunked into your wine after a meal of sole fish. The many shops selling the gorgeous glass ware was amazing to see and were cheaper than the factories but still expensive enough. However we were still treated to a demonstration and some interesting facts and then make a hasty retreat. However this was not always possible as we constantly noticed John missing and there he would be, chatting to someone with no intentions of paying their exorbitant fees!
Once we got back to San Marco we decided to go and have pizza. We choose a restaurant not far from our hotel.
We decided to get a seafood pizza. Sounds nice right? Well imagine our surprise when the pizza appeared with the mussels etc still in the shells sitting on top of the pizza! What the? It was a bit hard to cut the pizza so that everyone got some of the actual seafood. Never seen a seafood pizza like that before!
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