After breakfast we came back to the room, I finished off yesterdays blog and Jay went for a nap. Is it a nap or going back to bed when you are only up for a little over an hour? He does this on vacation, catches up on the sleep he's missing at home.
I woke him up at 10:15am and we got ready to meet Monica, our guide, at a square (Campo) just about 4 minutes from where we are staying. I can't remember how long the tour is and asked Jay what he wanted to do later, after our tour, his reply.."I don't know...nap probably". True story.
Here are my tour notes - I always make sure that my guide knows I'm not texting as they're talking that I'm taking some notes and I try not to take too many, just enough that I can remember the gist of their story.
We met at the base of an old Church and Monica pointed out that the Church clock is in a 24 hour format, but that the top, where you would have assumed the XXIV would be its actually XVIII. The XI is at the bottom and the Church bells would ring that its time to start work and the XVIII would ring for the end of the work day.
The first bricks of the church were brought from the mainland in the year 429. You can tell that it used to be part of the Rialto Market because of the inscription of the fish and clam on the column, any fish and clams sold in the market had to be a minimum of the size of the inscription and there would be a little ladder up against the column to measure it if there was any question.
Monica said “I know from your tour request you don’t like to eat fish, Venice is shaped like a fish, did you know?”
The tide is up from when Jay and I walked home last night and is coming up over the edge of the canal. I asked Monica what you do during floods because I know after Mom and I were here the last time, 7 years ago, that there was flooding after. She said that Venice will flood up to 100 times a year up to 1 metre or 1.3 metres over the banks of the canal, sometimes several times a day from October to March depending on rainfall.
There is currently a movie, she thinks Spider-Man, being filmed on the Rialto Bridge so there is a drone filming a scene and the boat traffic is stopped, so its a great time for photos!
I mentioned that Jay had told me that Venice was mostly tourists and asked how many people live in the City, she said at one time in the 16th Century there were more people living in Venice than in London or Paris, up to 200,000 at that time, now there are about 53,000 inhabitants. She said its hard for the local people because its hard to find supermarkets at good prices and everything is geared toward the tourists - there are up to 25,000,000 tourists through a year, many on cruise ships who don't spend too much money in Venice so a lot of locals don't find the cruise tourists worth the trouble. A few times she mentioned its becoming like Disneyland.
There used to be 10,000 gondolas when it was the primary mode of transportation, now there are about 500 and they're all for tourists. The striped shirts that the gondoliers wear used to represent the colours of the Noble House that owned the gondola and employed the driver.
The gondola can be recognized by the ornament at the front that represents the Rialto Bridge and the 6 Districts and 3 major Islands of Venice.
She pointed out a boat, similar, called a sandolo that has a flat bottom so I asked if those people were being ripped off because they thought they were riding in a Gondola and she said "Let's say yes".
She explained that the Venetian language is very different from Italian, for instance cheese in Venetian is 'casaria' where in Italian its 'formaggio'.
Water fountains are found all around the city for fresh water from the aquaduct. If you stick your finger on the spout to block it there is a little hole on the top that water will then come out of like a drinking fountain.
This is the canal blocked off for the movie scene.
There is a ferry here that will take you directly across the canal. For locals its .70Eu and for tourists its 2 Eu. I asked Monica if she could teach me how to say "I'm local" but she said that they would know me if I was local because I would be coming across several times a week to buy fresh produce in the Rialto Market..so I asked her to teach me to say "I'm new".
The fish market is signified by the sculptures of fish on top of the columns, the curtains work in two ways to protect the fish, from the sun and from the seagulls.
There is a problem with the fish market, many vendors are closing because there are too many tourists (who don't buy fish for obvious reasons), I asked her if the local restaurants (there are thousands) buy their fish from the market, but she said no, most buy frozen fish since its less expensive and still very good. She said its the transportation cost of the fish that is high because it must be caught fresh and then brought into the city by smaller boat and since there are fewer people buying and more people taking free photos of the market the fish vendors are in trouble. She could only think of a few restaurants that might buy their fish at the market.
The ceilings are made of wood, Jay liked them so I took a photo. She said many ceilings and walls are framed in wood, as well as the pilings under the city because its makes the buildings very elastic and less likely to crack being built on water. The wood came from the Dolomite Mountains and was brought into the city through the rivers.
Our first stop on the food tour is a place called Cantina do Spade, Cantina means that they sell wine and do Spade means Two Swords. Here we had garlic shrimp, scallops and a little pocket of mozzarella and prosciutto and a glass of white wine (I think we got a half bottle between the 3 of us). This is a local place, her father and his cousins hang out here all the time.
The ceilings are made of wood, Jay liked them so I took a photo. She said many ceilings and walls are framed in wood, as well as the pilings under the city because its makes the buildings very elastic and less likely to crack being built on water. The wood came from the Dolomite Mountains and was brought into the city through the rivers.
Our first stop on the food tour is a place called Cantina do Spade, Cantina means that they sell wine and do Spade means Two Swords. Here we had garlic shrimp, scallops and a little pocket of mozzarella and prosciutto and a glass of white wine (I think we got a half bottle between the 3 of us). This is a local place, her father and his cousins hang out here all the time.
As were walking Monica explained that the Venetian people didn't have any Saints to intern there and it was a famous and powerful city so they wanted the body of a Saint. So in 1828 they stole the body of San Marco from the Egyptians by putting his body into a wooden crate labelled "Pork Meat" knowing that because they were Muslim they wouldn't open the box.
We've circled back to the Rialto Bridge. The stones for the bridge came from Croatia and was one of the first stone bridges of its size. It was built to replace the original, wooden, Rialto Bridge which collapsed during a wedding procession with the crowd of wedding well wishers standing on it. There are two stone sculptures at the side of the Rialto on the building of a man and a woman both with fire burning between their legs, this is because someone said to the builder "I'll burn my dick if you can make a stone bridge!" So the builder had it added to prove a point in humour. Its a legend that the builder made a pact with the devil in order to get the bridge built and to be structural and his pact was that the devil could have the soul of the first person to cross the bridge - he and his wife crossed together, so says the legend, and shortly after she had a miscarriage.
At our next stop is at Sepa for Prosecco and some more little snacks I asked Monica what we should do on our way to Siena tomorrow. She recommended we go to Vignola Castle as the scenery is beautiful and also to stop and do a balsamic tour at Acetaia Leonardi, but to call first and make a reservation for the tour (which we probably won't do because we won't know what time, so we'll hope that if we go there that we can get a tour). For the amount of Prosecco that I drink I had no idea that it came from the Venetian Region of Italy. Jay liked the bars on the wall so I took a photo. He says he's stuffed, we are only on stop number 2 and he didn't eat anything - its because he had 5 croissants and then a nap!
I asked Jay to stand there for scale, but then it looked like a mug shot.
At this point I started asking my standard questions about life here. School starts at age 3, they call it Kindergarten and its optional, it is at a cost of 200 Eu per month. At age 6 school starts and then it is only 200 Eu per year. Universities are public and cost a max of 2,000 Eu per year for tuition, but the more you earn the more you pay so for most people they pay around 1,000 only the wealthy would pay 2,000 and then they're more likely to go to private University which is 30,000 Eu per year.
Medical care is free essentially, again if you make enough money you would pay nominal fees (2 Eu) for prescriptions. So I asked how much income tax is, since that must be what pays for everything, she said if you make more than 500 Eu per month then your income tax is 50%. Rent for her 2 bedroom apartment she shares with her boyfriend is 500 Eu a month and they earn 35,000 Eu combined income per year before tax. She has a child though who is 18 months old, so she is currently getting 800 Eu per month as a benefit and as a guide she doesn't have to apply for her VAT account (tax account) for 2 years and she has been doing this for only 1 year so far so she doesn't pay tax yet on her income as a guide. A cell phone costs 300 Eu to buy but once you own it its only 7Eu per month for the full phone and data plan.
Venice was built in the early 400's. I said that it wouldn't have been very practical to build here, so why did they? She said that Venice is in the middle of the lagoon, so the wealthy escaped here and built to avoid the barbarians. Their wall was the sea, so it was very safe.
The next stop is a little pastry shop. We got 3 pastries each, but Jay only had 2 so Monica had his other pastry, they're tiny little things, a perfect tiny size. I ordered a decaf espresso and convinced Jay to have a sip (in my defence I did tell him he wouldn't like it), I really wish that I had had my camera out because his face was priceless. I actually said to him "I wish I had my phone out" He said "I wish you broke your leg..and then we can remember - 'remember that time you broke your leg?'" lol.
Next stop is for more snacks but we opted to just get wine and nothing to eat here because the next stop is pasta. As we drink our wine in the courtyard Monica explains to use about the wells that are located all over the city that have fresh water, it used to be that a priest would open the well once in the morning and once in the evening with a key for the local people to get fresh water. On several there is a basin at the bottom that would naturally fill up, it was to ensure the cats had fresh drinking water in order for them to reduce the number of rats in the city. Each well has stones around them with holes that take rain water into a reservoir which naturally filters through sand underground and back into the well, which is 6M deep.
She stops us in the next alley to show us 5 brass stones embedded in a doorway. She says there are a lot more of these in the Jewish Ghetto, which we will briefly visit later, but a German artist started this memorial listing the name, date of arrest and deportation location of Jewish residents taken in the war. In Venice there were 246 Jewish deported though there were many more Jewish in Venice at the time the Jewish leader burned the list and then killed himself so that the record would be gone forever saving thousands of people from deportation. (In order to show the detail I had to crop one out and make them larger and do a filter).
This is not a gondola.
Burger King..a few times I've commented that Mom and I never were in these touristy areas. We stayed by the Academia Bridge and the tour we did was called Back Streets so we did all the little alleys and bridges instead of the wide tourist areas. I'm glad that we did the tour today because we got so much information about Venice.
Next stop for Ragu and a Spritz (Aperol and prosecco), which is a little bitter. So so far we had white wine, prosecco, red wine and a spritz..well rounded tour and I'm surprised that my notes still make sense to me.
We stopped in front of a store that sells Carnival masks. Originally Carnival was set for the people to create anonymity and no social divide, you could be speaking to a Lord or Lady or a servant and everyone was equal. It went from October through March. Napoleon ended Carnival because he liked the social class system and so it was abolished. Venice started to celebrate Carnival again in the 1980's, it now starts 40 days before Easter and is 10 days long. Its only since the 80's revival that the masks are decorated, they used to be just white. The masks with the long noses belonged to Doctors, who put herbs in the 'beaks' to stave off the plague. Doctors masks also had eye glasses in them.
These are walk ways that will be set up for when there are floods to raise the pedestrian streets so that you can walk above the water.
Most Campos you will find at least one tree, originally this was so that you could park your horse in the shade of the tree while you visited or conducted business. There haven't been horses allowed in the City since the 1500s.
Last stop Gelato! We had the smallest you can have, only because Monica insisted.
There are only 2 bridges left in the city like this one with no sides, it was so that the horses could cross without being nervous about the sides of the bridge.
This house is sinking slightly to the right. Jay asked will they just let it tumble and she said no, they'll close off the canal and pump all the water out and fix the foundation with new bricks. I asked if that was the responsibility of the home owner and she said no, the municipality would pay for it.
We walked back and instead of walking 30 minutes around to get to the Rialto Bridge and cross to our side we took a water ferry (essentially a big Sandolo) across and paid the 2 Eu each because I never learned how to say "I'm local, I'm new".
When we got back to the Hotel I hopped in the shower while Jay FaceTimed the girls. Then I started on the blog while Jay had nap #2, or is it technically 1 because 1 counted as going back to bed? He's been asleep about an hour and 15 mins so I'll wake him up to go out now. We were recommended to go to a rooftop patio so we want to try that and Monica recommended a restaurant to us in the Jewish Ghetto called Rioba so we might go back there.
I finished off the blog, with the exception of photos which I added after we got back from dinner.
We took the ferry back over to the other side of the Grand Canal and walked down to dinner at Rioba.
It didn’t open until 7:15pm and it was 6:30pm so we made a reservation with someone who was setting up. He said we could only sit until 9:15pm when they have another turn at dinner. I said that’s ok, we’re Canadian we don’t take that long to eat!
Jay and I walked down the canal until we saw a cool bar through a window on the other side, so we found it over a bridge down and alley and down another alley (this is why they have the cool windows facing the river so people seearch for it.
We went to Rioba after beer, sat down and the whole menu was fish. I mean there were 6 fish starters, one near starter and one vegetarian starter and then the same ratio of main dishes. So we got back up without ordering and went next door to the pizza place. I had carpaccio, Jay has caprese, he ordered bruschetta which was amazing, lots of garlic and a diavolo pizza.
On the way home the ferry was closed so we had to walk the long way to the Rialto instead of taking the ferry across where the line is.
It was a nice walk after dinner anyway and when we got back to the hotel I finished off the blog, for the most part and then read and went to bed. Jay plans to go for a run in the morning but is up late watching his iPad.
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