Well, that's pretty much the end of our organized tour of Venice, so as promised in a previous post, please enjoy these Visions of Venice...

Ca Rezzonico is a grand palace, bought by the city and used as a museum of Venetian life. They've stuffed it with interior art, furniture and antiques gathered from dozens of other Venetian palaces, and it's definitely the most fun museum in Venice. The Mocenigo palace is a similar concept, but is very dull, so I'd strongly recommend skipping that in favor of Ca Rezzonico.

Peggy Guggenheim was a member of the wealthy American philanthropic Guggenheim family. She moved to Venice after the second world war and lived on the Grand Canal until she died in 1979. Her palace is now Venice's modern art museum, and is a pretty place to walk around. But the rooms where the collection is displayed are quite small and stark, and get pretty claustrophobic with the tourist crowds. So we spent more time outside admiring the view than inside admiring the art.

The Accademia is Venice's foremost art museum, and probably the best in Italy, or, at any rate, the one I enjoyed the most. It's got a great collection focused primarily on Venetian artists, although it's a bit of a shame since most of the art was ripped out of the city's churches, where it probably would have looked nicer. The museum actually expanded into a nearby church, which makes for a nice place to display the collection.

Because the Jews were abused less here than elsewhere, the city's Jewish population grew as Jews fled persecution elsewhere. Due to the international nature of the Jewish population, the ghetto supported eight different synagogues, each for a different nationality. We visited three on a tour, which was quite interesting and highly recommended. You have to wear a yamulke at each one, and Somchai was much more fascinated at one guy on the tour who kept stealing his yamulkes rather than returning them when leaving each synagogue. He was going to make a citizen's arrest, but I talked him out of it.

We visited the Jewish ghetto, which is actually the ghetto, the one who bequeathed its name to the rest of the world. Jews were moved to the island of Geto in the midst of Venice, which became a catch-all phrase for any ethnically based enclave. While all Jews had to live here, and the bridges were locked every night to prevent their movement, they were treated better here than in most places. They were free to move around during the day, practice most occupations, and weren't forced to attend church. Napoleon ended the ghettoization of the Jews in 1797, but the area stil remains the focal point of the remaining Jewish population.

The Rialto Market sprawls around the base of the bridge, and is about the only place in Venice not selling tourist trinkets. As usual, Somchai made a beeline for the vegetables, but the market is really best known for its seafood.

We had two more days in Venice, just finishing up on the more obscure parts of town. Rather than go through chronologically, I'm just going to hit some of the landmarks in random order, then call it quits. This is the Rialto Bridge, which was the only way to cross the Grand Canal until the 1850's. A couple of earlier bridges at this site had previously collapsed, but this one is still going strong since the 1500's.

Tonight's dinner was at Alla Testiere, by far my favorite restaurant in Venice. It's a tiny place, maybe four tables, and the decor is simple, typical Italian cafe. It's also almost impossible to find. The food is great, typical Venetian seafood done with a flair that was lacking in the other restaurants. But the real reason this restaurant stands out is the owners, one of whom cooks and the other works the room. The roomworker does a fanstastic job and is immediately everybody's friend, not in the fake waiter way, where they ask how you are, state their name and their function as today's server, and push some drinks on you. This guy really makes you feel like your best friends without being cloying and intrusive or stereotypically loud Italian. Everyone in the little room is put in a great mood, and it feels like a real celebration. One drawback of the small size and festive environment is that it's hard to get people to leave. So, when we arrived our table wasn't free yet, so he walked us down the street to a nearby bar to wait for fifteen minutes, and watched a little soccer with us as well. (Food-15, Decor-11, Service-20)



By the way, the photos came from the helpful Gastroville website, as we're never going to get comfortable taking photos in restaurants.

Just some photos of Venice on the boat back into town. The bottom photo is of the city's cemetery, which occupies its own island in the lagoon.

As you may know, Venice was born as the barbarians invaded the Roman empire, pillaging their way down Italy. Some of the inhabitants fled to the islands of what eventually morphed into Venice. But the first of the fleers landed on the island of Torcello, in the fifth century, and for several centuries Torcello remained the center of Venice. In 638 a cathedral was built here, which remained the home of Venice's bishop for a thousand years. But by the fifteenth century, the island's canals had silted up and malaria plagued the island, reducing the island's population from twenty thousand to about thirty, where it remains today. It's not a popular spot on the tourist circuit, but it should be, although that would ruin the ghost town feel to the place. The highlight of the abandoned town is the seventh century cathedral, and weirdly there's an equally large church right next door. The town is far from where the boat drops you off, so an added pleasure is the walk along the canal, which feels much more like English countryside than Venice. We liked it so much that we stopped at the island's only restaurant for a drink along the canal.

Next stop was the very colorful island of Burano. The men are mostly fishermen, and centuries ago they started a tradition of painting their houses in bold colors so they could pick out their houses from sea. While the men were at sea, the women kept themselves busy making lace, which is now the island's main industry. There are dozens of shops selling the lace, and lots of workshops where you can see it being made. Lace apparently was never as interesting as glass, and Venice never had an assassination team targeting defecting lacemakers. I share in that general lack of lace interest, so we didn't stay here that long.

Apologies for the small size but this was the only useable photo I could find of our lunch restaurant, Busa alla Torre. It comes highly recommended, and service is very friendly. The restaurant sits by the main canal in Murano, with lots of outdoor seating, which almost never happens in Venice. The day was unusually hot, though, so being outdoors wasn't particularly pleasant. The restaurant specializes in seafood (surprise!) and the menu looked pretty good, but the waiter was so excited about this great quality fish they had just caught so I ordered that. Because it was such great quality, they didn't want to do anything to it, so it just came steamed, which is about the most boring way you can eat fish, no matter how good the quality. Somchai liked his more interestingly prepared food though. Food-11, Decor-7, Service-13.

Because of the risk of fire, all the glassmakers in Venice were moved to Murano in the thirteenth century. Venice guarded its supremacy in glass jealously, through a stick and carrot combination. The glassmakers were paid well, and allowed autonomy on their new home of Murano. Also, if the child of a glassmaker married into one of Venice's ruling families (as listed in the Golden Book, remember?) their children could be entered in the book as well. As for the stick, the glassmakers were forbidden to leave Murano, because the rest of Europe was constantly trying to bribe them to leave and teach them the secrets of the trade. Venice maintained a team of assassins, who hunted down any glassmaker who foolishly agreed to set up shop elsewhere. They took glassmaking very seriously back then.



Nowadays, most of the glass sold in Murano is tourist schlock, largely imported from Asia. But the remaining studios like Venini and Salviati are still known as the world's best glassmakers. We bought a couple of pieces from Venini, which was fairly stupid because we then had to carry the heavy glass with us for the rest of the day.

We spent the next day on the waterbus, visiting three islands off the coast of Venice, Murano, Burano and Torcello. First stop was Murano, which is by far the most famous due to its worldwide fame as glassmaker par excellence. The boat trip takes about a half hour, and dropped us off in the bustling little harbor town. The town is centered around a canal, and, just like the motherland, the wealthiest families lined the canal with their family palaces. The rest of the island is taken up by glassmaking furnaces, which provided the riches to build the canalside palaces.

Had dinner at Da Fiore, Venice's most famous restaurant and it's only one with a Michelin star. Very formal service, and good food, mostly seafood, but the interior is pretty terrible. It's windowless and very low ceilinged. I guess they tried to make the best of a bad location by dressing it up to look like an ocean liner, but it's a pretty depressing place to eat considering you're in the middle of one of the world's most beautiful cities. There is a really cute table for two sticking out the back of the place jutting out above a canal, definitely the table to book. (Food-13, Decor-7, Service-15)

The district ends in the awesome Arsenale, the world's first factory. While Venice made its riches through trade, it also developed world class manufacturing capabilities in certain areas, most famously shipbuilding here at Arsenale, and glassmaking on the nearby island of Murano. This enormous complex employed 20,000 workers at its peak in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and continued building ships until World War I, ending a 900 year production run. It was the first assembly line, ingeniously arranged so that the boat being built would be dragged along a canal as workers added various things to it, and continue being pulled through to the last station, where food and supplier were loaded and the crew jumped in. The factory built one ship a day, which is really amazing. As you can see from the photos, it was extremely important strategically, and hence heavily guarded. Unfortunately the site itself is closed until the city can figure out what to do with the huge place, and you can only see part of the massive walls guarding the inactivity inside.

I'm having trouble with the Venice entries because most of what we did during the day was walk along the canals and get lost in obscure neighborhoods. I've got hundreds of photos of these canals, but I have no idea what part of Venice they're in so I keep not using them and instead go from church to museum to palace because those are more easily identifiable and I know when I visited them. So the blog entries seem like we just kept going to churchese but in fact the trip was relatively light on that sort of thing apart from Piazza San Marco. I guess at some point I'll just do a photo dump of canal pics in the blog and call it something pseudo-artsy like Visions of Venice. But for now, it's lunchtime, and we ate at a very famous, and famously hard to find, seafood restaurant, La Corte Sconta. The restaurant sits almost at the edge of the city in an entirely residential neighborhood far from tourist sights, but that all adds to the charm. The interior is a bit dull, but most people opt for the charming outdoor terrace covered with vines. There's no menu, the waiters just chat with you and heavily suggest a series of dishes, all with the freshest seafood available. Everyone starts with a plate of various seafood appetizers, then we had a squid ink pasta, then some grilled fish. Somchai was in heaven, I'm a bit pickier about seafood but thought it was really well done. I must say I don't get the point of squid ink though. It's smelly and thick, and tough to get off my teeth, so I went around looking like a hillbilly for the rest of the day. (Food-15, Decor-15, Service-13).