March 28 -- exploring our neighborhood

.

Having checked into our apartment, we set out to check out our neighborhood.

This was our doorknob.  There are a lot of doorknobs in Italy which are there to pull on, to close the door, but which do not engage a latch or lock.  This one is of the "pull on, only" type.

Looking right, from our doorway.  Our street dead-ends at the canal.  I'm finding that it seems sort of odd to me, to call something that will not support vehicular traffic a "street," but it has a name and signs, and everything.....

Looking left, from our doorway.  This way our street ends at another street about the same size as this one.  If you turn left at this end of our street, you quickly arrive at the lagoon (and the stop where we got off the boat from the airport).

We have walked back to the lagoon, and now are standing by the bridge over "our" canal.

Sea weed in the canal.

Here's a look at the bridge over our canal.  You can tell that there are going to be a bunch of steps up and down.  The steps in Venice tend to be very kind.  The treads are deep and the risers are shallow.....

Closer crop of the above -- this boat is delivering restaurant supplies, I think.  This surely looks like wine.....  Note also the hand-cart in the front of the boat!  I didn't see that, when I took the pic.

I'm not sure if there is only one Goppion....  We had coffee at a Goppion coffee bar.  I believe they are one of the oldest businesses in Italy which roast their own coffee.

Here's another close crop of the bridge shot above.  The bridge is embellished with marble sculptures of the prow of a boat, which is embellished with the head of a goat.

Here's a closeup of the sculpture on this side canal -- someone must have crashed into it, at some point, knocking off the part under the goat's chin......

Standing on top of the bridge, looking at our apartment.

Yes, the kitchen really was several steps up from the hallway/bathroom (and one bedroom), which was one (shallow) step up from the living room and the other bedroom.  Carving up these venerable buildings to make apartments for our times requires some creative thinking!

Note that we had a canal view from our living room and one bedroom, and a lagoon view from our kitchen!  (We really didn't need two bedrooms -- the one on the canal was light and bright and had a king-size bed, so we both used that one.  The other bedroom had a window into outdoor space, but that window was over the staircase up to our apartment from our entry, and the outdoor space wasn't any wider than a staircase.  Very little light came in.  It was a perfectly good bedroom, but the other was much nicer.)



Turning the other way, and looking across the lagoon at San Giorgio Maggiore.

We saw the orange and yellow buildings, lower right in this next shot, from the boat as we arrived from the airport (see previous post).

The right side of this fork goes along the lagoon.  The left side is Via Garibaldi.

Note how wide Via Garibaldi is.  Very unusual for Venice!  It used to be a canal, but then they filled the canal and built a street.

It was very nice to be so close to Via Garibaldi, which has a grocery, a fruit/veg market, pastry shops, a bank, more different shops, restaurants, and even a post office.

Did you know explorer "John Cabot" was really an Italian?  I hadn't...........

This is San Marco's (St. Mark's) lion.  San Marco is the patron saint of Venice, and you see his lion *everywhere*.

Old buildings, 20th century technology.  We also saw lots of satellite dishes on the outsides of buildings, everywhere we went in Italy.

Textures.

(Digression:  WORKING external shutters are such an excellent idea.  They keep out noise and light (when you are trying to sleep), they make your place warmer (or cooler, by keeping the sun out), they protect you from storms and other mayhem.  I wonder why we in the USA abandoned this really good idea?
End of Digression.)


Park.  At this point, we hadn't realized how rare parks, and trees, and grass are, in Venice.

You can see in the above that there is a sidewalk just behind the trees.  There's one on the right, too, and it looks like this.

Cool chimney pots.

There is a cafe and plant store (and some-time yoga studio) in the park.  We had coffee and a light lunch.

A place in Italy that sells you food or coffee has a bathroom you can use, in my experience.  This is something to be taken advantage of, so I did.  One of many fanciful stickers on the bathroom wall.

We checked out the fruit/veg market boat, which was no longer open at that hour, and then we went to the grocery.

I love looking at other people's groceries!  They have stuff we don't have, or maybe they just package it differently.  This is mozzarella, the real kind, made from water buffalo milk, visibly floating in a milk carton....

Wine, in juice-box-size boxes.

I'm think finissimi is the superlative for tiny, and piselli is definitely peas, so these would be teeny tiny peas, in little boxes.  (I don't know why there are two weights on there, but 240 grams is about 8.5 oz.)

For our popcorn connoisseur -- he'd vastly prefer to eat it fresh out of the popper, but at least it exists, in Italy.

Walking back to our apartment to drop off our purchases.  This is somebody else's street.  Note wet pavement.

Zooming in on the other end of the street -- not a very good laundry day!  Note all the clotheslines.  I think clothes dryers must be vanishingly rare in Italy.

I essentially never use one, myself.  I feel sisterhood with those who hang their laundry to dry.  We had a clothesline and clothespins outside our Venice apartment's kitchen windows, and I would have used them, had we had a decent laundry day (you have to have over 60 degrees F if you want a prayer of things getting dry in one day, not to mention it has to be a dry day!).

Each of our Italian apartments had washing machines, and drying racks for indoor drying of laundry.  This is another major improvement over a hotel, right up there with having a fridge, stove, and kitchen table!  We set up our Venetian drying rack in the second bedroom.



In one of the shop windows on Via Garibaldi.  We love Pooh, and we are very fond of moose......

In order to facilitate chronological traversal of these posts, here is a link to the next post.

.