Walking toward Piazza San Marco (St. Mark's Plaza). Yes, that tower is seriously leaning.
The Bridge of Sighs. With gondolas.
Hmm. What do we have here? There are a LOT of these...... Maybe they're the world's biggest temporary stage?
Um. No. Notice the alignment..... These would be the high-water walkway.
In order to make a place to live which was hard to invade, the original Venetians built structures on top of wooden pilings driven into the bed of a swamp. They built their own islands, in the swampy edge of the lagoon. The lagoon is on the edge of the Adriatic Sea, which is connected to the Mediterranean Sea, which is connected to the Atlantic Ocean..... There are tides.....
When the tide is high, the water can be over the level of the pavement.
I have no idea how high the usual "high-water" is, but I suspect (and hope) it is usually lower than these walkways. You can see they are sort of knee-high to that guy in brown pants, upper left....
When the lagoon is higher than the pavement, you walk on these, to get from one place to another. While we were there, we got wetter feet than we wanted, as it rained a lot, and there were plenty of inch-deep puddles, but that's the most water-on-the-pavement we saw. (All of our apartments in Italy had plenty of heat, hot water, and wifi. So it was easy to get dry and warm after we'd been wet, and to dry our shoes before the next excursion.)
Speaking of the lagoon, here it is, with gondolas, and San Giorgio Maggiore in the background. This is an iconic view. I got some very atmospheric postcards with this view.....
From the same perspective as the previous, looking straight down. The dark bits at the top are the reflections of the prows of the gondolas.
With our backs to the lagoon, the Doge's Palace.
Isn't this gorgeous? I love the subtlety......
I learned from reading Wikipedia that this is the piazzetta (little piazza, I think), not part of the Piazza San Marco (though they are connected. The campanile (bell tower) is in the piazza, and San Marco's lion (on top of a pedestal) is in the piazzetta. The building behind the lion is the Libreria Antica.
If we looked to our right, we'd be looking at the Doge's Palace.
San Marco's lion has a companion. There were lots of gulls in Venice, as you might guess, given that it's on a big body of water. They were the biggest gulls I've ever seen, and made some noises that sounded human. I'd hear an odd noise out the window, wonder whose kid was in what kind of trouble, and it would turn out to be gulls......
The top of the campanile. Note the lion in the rectangle on the brick part. Also gull, lower right.
Golden angel, with ... lightning rod? I don't know what happens to your gold plating if your statue gets hit by lightning, but I bet it isn't pretty.....
Piazzetta, with Doge's Palace to the right, and San Marco (the basilica) straight ahead.
A reality shot, with soggy tourists, rather than a pretty one.
A prettier shot, but still with reality -- stickers on the light post, and plastic bags on the piazza. (Note plentiful garbage cans by the pillars -- what is wrong with people, that they won't put their trash in a bin?)
This would be one reason I fervently hope there are always postcards available for purchase.
The pros wait for the perfect moment to take their shots. They have better equipment. They get viewpoints ordinary people don't get (from airplanes, maybe.....).
They take pics ordinary people can't possibly take.
In reality -- there is always scaffolding on *something*..... I am glad for my pics, which show how things looked when *I* was there, but I am also glad for the professional shots on postcards, which show how things look at their best...... I'm grateful that I can buy cheap copies of the pros' images, and I'm happy that I can write on same and mail them home.
Help make sure there are always postcards. Buy some. Send them to your friends......
Here are some prettier shots, with the scaffolding out of sight at left.
San Marco is extremely heavily embellished, in many media. (I apologize for the blur, and hope it doesn't obscure my point....)
Sculpture.
Cool marble. Note -- arches, rectangles of different marbles, pillars of different marbles, mosaic, and I've no idea what all the yellow is. (The more I look at this, the more I'm not sure if the four arches and the circles are not filled with cut-out marble rather than mosaic.....)
The bottom part of this is mosaic, but I don't know what technique/medium is in use at the top.....
Here's a closeup of some fancy marble on the basilica, down low where I could get a closeup.
One of the entryways to the Doge's Palace.
The Four Tetrarchs, a Roman sculpture (from around 300 AD).
Here's a quote from the Wikipedia article:
"The statues probably originally decorated the columns of the porch of the Philadelphion in Constantinople. They were plundered by the Venetians when the city was sacked during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and brought to Venice.[9] In the 1960s, the missing heel part was discovered by archaeologists in Istanbul close to the Bodrum Mosque. This part is housed in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. As of 2008, there are no requests by the Istanbul government to have the statues restituted."
I tend to have the feeling that things are made, and then they stay that way. It's clearly not true -- given enough time, everything changes. This is much more obvious in Europe than it is here in the USA, where everything is so new that most things are still very much the way they were when they are made.
When things are hundreds of years old, rather than decades, they tend to have undergone a lot more change..... Not to mention a shift from here to there to somewhere else.....
Looking back across the piazzetta toward Libreria Antica and the lagoon.
Now, looking back the other way, a bit left of San Marco. This is felicitously known as the Torre dell'Orologio (clock tower).
A closer look at the top -- I have it on good authority that these guys actually move and strike the bell. Over the ever-present lion.
Excellent 24-hour clock.
San Marco, facing the piazza.
There are a some fancy cafes on the piazza, and under the sides of the buildings along the edges of the piazza.
It seems to be very common, in Italian cities, for the ground floor of buildings to be recessed, so people can walk/shop/dine, along the sides of the street, sheltered from the weather by the buildings' upper floors. You can sort of see this, if you squint at the building on the other side of the square. The yellow squares are shop windows, recessed (12 or 15 feet?) behind the pillars.
In Italy, one doesn't automatically tip in a restaurant (one might leave a euro or two), but it is very common for there to be a "cover charge." This is some number of euro per person at the table, and it covers linens, bread, etc. I think. In any case, we read that to sit at these tables, in this space, where there are often (always?) musicians playing, and drink coffee, your coffee might cost you 9 euro or more, with the cover charge (whereas if you stand and drink your coffee in a coffee bar, it's about 1 euro).
We thought about having a coffee here, anyway, just because, before we went to Venice, but the weather was such, most of the time we were there, that we didn't do it.
It was starting to get darker. This is what the camera remembers:
Here it is again, brightened up, to show you what I've been doing to all of these pics..... Less journalistic, perhaps (if we assume the camera's memory is better than mine, which is not always true), but more interesting to look at, imh......
We left the main square for a bit, to go in search of this:
I'll let my daughter tell you all about it.
This fugassa alla venexiana (in the Venetian dialect), was absolutely delicious. One of the best things we ate in Italy, in my estimation. You can't tell the scale from my pic, but these are bigger than your head.... We bought a muffin-size one, and also a little Easter dove (made from the same dough, but with a different shape). Mmmmmmm. Wish I had some right now. Light, fluffy, citrusy......... Yum.
Walking back in the direction of Piazza San Marco, which was on our way home. Doing a bit of window shopping.....
Elderly books.
An interesting assemblage, in the same window as the books above. (the weird blue places, like the upper right corner, are because of glare on the window)
I am not sure what the original purpose of these might have been.
If I were in an acquisitive phase, and were sure about the rules on what may and may not be purchased and brought home (in the way of old things), she might have come home with me. (For "only" 149 euro....)
Walking back through the piazza. They rang the bells...............
And there endeth the 28th. Buona notte!
In order to facilitate chronological traversal of these posts, here is a link to the next post.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment