Venice — Blog — The Towering Travelers

Venice is wonderful, gorgeous, and utterly confusing. There are canals. There are streets. There are alleys that dead end at residences. There are streets that look like alleys. There are alleys that look like streets. There are streets that dead end into canals. It’s a glorious mess.

Another reason that Venice is challenging to navigate (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Our hotel, perhaps in an attempt to seem even more Venetian, made no sense either. After being told that our room was on the first floor, we went up three flights of stairs and around five corners to find it. The room itself had padded green fabric walls, and brown hinged shutters on the windows. Very cute and very old looking.

Venice has no cars—your options within the city center are walking or boating. Since we didn’t feel inclined to pay for boating, we did a lot of walking. We spent both sunrise and sunset of our full day in Venice at Piazza San Marco, a huge open space at the edge of the city. We also spent a bit of time looking through the surrounding shops. Venice is known for glasswork, and there was beautiful glass art everywhere. There were also a surprising number of candy shops (Lindt was apparently a local favorite).

(Photo/Jason Rafal)

In Piazza San Marco we also visited the Florian, which is the oldest continuously-run coffee shop in Italy (it opened in 1720). The place was frequented by the likes of Lord Byron and Charles Dickens, and Jason was very excited to visit. We had very expensive coffee, hot chocolate, and cookies, which were all delicious and beautifully presented.

Our tray at the Florian (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Espresso doppio from the Florian (Photo/Jason Rafal)

We also wandered through the daily vegetable and fish markets, which were crowded with locals making purchases for their homes and restaurants. While not huge, the fish market had an impressive variety of fresh seafood, from swordfish to various types of shrimp. Everything that needs to be either put onto or taken off of the island arrives in boats, and then is taken to its destination by handcarts. Walking around in the early morning, we were able to get a sense of how many handcarts are required to transport trash, recycling, food, and restaurant products. For lunch, we headed to the Jewish ghetto, where we learned over matzoh ball soup and latkes that Venice’s ghetto is actually older than Rome’s.

The vegetable market (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Delicious latkes and apple sauce (Photo/Jason Rafal)

For our last night in Italy, we had a wonderful dinner and went to a Vivaldi concert. Venice is very proud of him. While my favorite part of the concert was Pachelbel’s Cannon, it was all very enjoyable. The women were all dressed in period costumes and ornately done-up blonde wigs.

To begin our 19-hour journey home, we left our hotel at 4:45 a.m. and headed to the dock to meet our water taxi, which took us on the 20-minute boat ride to the airport through the quiet darkness. After a stop in Frankfurt, during which I told a very confused German woman who had been selling me a nut roll grazie, even though we had been conversing in English, we headed back to Denver.

Our early morning boat ride (Photo/Jason Rafal)

We had a great trip, and thank you for reading along!