VENETIAN WANDERINGS

VENITIAN WANDERINGS

(February 2025)

(All the photos can be enlarged. Simply click on a photo gallery to get a full-screen slideshow, and right-click -> Open image in a new tab for photos posted independently of galleries.)

Base camp for this short stay of four or five days was the friendly Hotel Corte dei Greci (the "Court of the Greeks"), located in the parish of San Zaccaria, and which I warmly recommend.

...with a small picture of the Rialto Bridge on a wall...

...and, in the corridor, a representation of Saint Mark in the mythological/metaphorical form of a winged lion, one of the symbols par excellence of Venice:

Having this cozy little nest was fortunate, as apart from that the stay was polar, glacial, freezing and as icy as a glacial glaciation (and this is from a convinced enemy of heat) (It was, by the way, highly ironic that I should, the way I did, barely going out of a case of the flu, my bronchi still in a sorry state, so coughing like a guy with TB, visit the town that came up with the idea of quarantine, historically).

Another small problem: we weren't really at the right time to attend Carnival in full swing, as we had hoped, due to rather confusing signs announcing the opening of the Carnival on February 14, without specifying that there would be a week of almost nothing before the parades and the festivities themselves began on the 22nd. So we found ourselves there right during this pause. As a result, we stayed in the room for the entire stay:

Photos by Mireille Legros

No, I'm kidding! Especially since we haven't seen zero masks either. To begin with, there are some everywhere in the decoration of the streets, shop windows and cafes:

Photos taken around the Rialto

This is the window of a shop that borders the Rialto Bridge:

...and this is the interior of a café called "Le Café", and located in the small district of "campo San Stefano", near St. Mark's Square and the parish of San Zaccaria:

...and then, well, even if they were far from being as numerous as they should have been, the costumed Venetians were still very present, making the show go on:

Photos taken on and around St. Mark's Square

Thus, the mania for decorative masks has made its way to my home, as I have procured, while in Venice, two of those masks in a traditional maskmakers' s shop called La Bottega dei Mascareri ("The Maskmakers' Shop"), located in one of the alleys surrounding the Rialto Bridge.

On the left, the "bauta", the most traditional mask of the Venetian carnival, the one that everyone wore, originally, before the designs diversified:

And below, photos of the inside of the shop, all taken by Mireille Legros:

On the right, the famous mask of the plague doctors, which became a symbol of Venice because the city was affected particularly often by this medieval scourge (a commercial and qvant-la-lettre globalized port, built on water and therefore constantly saturated with humidity: the contaminated rats were big fans!), hence the invention of quarantine, on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo:

17 February

Basilica and Fenice

First-day visit, beginning with a meeting with guides, at the foot of the column of Saint Mark (one of the two columns that stand on the eponymous square, and between which the ancient and medieval Republic of Venice carried out public executions: the column of Saint Mark is the one representing a winged lion, while that of Saint Theodore represents the saint in question (former patron of the city) slaying a dragon).

After downloading the app giving access to the audioguide, we begin to explore on our own Saint Mark's Basilica, which was initially built in 828, in a style inspired by the oriental forms of the buildings of the Byzantine Empire, to host relics of Saint Mark the Evangelist, stolen from Alexandria by Venetian merchants. (however the current church was actually rebuilt after a revolt led to the burning of the Doge's Palace (and the original basilica with it) in 976).

Here are some views of the magnificent façade to begin with:

Same magnificence as far as the inside of the building is concerned:

...and what to say the superb views you get when strolling on the terrace?

Photos by

Cecilia Camus

On the other hand, let's clarify that, in the general opinion of the company (as far as I'm concerned, I got a decent tea and have nothing special to say about it), the Caffè Lavena, where we had hot drinks on the cold terrace after this first visit, had nothing to offer (apart from its location, and its claim to have been an establishment much appreciated by Richard Wagner) to justify the St-Mark's-Squaresque prices of its drinks. We will talk later about one of its neighbors, the Caffè Florian, which does have more arguments to justify its prices - but, really, what an idiot, this Wagner: anti-Semitic, and shitty tastes in cafés.

Photos by Cecilia Camus (I told you, that the weather was cold as hell!)

(but we sure did have a nice view on the square (the photo below was shot by Mireille Legros):)

The wanderings that followed that day also provided an opportunity to visit the famous opera house La Fenice ("the Phoenix"), where Maria Callas began her career, where many famous operas had their very first performances (including a good number of Verdi's most famous works), and where several fires (in 1774, 1836 and 1996) wreaked ephemeral havoc, leading to reconstructions that first motivated, then justified, the mythological name of the building.

First part of the visit: the Rococo auditorium with its 1,126 seats, including a little over 170 boxes (among which — only since (that great international criminal that was) Napoleon landed with his thugs and ended to the (admittedly grotesquely oligarchic) Republic of Venice in 1797 — an imperial box which later became royal box):

Then come the visits to the few rooms where prestigious spectators met for social events around the shows: the Verdi room:

...the Dante Room, where the establishment's café is now located:

... the ballroom (which seems more suited to concerts to be listened to while sitting than to dancing...):

... and, finally, the Ammannati Room (named after the 16th century Florentine architect and sculptor Bartolomeo Ammannati):

Urbanautical interlude

As is well known, walking around Venice means going from bridge to bridge (there are reportedly 438 of them), from canal to canal (supposedly, 183 of them) et from gondola to gondola... Here's proof:

The last photo is Cecilia Camus's

Of course, there are not just small canals, but also the Grand Canal, its vaporettos (= water buses), its banks lined with palaces...:

...and its Rialto Bridge, the oldest bridge in the city (because it was the first one they built in stone rather than wood, between 1588 and 1591):

18 February

Doge's Palace and Museo Correr

The day begins with a visit to the seat of all the components of the government of the Republic of Venice, the Doge's Palace, where the symbolic figurehead of the city-state, the Doge (not to be confused with the pseudo-department of vandalism and pillage headed by Elon Musk in the US), lived, and where the Senate and the other Councils of aristocrats met, forming the complex system, resolutely non-monarchical, but completely oligarchic, that governed the strange city-Republic on water for which Othello, Iago and Cassio fight in Shakespeare's play.

That photo is Cecilia Camus's

The visit starts with this monumental courtyard:

Next comes the Room of the Four Doors (an antechamber where government representatives waited before entering the four rooms where the assemblies of the College of the Sages, the Senate, the Council of Ten and the Chancellery were held):

The Antichamber of Full College Hall (where ambassadors et delegations waited for receiving audiences with the Signoria of Venice (the council responsible for the foreign policy of the Republic)):

— and when we passed through it again a bit later, we came across people cosplaying as doge and dogaress (the doge's wife):

Then here's the College Hall:

the Senate Hall:

Next is the Hall of the Council of Ten, where this specific group of nobles met in secret to manage the operations of justice, police, state security, Inquisition, imprisonment and torture, etc. (in short, the local Stasi):

...as well as the Hall of the Compass, the antechamber/tribunal where the accused appeared before the representatives of the Council of Ten (the "state inquisitors"):

Then come the many rooms that form the Armoury (because La Serenissima, the super-stable and peaceful Republic that lasted 1100 years (697-1797) and was so passionate about peaceful activities like art, culture and commerce, was actually quite warlike and imperialistic):

A short passage in the "liagò", a corridor that served as an antechamber to the Grand Council Hall:

... and its two vestibules (that with the paintings is the Quarantia Civil Vecchia (one of the three high courts of appeal of the Republic, where the judges of the Council of Forty sat); the one with the fresco (of the "coronation of the Virgin") is called the Sala del Guariento (from the name given to the anonymous 14th-century painter Guariento di Arpo, who made the fresco) and once served as an ammunition depot and a rest room for the soldiers protecting the meetings of the Grand Council):

Then we end up in the vast (1,250 square metres in total; 52.7 metres long, 24.66 metres wide and 11.5 metres high) and magnificent Great Council Chamber, where all the elected patricians forming the government of the Republic of Venice met in plenary session, in particular to elect the Doge (through an endless and extreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemely complicated process):

Note the small portraits of all the doges in the history of the Republic, lined up all around the room, above the more monumental paintings — except one, whose portrait has been covered with a painted black sheet (circled in red in the details below): Doge Marino Faliero, in a way the Donald Trump of the Republic of Venice, in that he failed to overthrow the Republic and replace it with his personal autocracy — but, unlike Trump, when the Republic foiled his coup plan, it did not give him on a platter the opportunity to do it again: Faliero was beheaded; and, in the manner of Herostratus (or even Hatshepsut or Akhenaten), the regime also made sure to "erase" him from history, the most famous example of this punishment being the concealment, by painting a black sheet over it, of his portrait in the Great Council Chamber.

After that, a quick passage through the Chamber of the Quarantia Criminale, where the Council of Forty (the Republic's high court of appeal) sat:

... then in the "Sala dei Cuoi" (a former archive room, which currently serves mainly as a picture gallery (admittedly, all the rooms in the palace are kind of picture galleries... but this one is officially so)):

... or the "Chamber of the Magistrato alle Leggi", where the Magistratura dei Conservatori ed esecutori delle leggi e ordini degli uffici di San Marco e di Rialto supervised compliance with the laws governing the practice of law and arbitrated trials between close relatives in testamentary matters (note a new lil' hi from the winged lion symbolizing Saint Mark):

... before going down the sinister staircase that leads to the even more sinister prisons of the Doge's Palace — but contrary to what I thought, we were not at all shown the Piombi, the initial prison, which was the scene of terrible tortures, and from which Casanova was the only one or one of the few to escape, and which is located directly on the ground floor of the palace (there is no basement: the building, like everything else in Venice, is built directly on the water, on stilts). Instead, we went inside the Bridge of Sighs to visit the New Prisons, built at the end of the 16th century and located on the other side of the Rio di Palazzo. (As a reminder, the Bridge of Sighs that connects the Piombi to the New Prisons, named so after the sighs of despair of soon-to-be prisoners who, when they saw the bridge, knew that it was their last minutes of freedom, and while, inside, it looks like this:)

... from outside, it looks more like that:

The second photo is Cecilia Camus's

... and here are the New Prisons:

We pass back over the Bridge of Sighs, then the visit of the palace ends with three rooms:

- the Hall of the "Avogadori di Comun", where crimes concerning the property of the municipality and cases between the tax authorities and individuals were dealt with:

- the "Casket Room", where the "avogadori" kept the register of Venetian patrician families, the "Gold Book", in which marital unions and births were recorded, in order to control the legality and legitimacy of the entry of young nobles into the Grand Council:

- and finally the Hall of the "Provveditori alla Milizia da Mar", where the galleys of the Venetian fleet were equipped, and where the hiring of sailors also took place:

.. then, a quick stop at the palace's shop, where I got the two trifles below, then goodbye to the doges and the councils of nobles:

...and hello to the (pretty and rich) hotchpotch, that is to say museum: in this case, the Correr Museum, also located in St. Mark's Square, and which contains the immense collection of works of art of Teodoro Correr (1750-1830), a magnate descended from one of the oldest patrician families of Venice, who bequeathed his booty to the city upon his death. Oddly, the place offers (like the Doge's Palace) free entry for the disabled and people with reduced mobility, but it opens onto a dizzying staircase of about twenty steps, without an lift (unlike the palace), and therefore, it effectively denies access to those people whom it issues free entry to... That is what experts of museography call an acute case of "Are you fucking kidding me?"

We start with the "neoclassical" rooms, which display Correr's collection dedicated to the works of Venetian painter and sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822). And there, (almost) gone are the portraits of doges and the Christian allegories that formed the bulk of the paintings covering the walls of the Doge's Palace: now, we are in full-on Roman mythology: Cupid, Venus, Adonis, Hercules, the inhabitants of Olympus and their close relatives clearly take center stage, often in the form of marble statues imitating the shapes of the sculptures of the time, hence the classification of this collection, and of Canova himself, in the category of neoclassicism.

In keeping with these Greco-Latin mythological themes, the next room (decorated in the Empire style by the Venetian painter Giuseppe Borsato (1771-1849)) serves primarily as a setting for one of Canova's first famous works: a statue representing that damn lil' rascal Icarus and his father Daedalus in the process of making him put on the fateful wings:

Next comes another Canovian room dedicated to the early works of the Venetian artist, including a statue of Orpheus and one of Euridyce, a bust of a pope and an allegorical bust representing Religion, or even equally allegorical reliefs, full-length portraits of Charity and Hope personified...

...and then another one that shows preliminary models that Canova made with clay, wax, etc. before embarking on the final forms of his statues:

We continue with the embodiment of bliss: a library. More precisely: imposing walnut shelves dating from the 17th century, which surround the next room after being imported from the palace of the Venetian Pisani family, containing all sorts of old books that celebrate, through their exhibition, the history of the early Venetian printing industry. In the middle, two beautiful world maps, of which I mischievously wonder if they are hollow and hide aperitifs like the one my parents had in my early youth. On the ceiling, a beautiful Murano glass chandelier (see the next day's entry, for more on Murano).

That photo is Mireille Legros's

... and all the rooms we saw afterwards contain their share of portraits of powerful figures of the Republic (doges, senators, dogaresses...):

(...and by portraits I don't just mean paintings: for example, Doge Francesco Morosini (1619-1694) also has his marble bust, signed Filippo Parodi (1630-1702) (even though he actually also has his painting (that one by Giovanni Carboncino (circa 1638-after 1703))):

... or if not their portraits, then their attributes of power, the objects that symbolized their position, in particular this ducal horn, the headgear worn by the doges (and according to legend, faced with the evidence of the fall of the Republic under the blows of Bonaparte's army, the last doge, Ludovico Manin, removed his horn and handed it to a servant with these fateful words: "Here, take it, I won't need it anymore"):

... or this model of the Bucentaur, the doge's immense parade galley (used in particular for the annual "wedding" between the doge and the sea):

...and the power of Venice itself is also celebrated in this painting by the Venetian painter Alberto Prosdocimi (1852-1925), depicting the façade of St. Mark's Basilica:

The Bucentaur provides a nice transition to the other major theme deployed in many of the museum's rooms: Venice's relationship with the sea, both because it is built on a lagoon regularly invaded by the Adriatic Sea, because the sea will soon end up engulfing this city, and also because, for a good part of the existence of the Venetian Republic, it was a quasi-globalized maritime trading power, so nautical charts, models of galleys, pieces of gondolas, paintings depicting naval battles, triumphant landings of illustrious Venetians, etc., are legion (or should I say they are fleet?) on the walls of this museum, sailor!

And then there is of course the Arsenal, this shipyard which was at the same time the source of the military power of the Republic, that of one of its export products (warships) for the other great powers (for the Crusades in particular), and the place where assembly line work was really invented (rather than in the American factories of the wealthy Nazi who made cars; and no, here, I am not talking about Elon Musk, but about Henry Ford):

Then there are, again, weapons — because, once again: Most Serene, my foot!:

...and coins of the Republic's currency (the Venetian lira), because you can never escape that kind of stuff, and because we're still talking about a city-nation-empire of traders:

... other neoclassical statues and busts, representing Roman soldiers, leaders of Ancient Rome, mythological figures, etc.:

...and then, well, lots of other things: as I said, it's a jumble: we stayed in the museum for about two hours, but when we had to leave in a hurry, it seemed to us that it would have taken three and a half hours to really do the whole tour...:

Then the day ended with strolls through the streets (see the interludes and the intro on masks) after a quick dinner of focaccias and other whatever-sandwiches:

(Photo by Cecilia Camus, although it's actually from the day before, just after visiting La Fenice)

Ecclesial interlude

Besides St. Mark's Basilica, there are plenty of churches all over Venice. Yeah, I know, weird idea... but hey, we did visit or see a few of them, and here they are:

The Church of San Zaccaria (named after the father of John the Baptist) was right next to our hotel, and located between it and St. Mark's Square, so we walked past it every morning:

The church of San Moisè (dedicated to the famous Ten Commandments' Moses character) is a building whose interior we had the opportunity to visit quickly, both because, unlike most churches, the visit was free, and also because one member of our group needed to sit down for a moment, because those endless comings and goings in the alleys of the Serenissima can be quite exhausting:

We didn't visit it, we didn't even get close to it, but the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute (Saint Mary of Salvation), built from 1630 on (and finished in 1681), therefore during and just after a terrible plague epidemic that decimated the city, stood out constantly from the city's skyline, on the other side of the Grand Canal:

As for the church of Santa Maria del Giglio ("Saint Mary of the Lily"), well it was there, and pretty, so the eye of the smartphone could hardly stop contemplating it:

19 February

Murano and Burano

That day, the vaporetto allowed us to get out of the historic center of Venice to go for a little walk around two of the most famous small islands of the lagoon (the equivalent, to Venice, of what would be the nearby suburbs in a more ordinary city).

We passed by, and got a distant glimpse of, the island of San Michele, a.k.a. the cemetary of Venice:

The second photo is Mireille Legros's

Then we made our first stop on the island of Murano, famous for its artisanal glass, and which is consequently lined up with shops selling all sorts of art stuff, jewelry and other tourist trinkets, all made out of local glass:

...including a small factory where you can watch the glassblowers at work:

...and from which I personally brought back this little decorative item:

...then came the more colorful (in terms of architectural identity: it's a little rainbow entirely designed by Punky Brewster, or so it seems) and all-lace (in terms of what it makes and sells most) island of Burano:

That photo is Mireille Legros's

After that, we got back on the vaporetto and headed back to Venice, to enjoy one of the few restaurant dinners of the trip (most of the time we ate on the go), in a restaurant called Trattoria Zaccaria, and located opposite the aforementioned San Zaccaria church:

Photo de Mireille Legros

Photo de Cecilia Camus

...and that joint is warrants a pretty high recommendation as far as I'm concerned. My tagliatelle with clams was perfectly delicious, and the cuttlefish and ink polenta dish that my sister tried, and which she had everyone taste, was a sensation: