Culture Corner: Italy - Venice

I have visited a fair amount of truly unique cities in the world—Guanajuato, Lhasa, Suzhou, Varanasi, Luang Prabang, but none were as photogenic as Venice.  I knew it would be a nice city before arriving, but, being there makes all the difference.  Thus look upon the following photographs as inspiration if you haven’t already been to the city whose roads are made of water.  (But I would recommend going off-season; the sheer number of tourists can be stifling.)

Our approach by ferry one sunny morning…

And whammo, five minutes off the ferry and you’re struck by this – classic!

It’s not often high expectations are in fact better in reality…

St. Mark’s Square (ignore my finger in the corner).

 The Grand Canal.

What passes for a back alley in Venice. 

It’s good to see the girls relax and have some fun, because…  Two weeks in a tiny moving home with limited plumbing and three women, well, you can imagine.

The Bienalle was open, and we spent an all too fast day perusing a mind-boggling amount of art—and so much of it defying my 5% great / 95% crap ratio.

One particular artist who grabbed my brain stem and won’t stop caressing it with the surreal is Papa Ibra Tall, a painter, weaver, and probably many other things.  Here is just a portion of a large tapestry. 

Off the main island of Venice is a collection of smaller islands, easily reachable by ferry.  But in order to get there, you first need to leave the city... 

More colorful than the “mainland”, this is a street of one of the islands, Murano. 

A teeny-tiny back alley of Murano…

But all good things must come to an end.  Here is our last morning in the camper, in a random forest in the Czech Republic, just another 2 hours until home in Wrocław…

The End (for now; there's still another half of the country to explore, Amalfi, Sicily...)