Vivaldi

Our final full day in Venice is a free day. Unfortunately, the weather is still custard, so we didn’t venture out much to explore the city. We took a quick look at the Rialto Bridge in the morning, then headed back to the Doge’s Palace, this time to go around the Marco Polo exhibition. Marco Polo is one of Venice’s most famous sons, and the exhibition showed his life, journeys, artefacts from his trips (or “souvenirs”, as we call them), and was generally informative. Unfortunately no photography is allowed inside the exhibition. 

Rialto Bridge in the rain

Still raining, we found Ristorante Piccolo Martini, who were able to furnish us with a lunch of spaghetti and pizza.

At five o'clock we assembled for a short walk to the Grand Canal, from where we took gondola rides in groups of five. It had stopped raining by this stage, so it was quite pleasant. We just did a short round-the-block trip, without any singing...I guess you have to pay extra for that.

In the evening we had a dinner of traditional Italian snacks – hors d’oeuvres if you will – crostini, deep-fried olive balls, various pastries, schmoked schalmon schandwichesch* (v. traditional!) and the like.  

We then went along the road to see a Vivaldi concert. Antonio Vivaldi is another famous son of Venice, born here in 1678. As such, there’s a lot of Vivaldi going on at any one time, and it turns out tonight that there are in fact two events. We walked to the wrong one. Hugely apologetic, Bonnie turned us all around and took us to the correct venue, with actually plenty of time to spare, as we’d set out knowing the walking pace of our group and had ample time built in. This didn’t stop one of our group getting lost on the way, so, with five minutes to spare, we took our seats whilst Bonnie combed the streets of Venice for her. Fortunately she was found and took her seat after the first couple of numbers.

The first act was various bits of Vivaldi, and Pachelbel mixed in as well; the second half was The Four Seasons. All the players were dressed in period costume, which can’t have been easy, but I guess they do this all the time.

It started to rain as we walked home, so we picked up the pace and made it without getting too wet. This is our last night in Venice, we’re on the road again tomorrow!

 

* Said in a Sean Connery voice