Tuesday in Venice October 7

Today we did what we should have done yesterday afternoon. Thirteen of the VBT-ers hired a licenced walking tour guide. Since several had been to Venice before, we requested the "backstreets" tour and avoided all the obvious tourist spots. It was great! Our guide's name was Cristina and she was born in Venice and has lived there her whole life. 

Our Guide Cristina. 

She explained that Venice is made up of 114 (?) islands, each with a piazza in the center with a cistern, surrounded by buildings and a church. I began to notice and photograph the cisterns. 

One of our first sights was this leaning tower. Hard to tell in the photo, but quite crooked. 

She suggested we look up at the chimneys all over town. They are all unique. Young stone masons had to build a beautiful, functional and novel chimney design to become acredited. So almost every chimney in Venice is unique. 

We passed a gondola making yard. Gondolas are not symetrical. They are longer on one side to balance the gondolier's weight. So they are are custom made for each gondolier and they can't gain or loose much weight!

Gondolas are all uniquely "furnished". We were told it costs about 80 euros for a half hour for up to 6 prople, but we did not indulge. 

Cristina told us that this is is one of the

best residential neighborhoods. For most of it's history until about the 1950's the population of Venice was about 150,000. But now there are only 56,000 full time residents  and their average age is 65 !

After the 2 hour walking tour, we had lunch on the waterfront. Seafood rissotto! Yum!

In the afternoon I made my only real purchase of the trip. I had seen it the day before and thought about it all afternoon and evening. In a way, it is a piece of jewelry, but also a very creative piece of art. I met the designer and his son who have been creating this wearable jewelry/art for the last 20 years. It is only available in this one little shop in Venice that we just happened to pass the previous evening. I was so intrigued after talking to him that I went to the website where I found we could make an appointment to visit their nearby showroom. 

The assistant walked us two short blocks to the courtyard of an old Palazzo. Inside was a modern glass and metal shiny lit room of shelves and drawers. Wish I had photos but you can see it on their website: micromegaottica.com

Each piece is unique and I got to choose each component. Back at the store, Hugo, the son took all the measurements and helped me with all the component choices. Their/ my creation will be shipped to me in about 10 days!

After that adventure we visited an interesting art exhibit in a beautiful old Palazzo: "A Sense of Place", featuring works by Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg, Ai Weiwei among others. 

Sculpture outside the Palazzo by Ai Weiwei titled "Forever" looks like an infinite assembly of bicycles! 

More wandering around the city, getting lost as we were advised to do. Following the map is impossible. I began to feel like a lab rat learning to run a maze! I was starting to feel pretty good at it!

But sometimes a street just ends at a canal without warning, as this one did and all you can do is turn around. 

After dinner we ran into Bob and Deb who had gotten tickets to a concert in a nearby church.