Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Venice Day 2

February 24

Last night, we spoke to the guy working the front desk at our hotel and asked him for recommendations of things to do that the tourists don't know about. He told us that we should cross the bridge directly in front of the train station, go to the right (everyone else goes left) until we come to a park, then walk along the park until we come to the Scuola di San Rocco, which houses a lot of early Renaissance paintings. When we are done there, we should cross the piazza to the Basilica San Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (Basilica of Saint Mary, Glorious of the Friars). Beth already had both places on her list after reading Rick Steve's book on Italy so after breakfast, we head off to follow this plan.

The Scuola is a confraternity, a voluntary lay organization dedicated to promoting works of Christian charity. In this case, the organization helped people during the time of plague. It was founded in 1478 by a group of wealthy Venetians and named after San Rocco, who was widely believed to have protected people from the plague and whose remains are housed in the church next door. Work on the current building began in 1515 and was completed in 1560. The organizers hired the Italian painter Tintoretto to decorate the Scuola and some of his best-known works are here. Here are some pictures from inside the Scuola:

These are huge paintings (10's of feet across) so it is no wonder that it took Tintoretto nearly 15 years to complete all of them. San Rocco was a patron saint of Venice so every year, the Doge came to the church next door to celebrate his feast day. This may explain why a number of Tintoretto paintings also ended up in the Doge palace. Maybe I have no artistic sense, but I found most of these paintings to be overly dark although it does give the artist a chance to use light to highlight the subject of the painting.

After the Scuola, we head over to the Basilica of San Maria. This is a HUGE church - 335 x 105 x 92 feet (not counting the 230-foot spire). The Doge gave land for a church and monastery for the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor, but the initial church was deemed too small before it was even completed and work began on the current church in 1250 CE. It wasn't completed until 1338! As is common with many Franciscan churches, the outside is pretty plain. Inside is a whole different story:

With so much interior space, there is plenty of room for funerary monuments like the upper middle picture for the Renaissance artist Tiziano Vecellio also known as Titian, who was regarded as the most famous Venetian Renaissance artist.

After our visit, we stop into a nearby trattoria - unlike the ones on the main walkway between the train station and St. Mark's square, there are only two customers eating. Beth has a prosciutto and cheese panini, and I have a tomato and cheese pizza. Yum! On the way back, it is a little unclear which is the right way, and we walk into a dead-end. But all we have to do is back-track a little and look for a sign like this one:

There is one of these signs in almost every piazza which makes it very easy to find your way back to a major area. In this case, Ferrovia is the train station, near which our hotel is located, and we are quickly back on the right path. But I can imagine that it is much more difficult to look for a place that is not a landmark and many of the narrow streets have tall enough buildings that Google maps doesn't work well. We make our way back to the Grand canal:

and quickly get to our hotel. We have plenty of time to do something else, but first, we speak to the guy at the front desk to ask how we should get to the airport tomorrow. Marco Polo airport is on the mainland so getting there is a little complicated. He says that you can take a bus from the cruise ship port or you can take a train to the mainland and connect to a bus, but his preferred option is to take a boat, saying that it is the perfect way to leave Venice and it goes directly to the airport. Even better, the dock where the boat departs is only slightly further away than the train station. This sounds good to us, and we go up to our room and book the tickets online. Then we walk back to the train station and buy tickets on the vaporetto to go to the island of Murano.

Since we've been in Venice, we've seen many of the shops selling Murano glass, most of which are multicolored and in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Beth has found that there is a glass museum and we head off to see what we can learn about Venetian glassmaking. We attempt to board the line 4.1 vaporetto, but the deckhand tells us that we should take the 4.2 vaporetto instead. We figure out that these lines essentially follow the same route, but the 4.1 goes counterclockwise and it will take us 90 minutes to get to Murano while the 4.2 goes clockwise and it will only take us 30 minutes to get there.

As soon as we get on, a guy comes up and starts talking to us. He reminds me somewhat of an older hippy although he is probably too young to be one. It turns out that he is a semi-retired freelance photographer from Florida who has been in Cortina and the other mountain venues for the Olympics. It seems like his goal in life is to have as many adventures as possible while spending as little money as possible. For example, rather than paying big bucks to stay in Cortina, he rented a room in a hotel far down the valley and took the bus back and forth. When his train to Venice dropped him off at 1 AM, he just slept in the train station. He doesn't have a room for tonight but has no doubt that he will find one.

After a couple of stops, we go across the lagoon to Murano and make a fortuitous mistake. The first stop says Murano Colonna, and we figure that this is the only stop on Murano before the Vaporetto goes back toward St. Mark's square, so we get off. It turned out that Murano is a lot bigger than we thought and we should have gotten off at the third Murano stop to go to the museum. But a sign outside the Colonna dock points to a glass making presentation at the Murano Glass factory. Wary that this is just a way to get you to buy their products, we decide to go in. We find the photographer from Florida already sitting up front ready to photograph the whole process. The workshop is not much to look at, but the presentation is amazing. The two glassmakers first make a kind of vase:

It takes two glassmakers because what you think is the top of the vase is really the bottom and you need to stick it onto another glassblowing rod in order to finish the piece. I'm having flashbacks to my glassblowing class in college when one of the guys puts the finished piece on a table and puts a small piece of paper into it. The paper immediately ignites, reminding me that glass doesn't have to look hot to be hot! Then the guy we take to be the master starts making something else:

He rolls the piece into a tray full of what looks like colored chocolate sprinkles to coat the outside of the glass and then puts it back into the oven, takes it out, pulls on it, and puts it back into the oven a couple more times and in less than three minutes, ends up with this:

Incredible! While the glassmakers didn't speak English, there is a narrator talking a little about the history of glass. They speculate that the first glass was made by accident in either Egypt or Mesopotamia when a guy built a fire on a beach close to a chunk of salt peter. Normally beach sand (silicon oxide) melts at too high a temperature to melt under a bonfire, but the presence of the salt peter (sodium nitrate) lowered the melting point enough that a hot fire was hot enough to melt the sand. When the fire burned out, the guy found a chunk of semi-transparent stuff under the fire. The Roman empire produced glass objects after learning glassmaking from the Greeks (who, in turn, probably learned it from the Egyptians) so glass making in Venice was already well established around 500 CE, but it really took off in the early 1500's when glassmakers figured out that adding potash from the Levant to the very pure silicon oxide beach sand near Venice produced glass with much better clarity (called Cristallo) compared to competing products. Venice quickly established a monopoly on potash to protect their industry.

In 1291, the Doge decided to avoid having the glass industry burn down the city by ordering that all glass makers move to the island of Murano. Glass technology was considered a state secret at the time, so the glass makers were confined to the island. Leaving the island without permission or passing along trade secrets was punishable by death. But concentrating all of these experts in one place and exposing them to the already advanced glassmaking in the Middle East was the key to the continued development of Murano glass. And it was not all bad for the glassmakers. They didn't have to work during the summer (up to 5 months of summer vacation) and unlike other members of society, if a glassmaker's daughter married a nobleman, their children would also be nobles. Today, there are about 40 glass making companies on the island.

All good tours end in the gift shop, and this one was no exception. Beth bought a necklace that she thought that Sean would like to make up for our failure to find designer shoes at affordable prices for him. Then we begin a fairly long walk along the main canal to the glass museum. Along the way were shop after shop with wide varieties of glass products. If that was not enough to tell you where you were, we see this on a wall:

The museum was really interesting. They began with the glass products that the Roman empire developed:

Once the glassmakers learned the secret of making completely clear glass, they became famous in the 1700's for making chandeliers:

When Chinese porcelain began to arrive in Venice, the glassmakers created a type of glass called Lattimo (milk glass) which mimicked porcelain, but was a lot less expensive:

Glass beads were made for rosary beads and as jewelry (Christopher Columbus used Murano beads as trade items with the native Americans), but one offshoot of this process really amazed me. It involved pulling pieces of single colored glass into extremely long thin strings called canes. Then they take bundles of canes and melt them together to produce Millefiori glass:

The ends of these Millefiori canes can be widened to produce pendants. This technology advanced to the point where they could make essentially dot-matrix pictures:

The bottom is the actual cane (and is about 5 mm across), and the top is what happens when it is expanded during the final glassmaking step (to a grand 2 cm!). This allowed them to mass-produce different kinds of pendants.

Despite the bests efforts of the government to keep the technology secret, eventually glassmaking spread to all of Europe. In 1673, Englishman George Ravenscroft, who had lived in Venice for some years, figured out how to make lead glass that was as transparent as Cristallo, but much less fragile and it was all downhill for the Murano glass industry until 1797 when Napoleon shut down all of the factories and many of the Murano glass techniques were lost. About 100 years later, there was a revival in luxury glass that continues today. Here are some of the other pieces we really liked in the museum:

It is only a short walk to the nearest vaporetto dock, and we are lucky to catch a boat leaving just as we arrive. We find that our friend from Florida is also on this boat. It takes about 45 minutes to get back to the train station, and we head back to the hotel to watch some Olympics and blog before dinner.

Before dinner, we want to see exactly how far the dock for the airport boat is from the hotel. It is only one bridge from our hotel and takes about 10 minutes to get there. On the way back, we stop at a pizzeria for dinner. By this point, I'm pizza'd out so I go for a vegetarian lasagna and Beth has a fettuccini with a scallop pistachio sauce. The food wasn't awesome, but the interior was interesting with many old advertising signs - for example, a rental car sign from the 1920's. As usual, we skip dessert and stop for gelato on our way back to the hotel. We wish that we had a little more time to explore Venice, but it has been a long three weeks, and we are ready to go home.

Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Venice Day 1

February 23

We have read somewhere that Venice has been voted one of the top 5 least authentic cities in the world. Out of a total population of about 250,000, only about 50,000 actually live on the island of Venice with the rest either living on the mainland or on other nearby islands. This means that tourists greatly outnumber the locals. Today, we are going to visit two of the sites that draw all of these tourists, St. Mark's basilica and the Doge Palace. But first, a little history.

We had wondered what on earth possessed people to build a major city on a bunch of swampy islands. It turns out that post-Roman northern Italy was not a particularly safe location. In the 5th and 6th centuries, this area was overrun by invaders from Germany (the Visigoths) and Atilla the Hun so the refugees from nearby Roman cities like Patavium (Padua), Tarvisium (Treviso), Aquileia, Altinum and Concordia (Portogruaro) likely settled on these islands to get away from the barbarians. The city was established in 421 CE with the dedication of the church of Saint Giacomo in the Rialto section of town. The first leader (doge) was elected at the end of the 7th century, and the doges ruled Venice for about 1,100 years until Venice was conquered by Napoleon in 1797. Because of its location on the Adriatic Sea, Venice became a major sea power and was highly connected with major trade routes to the Middle East and even as far as China.

The current Saint Mark's basilica is actually the 3rd church dedicated to Mark on the same site. The first was built to house the relics of Saint Mark, basically his body with the exception of his head, which were removed from Alexandria in the early 9th century by two Venetian merchants. Because of Venice's close ties with the Byzantine empire, the original church was modeled after the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul). The current church was begun in 1063 and incorporated many of the elements of the previous two versions and has the general interior layout of a Greek cross. 

It is about a 45 min walk from our hotel to St. Mark's square (Piazza San Marco). There are signs on many of the buildings with arrows pointing to Piazza San Marco, but honestly, it is pretty easy to follow the crowds of tourists going in the same direction. Along the way, many of the shops are still filled with masks for Carnivale, which ended the week before we arrived. This goes well with our collection of masks, and we decide that we will see if we can find a nice mask that is made locally (as opposed to the cheap ones from China) for our collection.

When we get to the piazza, the place is already packed. Entry to the basilica is timed so we have a little time to kill. This gives Steve a chance to take some exterior pictures:

The original church had a brick facade, but after the pillage of Constantinople following the 4th Crusade, a lot of marble columns were brought back to Venice, sliced up and used as veneer on the outside of the church. But for us, the key is the mosaics, which were likely started by mosaicists from Constantinople and which were supported by the glass industry in Venice (more on that tomorrow). Here are some interior pictures:

There is a museum upstairs in the Church which shows some of the older mosaics, sculptures and tapestries that were recovered during renovations. It also helps us get a nice view of the Piazza San Marco:

We've got some time before our tour of the Doge Palace next door begins so we grab a couple of panini for lunch and then walk around. Here are a couple of pictures:

The bottom left of these four pictures is the outside of the Doge Palace. The lines to get in don't seem too long in the early afternoon so Beth asks if we can go into the Palace early and they agree. 

The Palace was built originally in the early 9th century and rebuilt in 1340. It was the residence of the Doge and the administrative center of the Republic of Venice for nearly one thousand years. Besides having the dominant navy in this part of the world and the riches arriving through their trade networks, one of the reasons for the long success of Venice was that their leadership believed in the rule of law and treated their populations fairly well. Here is an example:

The mouth is actually a mail slot, and the wording says that anyone can submit secret information about people who abuse their offices or who collude to hide their true income and the authorities will investigate. Here are some pictures of the Palace and the museum attached to it:

A lot of the artwork shows the leaders of Venice getting divine instruction (translation: God is on our side!). During one of the expansions, a prison was added nearby. People convicted in the courtroom in the Palace were escorted over the Bridge of Sighs where they would see their last views of Venice before being placed in a cell (bottom right picture).

On our way back to the hotel, we accidentally walk into the Rialto neighborhood where the main market area of Venice. The crowds make the area around the train station look like an uncrowded plaza! We immediately detour to find a less crowded path back. Here are some pictures:

Along the way, we come across what we were looking for, a family-owned business that makes their own Carnevale masks. They are basically constructed as with paper mache - a plaster called gesso, which is a mixture of chalk, gypsum and pigment is applied to a base along with gold leaf. We are a little worried that one won't survive being packed in our suitcases, but the cost is low enough that we are willing to risk it. We get a small ceramic one for Sean that we are sure will survive and then go for a larger one for our collection:

Carnevale is to Venice as Mardi Gras is to New Orleans. It began in Venice as early as the 13th century and was seen as a way to temporarily avoid the very rigid class hierarchies of Venice because for the Carnivale period, anyone could appear and act to be in any social class that they wished. Carnevale was banned by Napoleon and was only legally reintroduced in 1979. This style of mask is called a Volto and is the most common of the modern types of Carnevale mask. It is secured in the back with a ribbon, is typically worn by women and often combined with a headdress, scarf and/or veil. 

With our purchase in hand, we head back to the hotel. We ate too much last night so tonight we go to a trattoria. Inside, they have a bunch of quite different masks on the wall. When we ask the owner if these are a type of Carnevale mask, he says yes, but that they are from Romania. And yes, we have gelato for dessert!

For our last full day in Venice, we've planned a visit to a museum with early Renaissance paintings and a trip to the island of Murano to learn more about Venice's glass industry. Enjoy!