Padua 4

As with Rome, our last day in Padova was a free day.  We decided to return to Venice by train to explore it further.  We visited a number of the islands surrounding Venice, churches, boats, bridges, gardens, gelato shops, and good restaurants.

In concluding Venice, I feel that it is probably my favorite of the Italian cities we have visited.  Although it can be hectic at times, it is such a unique and interesting city that I can forgive many of its failings.  Rome, despite being 6,000 miles away, isn’t THAT different from Atlanta in several important ways.  Venice, on the other hand, is another planet.

Tomorrow, we will board our bus and leave Italy, only the second country that I have set foot in.  Despite being unimaginably alien to this place, I feel somewhat saddened at leaving it because I have experienced so much here in such a short time.  I cannot help but wonder if I will always regard Italy as my European home just as I regard Atlanta as my American home.  We’ll see how I feel after a Bratwurst and Pils.

Padua 3

Today was our heavy touring day in Venice.  Instead of taking the bus the entire way there, we walked to the train station in Padova and then boarded a train to Venice.  The walk was about 20 minutes and the train ride was a little less than an hour.  I guess this is a good time to talk about how one gets around in Venice.  It’s sort of complicated, so I didn’t want to explain it in the last post.

The train depot is on the western part of the island (I don’t know if Venice is technically an island, but it might as well be).  Anyway, there are no roads or cars to speak of in Venice so driving around is certainly not an option.  Walking is also quite difficult as the city is virtually a labyrinth.  It is a chaotic web of cobblestone alley-ways that frequently dead-end at completely illogical locations.  Anyway, your best chance it to stick to the roads along the canal, or even better, take the Vaporetto.

The Vaporetto is a bus that can take you pretty much anywhere you want to go in Venice, except it’s a boat.  You buy a pass for a specified amount of time (say 24 hours), and you can use it as much as you want as long as your pass is still valid.  You board the Vaporetto by going to one of the dozens of stations throughout Venice.  The pilot executes a controlled collision with the floating holding chamber that you wait in, and you board.  From that point onward, it’s basically like a bus.  You take a seat or stand and wait for your stop.  It’s really a nice system with one exception.  If you are foolish or desperate enough to board a Vaporetto during peak hours, you will be packed onto the boat as if you are a sack of low-quality potatoes on its way to becoming mashed into a mediocre mess of microwavable (alliteration) hash browns.  They pack the boat until you literally wouldn’t fall even if the boat were inverted by some sort of divine intervention, and then they pack on 40 more people in, just for good measure.  Periodically someone in the back decides they need to get off, so they mercilessly trample you.  That’s only sometimes, though.  Otherwise, it’s a serene and enjoyable voyage.  I highly recommend a trip aboard this graceful craft.  I asked my friend, James, to verify this and he agreed that it is an accurate account.

The two museums we went to were Accademia (NOT the one that houses Michelangelo’s David if that’s what you were thinking.  If you weren’t thinking anything, that’s okay too.) and the Peggy Guggenheim collection.  They are completely different as the first one houses works by artists such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Giorgione—the most famous Venetian Mannerists, and the second is exclusively modern art.  We also toured a beautiful church from roughly the same era as the mannerists that included magnificent sculptures throughout.  I enjoyed the Peggy Guggenheim far more than I anticipated.  I expected the most of the art to be comical (as modern art often is), but I really enjoyed a large number of the pieces in the collection.

After a long day in Venice, we headed back to Padua and found a really interesting Chinese restaurant near our hotel.  The staff was entirely Chinese and spoke a mixture of Italian and Chinese, but absolutely no English.  The menu featured dishes that were half Italian and half Chinese.  Pasta and Rice all around.  It was a worthwhile experience.  Now that I have ordered tea from a Chinese Italian, I claim to have mastered language.  Honestly, what more do I have to learn?

Padua 2

Today we awoke early for several hours of classes that would preface the art we would see in Padua and Venice as well as a concert we would attend that night.  The professors decided to cut the classes short upon finding out that downtown Padua is fairly far from our hotel.  They wanted to give us ample time to explore the city since it would be inconvenient to do so otherwise.  Luckily, we were able to take the bus into town and avoid the long walk.

We took a walking tour of Padua with Professor Lewcock (who handles the art/architecture side of things), the highlight of which was a visit to the famous Arena Chapel.  The Arena Chapel is a highly regarded site of important Proto-Renaissance works by Giotto.  The building itself is stringently protected from humidity through a series of sealed chambers.  Upon entering the first chamber, we watched a 15 minute video while the ambient humidity was readjusted to suitable levels.  We then proceeded into the Chapel itself.  Giotto’s work was exquisite, and I only wish we were able to stay longer than the mandated limit of 15 minutes.  Of course, all of these procedures are only in place to protect these works and their continued survival can be attributed to such precautions.

Following our tour of the Chapel, we continued onto the adjacent gallery of sculpture and painting.  We explored this portion mostly because it was there but not because any of the works contained were particularly earth-shattering.  I only mention this second leg of the art tour because of an interesting encounter with a sculpture.  My mother’s maiden name is “Parodi” and her family descends from Genoa.  I ran across a sculpture by one Filippo Parodi, who also hailed from Genoa.  Okay, so I realize that there are probably a million Parodi’s, but it was still fun to imagine that this could be some sort of ancestor.

We planned to take a bus into Venice, approximately a one hour drive, but first we returned to the hotel for an hour.  I’m going to talk about what Venice is like in a later post since it’s rather involved to describe it.  For now, I’ll ignore how we got to the concert and just say that we did.    Predictably, the orchestra opened with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  They then played Cimarosa’s Concerto per clavicembalo e archi and Handel’s Concerto Grosso per 2 violini, vioncello, archi e cembalo op. 6 n. 3.  If you care about music, you can Google those.  It was a good performance.

The concert ended pretty late, and we returned the same way we came—which I still haven’t really explained yet.

Padua 1

Disclaimer:

My internet connections have been really terrible thus far.  We’ve stayed in fairly nice hotels, so I’m concluding that a good internet connection is simply not in high demand here.  I mean, I have heated towels, but I can’t check my email half the time.  Honestly, I wouldn’t care if I weren’t trying to write this blog.   Let me get to the point.  I’m writing this preface to avoid potential confusion.  All of the blog entries thus far have been written into word documents (sometimes the day of the events described, occasionally 1-2 days later if I’m particularly busy; if I can’t write on a given day I always take notes to ensure accurate portrayal of the day).  At that point, I begin to upload any new entries I have stored on my computer to the website.  For some of the entries, that has taken several days of battling the internet.  In short, ignore WHEN the entries were posted.  Only know that they are in sequential order.  Also of note, I have stopped updating the photographs and map because of these issues.  I have thousands of photographs already, but they won’t be online for quite some time.  Sorry to disappoint.  Onto today’s entry:

I said that I wouldn’t write about the travel day from Roma to Padova, but there is some information I can add about that day.  On the way, we stopped in a town called Ravenna.  While most of the Roman Empire fell to the Goths (and a bunch of other groups, but we won’t go into that), Ravenna was sheltered from invasion by marshes.  As a result, it was able to outlast much of the Roman Empire by several hundred years.  This, and the fact that Ravenna had an effective naval link with Constantinople (via a canal to the Adriatic Sea), made it an ideal location for the seat of the Roman Empire.  By the way, feel free to correct my history at will.  I can’t actually confirm most of this since I have a hard time getting online with my current connection.   I’m mostly speaking from memory.  Anyway, a number of important churches with a very unique style can be found there.  In particular, the Basilica of San Vitale has very impressive, original mosaics of Emperor Justinian and his wife.

A little while later, we arrived in Padua (or Padova).  I’ll be honest, the location of our hotel is not ideal.  The hotel itself is very nice (4 stars), but it’s a good 25 minutes walking distance from anything worth doing.  We have a grocery store down the street and that’s about it.  It works out though, because we plan to go to either downtown Padua or Venice (depending on the day) and stay there all day for the three days we are here.  To get to Venice, one must either walk or take a bus to Padua and then board a train that will go straight into Venice.  Not horribly convenient, but for the time we are here, it’ll do.

Tonight we just went down the street to the grocery store to restock ourselves and grab some snacks.  We were tired, so we slept shortly after that.