Bring your wellies!

I arrived in Venice in the mid afternoon and I walked through to the hostel from the station. It was a little longer carrying luggage than it said on the website but at least I managed to find it without getting lost (no mean feat in Venice). The hostel is in a cute little Venetian house with authentic Murano chandeliers and old furniture. It even has it's own little bridge to get to the door. I left my stuff and headed out to see St Mark's Square seeing as it is meant to be the highlight of Venice and I wanted to get a tourist map so that I didn't have to carry my big lonely planet around all the time. It was quite easy to find as all you have to do is follow all the people and there are lots of them. I would hate to see the streets in the peak season because they are pretty full at the moment and it is the lowest of the low season at the moment.

There are lots of shops selling tacky stuff for exorbitant prices. I was quite taken by the murano glass multicoloured cockatoos on a tree and was very tempted but how would I get it home. There were also lots of places selling the masks like they wear for carnivale as these seem to be very popular souvenirs. The canals are really quite stinky and are very cloudy. There are signs up saying that you can't swim in them but I'm not sure why you would want to (other than a wish to catch a nasty infectious disease). There was lots of people going around on gondolas which was surprising given the 60 euros per hour cost. There was one that went past with a man singing and another playing the piano accordion. I'm not sure if you have to pay more for that or more to make him stop.

When you get to the entrances of St Marks Square there are lots of signs telling you all the rules for entering the square and that you will be fined for breaking them. It is FORBIDDEN to:

Sit or lie on the ground

To eat and drink while sitting down

To soil and leave rubbish

To swim or bathe in the lagoon

To wear swimwear

But yet it is okay to feed the pigeons through out the square so that they soil it for you!

The square is pretty impressive with large columns on the buildings on the sides and the Cathedral at the far end of the square. In the middle are lots of pigeons as for some completely inexplicable reason you can pay to feed them. For one euro you can have the pigeons sit on you while you feed them breadcrumbs. Haven't they heard of bird flu?

The cathedral is like a giant birthday cake looking thing with decorative bits all over the top of it. It's actually kind of ugly from the outside.

I wandered around trying to find the tourist information place and found one that was closed before finding another on the waterfront. They do have tourist maps but they are really large and they are 2.50 euros (nothing is free in Venice). The more useful thing that they have is the Chorus card which gets you entry into 16 of the best churches in the city for 8 euros. If you don't have the card, the individual churches are 2.50. The card is valid for a whole year as well so you don't have to worry about rushing around if you are in Venice for a couple of days.

I wandered back to the hostel via the supermarket which luckily wasn't as expensive as I had feared. I did suffer from a bit of crowd rage. I think that I have been in quiet places for too long and the people who were walking so slowly in the middle of the narrow streets (come on people, I could crawl faster over broken glass!) and there is no way of passing them and it gets really frustrating. I hate to think how the locals feel.

The hostel cooks dinner for everyone every night which was great. Everyone sits at a big table (under the 80,000 euro chandelier) and eats a basic meal of pasta of some sort. It's more the kind of stuff that families eat rather than restaurant food and given that eating out is really expensive in Venice, it's a major bonus. I ended up staying up much later than I had planned but made it to bed before midnight.

The next morning, I had a quick breakfast and headed out to see the sights. Lots of the churches (and museums) don't open until 10am which is a bit of a nuisance, but St Mark's opens early and is an easy way to kill an hour or so. I walked a slightly different route to get to the square and came through the archway to find that a good proportion of the square was under water. It is obviously a frequent occurrence because they had boardwalks out so that people could keep their feet dry. The square was already rapidly filling with Japanese tour groups but was otherwise fairly empty.

I headed to the cathedral first and was told that I had to put my bag into the luggage room. The man just pointed in the general direction of the room which of course doesn't have anything as useful as a sign to let you know that it is down that little street. You pretty much have to walk past it to see it. It is in the second street on the left after you come around the cathedral and is about halfway down the alley. I left my bag and came back around to enter the cathedral. The boardwalks go right in under the entrance as it fills with water as well.

St Marks was built as the counterpart to Hagia Sofia in Istanbul when Constantinople fell. It has the same bookmatched marble in places and golden mosaics on the higher walls. It is hard to see the mosaics from the bottom as he ceiling is really high and it is quite dark inside the church. The views are much better from the museum which is in the gallery. The floor is really uneven because of the water affecting the foundations of the church over the centuries.

To go upstairs you have to pay to go into the museum (3 euros) but it is totally worth it. The museum itself is interesting. You get to see the mosaics from closer, you get a good view of the marble floor from above and you get to go out onto the balcony on the front of the church and look out over the square. The balcony also lets you see the external mosaics and statues including the replicas of the golden horses (the originals are inside in the museum). You can't see the horses very well at the moment though because there is scaffolding on the front of the building.

The originals are in brilliant condition given their age and that they have been outside most of the time. They were brought back from Constantinople during one of the crusades (another man who wasn't happy with the tea towel option). They aren't actually made of gold but of copper that has been treated with mercury to give it a golden appearance. They have been scratched on the outside to make them less shiny so that you can actually look at them in the sunlight.

The museum has models of the church and drawings of the different appearances over time as well as some of the mosaics that used to be on the walls but have been removed during renovations and not returned. The mosaics on the wall vary in appearance because at various times they have had to be repaired or replaced. Some are very byzantine and look just like the ones in Istanbul while others have a much more renaissance look to them. They also have a collection of paintings and carpets/tapestries that belonged to the bishops that lived in the building next door. You aren't allowed to take photos anywhere inside the church or museum but there is a good selection of post cards available that are only 30 cents each and have better lighting and no people in them.

I then headed off to start looking at some of the other churches around town. Some of them can be a little hard to find as the map that comes with the chorus card isn't very detailed (gives more of a general location) and lots of the churches aren't marked on the other maps. There also isn't a list of addresses so that doesn't help either. Luckily most of them are on a street that has the same name or a square that is named after them which makes them slightly easier to find.

I started at Santa Maria del Giglio which is a very ornate baroque number which was quite OTT inside. Unfortunately because all the buildings are so close together in Venice, you can't step back and admire the facade which is really impressive. It is quite typical of the baroque era and is nothing particularly special in Venice (on the inside at least).

The next church was St Stefano's which is also baroque on the inside. It has really lovely patterned brickwork on the walls of the main church which is quite different from all the others. It reminded me of the patterned bricks in Melbourne. The ceiling is carved and quite lovely. The altar has a large open space behind it which makes the whole place feel much lighter. There is a little museum of art in the back of the church (mostly in the sacristy) and this is the area that you have to pay (or use the card) to get into. The rest of the church is free. Part of the museum is closed at the moment but the part that is open has a small collection of renaissance religious paintings and statues.

I headed across the Academia Bridge and onto the other side of the Grand Canal. There are some pretty impressive buildings up this end of the Grand Canal and the university seems to own quite a few of them. I walked through to the waterfront and to the Church of St Mary of the Rosary. It has a very ornate Baroque facade that faces out over the water. Inside it is the hideous type of baroque with large golden angels and a dressed up wax madonna (she's a little creepy actually). Definitely not my type of church.

A little further along the waterfront is another church, St Mary of the Visitation. It is much smaller and plainer without any wall paintings but a painted ceiling. It is being restored at the moment so most of it is covered.

I headed into the maze of streets again in search of St Sebastiano's which is a really nice church. It was decorated almost entirely by the one artist so it has a togetherness that a lot of the churches lack. It's only a small church with a painted ceiling and walls by Paulo Veronese. The sacristy is particularly good with paintings of the old testament and the evangelists. It was done in the 15th century. The colours are much brighter than in the other churches though it may just be that it has been cleaner more recently. Around the top of the choir and near the organ are large marble statues of various saints. Clearly painting the whole place just wasn't enough!

I decided that it was time for something to eat so headed for St Margherita Square where there are lots of little places to eat. It took a while to get there (mainly because I ended up missing the turn and then having to backtrack to get back across the canal) but I got there eventually. Now this is a good place in Venice. It has some of the few parkbenches in the entire city and you are actually allowed to sit on them and eat lunch (to avoid paying the cover charge at so many of the restaurants). I grabbed a piece of artichoke pizza and sat on a bench and ate it (with the drink that I had bought at the supermarket the night before at a third of  the price of getting one in the shops). I had a lot of company as the birds here are really quiet and all sat on the bench next to me waiting for crumbs. Unfortunately for them, I was hungry so there wasn't much left over.

I headed from here to Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari which is luckily quite large so easy to find. It was quite annoying the almost all of the signs in Venice point to either the Rialto or St Marks. It is like they think that no-one ever goes anywhere else in the town. The church is huge both inside and out and you can take photos without a flash inside. It's a huge empty space that I don't think gets used as a church anymore. It has a really interesting collection of tombs on the walls. Some look really quite modern given that they are centuries old. The nave is spectacular and has really impressive carved wooden seats that are all lit up and golden. At the front are a series of side chapels with nice altars. It was definitely one of my favourites of all the churches.

I headed into the backstreets again and to the Church of San Polo which is only a short walk away. It's a much smaller plainer church with a wooden ceiling. It is famous for its stations of the cross that are kept in a separate room at the back of the church. I wouldn't rave about them but someone obviously thinks that they are special. When I got out it had started to rain properly and I had to put my raincoat on.

It was quite a walk through to San Giancomo Dali'Orio but it was well worth it. It has an incredible wooden keel ceiling that covers the entire cross of the building. It was definitely the most impressive ceiling of any of the churches and that includes the painted ones. The altars are nothing special though there is one nice one that has an old Gothic Madonna and child incorporated into it. They have two painted sacristies at the front of the church as well which you can go into. It does have one great altar with St James resurrecting a rooster at a dinner party. It's quite a party trick!

I walked through to San Stae but the church is now used as an exhibition space and they were packing up the exhibition so I couldn't go in. So I had a quick look at the inside and headed onto San Giovani Elemosinario. Now this one was really hard to find. The street was easy enough but I managed to walk straight pass the church the first time and nearly did it a second time on my way back. The church is just built into the buildings and there is nothing about the entrance to suggest that it is a church. It was built for the merchants in the marketplace out the front of the church (now touristy stalls). It was completely rebuilt in the 16th century after the big fire that destroyed most of the suburb. It's quite nice inside and very quiet after all the noise in the market. The whole thing is plain white marble with bright paintings on the altars.

I headed across the Rialto bridge through the souvenir stalls. I suspect that it used to be lovely but is now covered in rubbish and graffiti. My next stop was Santa Maria Formosa. It was built after one of the bishops had a vision of the Virgin Mary asking him to built her a church where the white cloud stopped (typically it stopped over prime real estate). It was built in the 15th century in the renaissance style over the top of an older church which was in the Greek cross layout. It's very plain on the inside with white and grey marble. They have a really lovely Byzantine icon that was stolen from somewhere but no-one is really sure where or when.

I then headed a few streets further to the Gothic cathedral of St John and St Paul. It's not included on the Chorus card but is worth the 2.50 to get in. It is truly awesome. The outside is mostly brick and fairly so-so but the inside is brilliant. It is more a museum than a church now but I think that they still have services in one of the side chapels. You can take photos in this church too but it is quite hard because it is really dark inside. It is lined with impressive tombs including at least three with full sized horses on them. They also have their own wax saint in a box, St James, the patron saint of cancer patients. Ironically, he died of cancer himself in his eighties. The really impressive baroque building next to the church is the hospital with its own dock for water ambulances (I guess it beats having to carry the patients to the hosptial). The ambos here must have impressive knowledge of the streets because the addresses are completely unfathomable. The posties here must do a 12 month course before they can start just to find the places.

I would have liked to stay longer but it was getting dark and I wanted to find the last of the churches on my list, St Maria dei Miracoli. This church is very small and used to be attached to a convent. It was built to house an icon of the Virgin that was supposed to have performed miracles while it was hanging on the wall outside a man's house. They raised money and built a church for it. You can't get all that close to the icon so you can't see it all that well. The church has a lovely painted barrel ceiling and is renaissance style.

From there I managed to tack onto the back of a group of locals and get back to the main street without getting lost in the dark. They don't light most of the back streets and if you aren't careful you could end up in a canal (some streets don't end with bridges, they just end). In the evening we sat and watched a movie in the hostel which was nice and then ate dinner together. I had been intending to have an early night and then all of a sudden it was midnight.

In the morning, I didn't really have time to do much other than get ready and head to the train station. We were woken at 6 am by the sound of sirens which we were assuming were for the flooding as the canals were very full (high tide) and it had been raining for over 12 hours. As I was leaving the hostel I had to use stepping stools to get across the bottom storey and out the door. The locals must be very used to it as they were all out in their trendy colour coordinated gumboots. There were boards on some streets but others were just ankle deep in water and people were wading on through. Just a quick hint too, if you are catching a train out of Venice make sure you check which station it goes from. Most of the intercity trains go from Venezia Mestre which is 9km away from the island and only a few leave from St Lucia. I got caught out and missed the train that I wanted to catch.

Venice is lovely but there is something kind of sad about it. It reminds me of old women who used to be beautiful and are piling on the makeup to try and retain their former glory. It's faded and it floods regularly. You would think that given the majority of the Netherlands is below sea level and manages to stay dry the Italians would have worked it out by now.