Many of the travel guides say that one of the best ways to see Venice is on foot. While we have done quite a bit of walking so far, today that is all we have planned. The last couple of days have been long, so we allowed ourselves to sleep late and move slowly. Then we used walking tours from one of our guide books as a foundation to plan our walking for the day.
We started by walking around less traveled area of Cannaregio, one of the six historic sestieri (districts) in Venice and our home this week. It has many beautiful buildings overlooking the canals.
We stopped at the Gothic Church of Madonna dell’ Orto that is known for its Tintoretto paintings and visited the area where Marco Polo lived after he returned from China.
We then worked our way to a restaurant where we ate the best lunch of this vacation. The service was great, the food was great, the Tiramisu was great, and the coffee was the strongest on the planet. Their regular coffee was like some place’s expresso, and their expresso was four times that strong. Who would have thought you could make coffee that strong and it still remain a liquid.
After lunch, we walked through the Rialto area to Piazza San Marco. There are some rather high end shops in this area including Prada, Fendi, Gucci, etc. One shop had musical instruments made of Murano Glass, including a guitar which sold for a mere $24,000 USD. It would certainly make a nice souvenir; maybe next time.
We walked around the Piazza taking more pictures.
Then we continued our tour by walking the maze of streets surrounding San Marco and Rialto.
One of the beautiful buildings we saw was Scala Contarini del Bovolo, ‘snail’ stairway built in 1499.
We even saw a leaning tower.
A stop at the tragetto (ferry) pier provided a great view of the Grand Canal as sun started to set.
A snack helped us reenergize for the walk back to the apartment. As it became our tradition, we stopped at a few markets along the way for more local foods for dinner.
