Long Time, No See

Hi All--

Our time in Italy has been jam-packed with activity, so we haven't had much time to blog... Venice was incredible, of course, even if tourists vastly outnumbered locals. And because it's apparently been that way for a couple hundred years, I'm sure that you already have a pretty good concept of what we did there. The typical boxes all got checked off -- we hung out in the Piazza San Marco, gaped at the mosaic ceilings of the Basilica, shuffled sideways through the crowds at the Ponte Rialto, saw hundreds of pieces of famous Renaissance artwork, and yes, took rides up and down the canals. (Although we did that last one on the cheap, taking the vaporetti -- boats that serve as public transit -- instead of an uber-expensive and mildly-awkward gondola ride.)

But along the way, we stumbled across some secrets that very few other people seemed to know, and I thought that I would share those with you instead.

One: Feeding pigeons in Venice is illegal. This must be a closely-kept secret, because every child under the age of six was running around San Marco with hunks of bread for them. (Criminals, each and every one of them.)

Two: You do not have to wait in the enormous line at the Basilica. There is no need to spend two hours baking in the sun, slowly crawling across the Piazza while all of your body's water content gets squeezed out of your pores. There is a small bag-check on a side street -- if you head right there and drop off your backpack, they give you a card that allows you to skip the line and head straight in to the cool interior. Thanks for that tidbit, Rick Steves!

Three: This one's kind of neat -- the Doge's Palace is jam-packed full of incredible artwork, but it's also jam-packed full of crowds craning their necks to see it. However, there's a little, teeny-tiny staircase that leads away from a major hallway, and if you climb to the top of it and pull a three-sixty, voila -- an enormous Tintoretto canvas, a masterpiece in dramatic high-Renaissance style, all to yourself. We sat and gazed at it for a full twenty minutes, and not a single other person ventured up near us. (Although a few walked by and gave us funny looks, wondering why two kooky Americans were camped out at the top of a narrow stairwell with dreamy looks on their faces.)

Four: This may come as a shock to everyone, but there are streets in Venice that are not directly adjacent to the Piazza San Marco and the Ponte Rialto. And they have houses, views, restaurants, canals, everything. It is not necessary to wait in a twenty-minute line every time you decide to do something. You do not have to pay eight euro for a cup of coffee. It is possible to find shady piazzas with free benches and no crowds. There are even real Italians in the city, and believe it or not, they eat at normal restaurants with normal prices -- and you can too!

Okay, that sounds pretty obvious, right? But nobody else seems to have figured it out! The oppressive crowds of the two major tourist centers disappeared, literally disappeared, after a five-minute stroll to the east. And there we found heaven -- streets that you could walk comfortably down, pizza that you could afford, canals that weren't loaded up with trash, shop owners that spoke Italian (and only Italian) -- the "real" Venice, I suppose you could call it, and it was wonderful.

But I have to admit, wide-eyed American cornball that I am, the more official tourist sites of Venice weren't half-bad either.

All for now!