On Thursday, August 16th we decided that we should get on with our journeying and leave Desenzano on a morning train. The breakfast buffet at Hotel Astoria was one of the biggest and best I've ever seen, with various meats, cheeses, fruits, breads and pastries, thought the coffee comes out of a push-button machine.
We said goodbye to the friendly staff, then caught the train to Vicenza. On the way, we received some unpleasant news from reading Rick Steves' Venice guidebook, which includes Vicenza: there is no luggage storage at the railroad station there. If we had to lug our baggage around with us wherever we went, we wouldn't be able to See much there. Steves did say that in a pinch, the tourist information office might watch your luggage for you, but he specifically recommended against doing what we were about to do: stopping off in Vicenza to look around, on our way from one place to another, with luggage.
At least the center of Vicenza is much closer to the train station than is the case in Desenzano, and we had a map in the Steves book that showed where the two tourist offices are. So I hefted Mary Joy's bag and took the handle of my roller bag, while she carried both our daypacks. Although I knew pretty much where we were going, I stopped at a map on a board outside the station, in order to orient myself. An Italian man, seeing that we were in need of information, and without our asking, told us to go straight down to the tower and turn right on the Corso Palladio, and we'd arrive at the Piazza dei Signori. I thanked him and didn't bother taking my book out to follow the map. This turned out to be a mistake. Which leads us to two digressions.
Corso Palladio is Vicenza's main street. It is named such because Andrea Palladio is, by far, Vicenza's most famous son, and the creator of its principal tourist attractions. Sirmione has "Catullo this" and "Catullo that" because its most famous son is the greatest Roman love poet, Catullus. Unfortunately for Sirmione, Catullus didn't leave any tourist-visitable sights, other than some Roman ruins that have been named after him but with which he in actuality never had anything to do.
Vicenza, on the other hand, is lucky enough to have an architect as its favorite son, and not just any architect, but perhaps the most influential architect who ever lived. (Peace, Frank Lloyd Wright). If, like Thomas Jefferson and many other important people from the 16th to the early 20th centuries, you love neoclassical architecture, Vicenza is a place of pilgrimage.
Second digression. Italian people will go out of their way to help you, without even being asked, much more so than the French or the Swiss. They are wonderful, genuinely friendly people. Sometimes, however, the good intentions behind their helpfulness exceed its efficacy. This may be mostly a matter of misunderstanding on our part, due to the language barrier.
In any case, after walking quite a while, I checked my map and found that the Corso Palladio passes a block or two to the north of the Piazza dei Signori. So we might well have passed it already. From the map, I couldn't tell how far we'd come, so Mary Joy asked a woman how to get to the Piazza dei Signori, and she replied with a great deal of detail, making sure that we knew exactly where to turn to get back to that point. We thanked her, followed her directions and arrived there straightaway, and found the Tourist Information office. Unfortunately, it was closed until further notice (budget problems?).
We walked the several blocks to the other TI, next door to Palladio's Teatro Olimpico. This, fortunately, was not only open, but staffed by a very helpful young woman who not only would store our luggage while we did our Palladio walking tour of the city (set out in a brochure she gave us)--though Mary Joy had to sign a form and give her her passport to be xeroxed--but even though the office would be closed from 1:00 to 2:00, and we would have to leave around 1:30, she said that it would be no problem, since she would be in the office and we could just knock.
So we started following the itinerary in the brochure. That didn't last long. We've taken several architecture walking tours in Chicago, but the architecture there is varied, interesting and sometimes even exciting. Vicenza has some interesting Venetian Gothic buildings, but unless you love attempts to emulate the architecture of the Greeks and Romans, it will leave you cold. I don't expect ever to go there again.
So we went looking for lunch. After consulting our food guru, Lonely Planet Italy, we settled on putting together a picnic from foodbought at a recommended deli, Gastronomia Il Ceppo. "Al Ceppo" for dinner one night and "Il Ceppo" for lunch the next day. I later googled "ceppo" and found no enlightenment as to what the word means. I'll have to wait and consult the big Italian dictionary at home. We got two salads (shrimp with two types of rice and melon, and shrimp with zucchini and rice) and an interesting sort of wrap involving a light pancake, maybe with egg in the batter, and tuna. I got a Coca-Cola Light (i.e., Diet Coke), Mary Joy got a small bottle of mineral water, and we went over to the garden by the Teatro Olimpico and ate our lunch. Very nice.
We caught the 14:05 train to Venice, arriving there about an hour later. We hefted our luggage and walked to our B&B, Al Campaniel, taking maybe twenty minutes. For once a map in a Rick Steves book proved useful.
Al Campaniel's owner, Marco, let us in, checked us in and showed us our room, on the ground floor, with its own bathroom, not ensuite but down the hall. It was pleasant and, most important of all, had both air conditioning and WiFi. The building is on a narrow side street just off of Campo San Toma. Venice is full of little (and not so little) squares, called campi ("campo" means "field") instead of the standard Italian piazze. In Venice, I think, there is one piazza (San Marco, by the cathedral), one piazzetta (between the Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal) and one piazzale (Piazzale Roma, where the highway bridge across the lagoon from the mainland arrives--this is where the automobile age ends, with parking ramps and bus depots, and the medieval and renaissance reliance on foot transportation resumes its sway. One thing that differentiates Venice from many other pedestrianized zones (such as Mackinac Island or Hydra), is that the footgoers are all human (aside from some canines) and therefore not the sort of pedestrians who leave large hunks of manure in the streets.
Campo San Toma is close to and between the Frari Church and the San Toma vaporetto stop. Vaporetti are the buses of Venice, large boats following set routes, with set prices. The most important vaporetto route is route 1, which goes from Piazzale Roma all the way down the Grand Canal to Saint Mark's, then across to the Lido, the beach resort island, where cars are allowed.
After freshening up, we hurried off to visit the Madonna del Orto church before it closed at 5:00. Getting there took longer than expected. Walking in Venice involves following mostly narrow streets either along or between canals, then up and down the steps over little humpbacked bridges into alleys opening onto little campos, with their little (or big) churches, shops and restaurants (often with outdoor seating). Every so often you get lost and wind up in a cul-de-sac and have to retrace your steps until you see one of the rectangular yellow signs posted high on the walls, with long arrows pointing "Per Rialto" or "Per San Marco" or wherever it is that you're going or is in the same general direction as where you're going. Then, if you're on one of the main tourist routes, say, near San Marco or the Rialto Bridge, you become part of a horde of people speaking English and German and French and Spanish and Japanese, plus the occasional Slavic language. No Italian, except in the shops, stalls, bars, osterias, trattorias, ristorantes, etc., crammed into these streets. The tour buses and cruise ships have emptied themselves like a blood transfusion poured into the main arteries of Venice.
Then, you turn off into a side street, go over another little bridge and into another little campo, and you find yourself alone. The population of Venice has decreased drastically over the decades, going from a high of around 200,000 to a current count of under 70,000. Some areas are practically deserted, giving you the feeling that you're on a film set instead of in a real, living city. We left the tourists on the Strada Nuova, part of the main route along the north side of the Grand Canal, and headed north into the settiere, or district, of Cannaregio, which is the working-class, least touristy part of Venice. We got to Madonna del Orto half an hour before it closed. We bought a couple of Chorus passes, which would get us into most of the churches of Venice for free. In the end, while Mary Joy had been hoping to visit as many Venetian churches as possible, we didn't have time and only used them to visit the Frari. The money went to a good cause: the upkeep of the most beautiful and historic of Venice's hundreds of churches.
Madonna del Orto, which houses a miraculous statue carved in the fourteenth century, was the parish church of Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto (the little dyer) because his father was a cloth dyer, and his son and successor Domenico. Tintoretto is buried there, in the chapel to the right of the sanctuary, and has several paintings in the church. The one I liked best is the Presentation of the Virgin, which shows the child Mary on the steps of the Temple, with priests waiting to receive her. This episode is nowhere mentioned in the gospels, but comes from one of the legends that filled in the gaps in our knowledge of the childhoods of Mary and Jesus. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does religion. The angle of vision is from below and to the left, so that you, along with the bystanders in the painting, are looking up the steps toward Mary, exultant in light, as she, in turn, looks up more steps to the left, toward the priests and temple towering over her. Tintoretto, in a way, is a baroque painter before there were any baroque painters, much as you can say that my other favorite painter, J.M.W. Turner, is an impressionist before there were any impressionists. Except that Turner is greater than the impressionists and Tintoretto is much greater than the baroque painters.
Before our last visit to Venice, in 2007, I happened upon an article about Tintoretto. Intrigued, we went to the Scuola di San Rocco, and I was blown away. We didn't manage to visit San Rocco this time, but unless Venice sinks below the waves in the next few years, it will still be there for the next time we are in the city.
Next, we went looking for restaurants in the neighborhood. Of the three that Mary Joy had picked out, one was too far away, one was closed for August and the third was closed on Thursdays. So we made our way back to the Strada Nuova, and there, across from San Felice church, was another recommended place, called La Cantina. There,on the recommendation of our waitress, I had the house beer, which is artisanal, brewed by someone she knows. It was very good. Mary Joy had a white wine from Soave, a town in the Veneto, the local region. Along with our drinks we had cicchetti, a sort of Venetian tapas. I don't remember exactly what we had for our little snacks, except that they involved cheese and prosciutto. At the next table was a couple from Belgium, with whom we had a nice conversation.
From there, we headed back to our B&B, looking for a place to have a salad along the way. But first, Mary Joy noticed a little pistachio cake in the window of a small pastry-shop. It didn't stay in that window for long.
We got into the crowd crossing the Rialto Bridge. Below the rail station, there are only two bridges across the Grand Canal. About halfway to San Marco is the stone Rialto Bridge. About three-quarters of the way down is the wooden Accademia Bridge. If I have time for another digression (which I won't), I'll talk about how, on our two previous trips to Venice, we stayed in five different hotels, all in the Dorsoduro district, near the Accademia (which, by the way, is Venice's preeminent art museum).
While crossing one campo along the way, Mary Joy stopped to check the menu of a bar (i.e., cafe) with tables in the square. I must have been checking the map to make sure that I knew where we were. A waiter from the bar came up, as they often do, and bantered with her, talking up the restaurant. She declined to stay, wanting to continue until she found something with a review in our books. So they bantered back and forth, and the waiter ended by hugging her and giving her the double air kiss. At this point, I arrived, pretending, for comic effect, to be the offended husband. But, being in his twenties or thirties, he immediately claimed Mary Joy as his long-lost "Mamma."
We went on to the Campo San Polo, the largest campo in Venice (remember that the Piazza San Marco is not a campo). Mary Joy had a particular restaurant in mind, but I wasn't aware of that, and when she decided that the menu had what she wanted, I, tired and hungry, said that we should sit down, then. Thinking it might be the recommended place in the guidebook, she asked the waiter what the name of the place was. When the name wasn't the one she was looking for, she hesitated, at which point I rebelled. So we sat down and ordered salads. They were not good. The tuna was low-quality, the lettuce was the stem-ends of head lettuce, the other contents were not fresh.
Mary Joy took one look at it and said "This is crap." She took one bite of it, threw down her fork and said "I'm not eating this."
No comments:
Post a Comment