Venice; Monday, 29 September, 2008

Out slightly earlier today to head over to St Marks Square and the cathedral. Sadly, everyone else had had the same idea and after dumping my bag in the luggage office I joined the back of a long queue. Thankfully the queue moved quite quickly so it only took about 20 minutes to get inside.

Having looked around the Cathedral and the Loggia I headed across the square to the Museo Correr. This, along with the Archaeological museum are included in the ticket to the Doge’s palace. The reasoning being that as people have paid for them they might visit them (though most people appear to think of it as a sneaky way of making you pay more for the Doge’s palace than it’s actually worth as nobody would visit the other museums anyway). Based on the number of people looking around the museum I have a tendancy to believe in the extra charge theory!

With the museums done, I headed off to get a spot of lunch. I thought it might be quite nice to pop across the Lagoon to the Lido to get some lunch. Unfortunately there were only little kiosk around the Vaporetto stop, and having walked a few minutes in each direction past the stop I couldn’t find anything that I really wanted, so I caught the next Vaporetto back to the Arsenal and had a bite to eat near the restaurant I had eaten in the previous evening.

After finishing lunch I caught a Vaporetto across to the Santa Maria della Salute to have a look around. From there it was a short walk to the Traghetti stop. These are stripped down Gondolas that offer the experience of having travelled on one without having to pay the horrendous price tag. They server the purpose of crossing the Grand Canal at many locations, which is useful given that there are only a handful of bridges over its entire length! Having crossed I had a long wander down the alleyways of the city, meandering in no particular way, stumbling across a couple of nice churches (which were all closed) and a church that had been turned into a temporary exhibition on violins before finding myself crossing the Grand Canal on one of the few bridges by the Academia.

From there it was a short walk down to the canal side looking over the southern islands, where I stopped for a late afternoon drink, before catching one of the circular ferries out and round to Murano and back.

By the time I got back into the city centre the sun was setting and it was time to grab a bite to eat before heading back to the hotel for some rest.