After leaving Breschia, we made our way across the bridge to Venice...

Venice is actually a collection of hundreds of islands - off the north eastern coast of Italy. In the late 400's AD, the Roman Empire was disintegrating and Attilla the Hun took advantage of that to move south. The Venetians decided to move off the mainland and onto these islands to avoid that invasion. 

Over the centuries they built up the islands, bridging from one to another with pilings and building on top of them - to the point where the separation between islands became hard to see.  The canals of Venice are the remnants of the passageways through the islands.

From about 1200 to 1500 AD Venice was a major power in the Meditteranean, perhaps the pre-eminant naval power in the world. The Venetians took advantage of this to plunder treasures from around the world and bring them back to the homeland, making Venice what it is today. Marco Polo's adventures began and ended in Venice.

If you’d like a bit more on Venice’s history, check here.

Grand Canal at Dawn, from the Rialto Bridge

There are hundreds of bridges across those canals - something that is very picturesque, but a challenge for people travelling with a baby stroller!

First bit of advice - bring comfortable shoes! Second - if you're travelling with a baby, bring the lightest stroller you've got - you'll be carrying it up and down bridges a lot.

Anna at the Rialto Bridge

On the whole, bridge difficulties aside the pedestrian oriented nature of Venice made it a great place to visit with the baby.

We stayed at a great location - just a few blocks from the Rialto Bridge and easy walking distance to San Marcos Square (assuming one didn't get lost!) and everything else in Venice.  We booked almost last minute - staying at a hotel called the Al Vagon which we found in the Time Out guide to Venice. The room was small but had it’s own bathroom, reasonably priced (70-some dollars a night, reasonable for Venice), and the owner - Giovanni - was a good guy. .

Our room overlooked a small square, which was nice to watch traffic go by but a bit noisy with the shutters open. Next time we'll try staying on the canal side of the hotel if we can get a room there.

TIme for some pictures, then we'll get back to the narrative..

San Marco Piazza (St. Mark's Square) from the Grand Canal

San Marcos Piazza (above), detail from Doge's Palace (right)

The top of the Campanile

Entrance to San Marco Piazza from the Grand Canal

The Doge’s (leader of Venice) Palace (left), the Campanile and St. Mark’s Cathedral (below}

St. Mark’s - by day and by night

Inside the courtyard at the Doge's Palace

Santa Maria della Salute Church, from San Marco Piazza across the entrance to the Grand Canal

Accademia Bridge

Rialto Market

Traffic on the Grand Canal

Murano

Gondola Ride!

We spent most of a week in Venice, and could easily have spent more time there.  There are plenty of places to wander through, lots of dinners to be had at some small place sitting alongside a lesser-known canal.

Some advice if you’re going to go there -

• Late April/Early May was a great time of year to go. Weather was moderate but still shirt-sleeve weather, perhaps sweaters at night.  Rained on us once, for a couple hours one day, but that was it.  We can imagine it would be pretty miserable if one went during a hot time of year....
• Wear comfy shoes!  Good hiking boots work great.
• If you must have dinner alongside the Grand Canal, go ahead, but there are plenty of lesser canals that have places to eat alongside them at much cheaper pricing. We had risotto at a small place on a lesser canal in the Cannaregio district our last night there - it was wonderful.
• Wine is cheap in the stores, you can get absolutely great bottles of wine for under $10. Bring your corkscrew.
• Do the gondola ride... So the guidebooks think it’s expensive - Patty had to talk Todd into it also, but it was a great way to spend some quiet time in the smaller canals. You can negotiate with these guys, too. There’s plenty of them, you can walk from one and there will be more.
• Take the vaporetto (water bus) for a cheap tour up the Grand Canal
• They do “free” water taxi rides to Murano on Thursdays, leaving from San Marco Piazza. It seems like a scam, but it’s not - you just have to resist the sales pitch on the Murano side to buy glass. Do it, it’s fun.
• Get up early if you can! If you’re jet lagged and laying awake at 5am, get out of bed and walk around!  The city is wonderful in the early morning, before the hordes descend.  Stop at a cafe, get a pastry of some sort, and sit by a canal watching the shopkeepers get their stores ready for the day. Great stuff!
   

Whatever you do, give yourself some time!  Venice is not something you buzz into for a day, spend at least three, preferably a week.  Relax!

And now, on to the trip back home through Austria and back to Switzerland...