Bill's Blog

Venice

We traveled by train to the Mestre Station. I just want to rave about the Italian Train System. The system runs on time, is not expensive costing less than buses. Even stopping at many small cities, the time from Trieste to Mestre was less than two hours. We will use the trains through out our Italian journey.

We booked a room in Mestre for three nights. Mestre was once a separate town, but is now a large, on-land neighborhood of Venice. The room was nothing fancy but adequate with a private bath. The B&B provided something of a breakfast. We arrived on Thursday morning. We took the bus into the old city that everyone knows as Venice, arriving in the early afternoon after a 30-minute bus ride.

The weather was not great, being very overcast and a bit cool. We had about four hours to explore. We walked to Piazza San Marco often getting bit lost, while stopping along the way to walk into an ancient church or to view a little canal. We were getting turned around because Google maps just not work well in a city of very narrow walking streets with four-story thick walled buildings looming on each side of the street. On the Riva next to San Marco, we finally purchased a city map. Every other city will provide the visitor a map, but not in Venice. The map was EXTREMELY useful. As we were leaving Venice about 4 pm, the mist and the light rain began to fall.

The next day, Friday, it rained ALL day long. We took the day off, trying to stay warm and catch up on the news of the world.

Finally Saturday was a beautiful, warm, sunny day. We covered some of the same ground that we did on Wednesday. But we made it to several new parts of the old city. At the end of the day at 5:00 pm, we returned to the Church of San Rocco. Here we were greeted to an hour-long concert of organ, trumpet and a soprano.

On Sunday, we left the Mestre Station for a ride lasting a bit over one hour. We stopped in Verona, Where we will spend a week and which I will write more about next time.

\

Gondola on the Riva

Posted by bill at October 18, 2016 10:29 AM