Our last city on this trip with Oz is Venezia, where we walked a lot through the narrow streets and across many, many bridges. From the top of the Campanile, or bell tower, we could look down on this picturesque watery world. This is where Galileo brought his telescope. He looked up at Jupiter, and took “Man” out of the center of the universe. His business friends, who ran the city and its trade routes to the east, the ‘La Serenissima’, were more interested in using his telescope to spy on ships just over the horizon. They wanted to set up insider trades before others knew that fresh spice was soon arriving. Science! Business!!
A high point of a visit to Venice is wandering the many narrow streets and alleys and walking over countless little bridges, revealing new scenes with each step.
We took some lessons, including ‘rowing’ lessons in a gondola-like boat. This adventure was through Row Venice, composed of a group of women dedicated to keeping up interest in the gondola-like working boats called “batellinas”. These are working boats, used for shrimping and cargo, we were told. The vessels have a rower at the back, our instructor, and a rowing station amidship for the ‘crew’, i.e. us. We worked our way through narrow canals and then out into the open water of the lagoon.
We also took a glass-fusing lesson from Fabio with another family from Chicago. Unfortunately, we were not able to bring our creations home because it takes them 5-6 hours to cool. By that time, we had to be heading toward the airport by vaporetto for a 6 am departure for home.
Here are some examples of glass art that we have seen in shop windows:
Here we are, just starting on a heated path that takes years and years to follow and perfect. We recommend reading The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato if you are curious about the history of this Venetian art.
Here is a detailed video lesson from our instructor, Fabio, if you want a deeper dive into learning how to create a fused glass fish.
We had scheduled a mask making workshop late on our last afternoon in Italy, but our schedule got too tight and our energy levels dropped too low in that late afternoon. We suspect that our masks would have been nice, but probably not up to the style of lots of masks which we viewed in the many shop windows of Venice.
This brings us to the close of our ‘coming of age trip’ with Oz. It has been quite the walking tour of Italy; Oz recorded a total of walking between 5 and 8.4 miles/day, with a total of 72 miles. Being located in the center of each city in a variety of hotels was convenient, but we certainly were worn out at the end of each day!
Finally, these are the dramatic Alps as we headed over them on the last day of our Italian adventure, heading for Portland.
