Venice, Italy

After a week, on Saturday 27 June, we left Atrani and drove up to Venice. We spent a few days in the beautiful but unfortunately touristy and crowded city, which was enough for me. We had an ostensibly lovely apartment, fitted out with really nice furniture, some basic food, 2 TVs and some books. But the shower was really annoying – it filled up and wouldn’t drain. I guess that’s Venetian plumbing for you. We managed to see quite a bit in our 3 days, including the Rialto Bridge and markets, Piazza San Marco, the Doge’s Palace, the Correr Museum and the Jewish ghetto. We ate plenty more quality Italian food (and some not so quality – I think basically in Italy you need to pay a fair bit for decent food at restaurants) and found another favourite gelati shop. We discovered cheap peach champagne, huge meringues, cream-filled pastries, lemon flavoured chocolate and nutella snack packs. Katie loved her time here just a year ago, and we found the hostel she stayed in and a wide shopping strip right next to it – packed with Aussies actually! The highlight was undoubtedly turning up to Piazza San Marco at 10pm on our last night, having seen a poster advertising the time and place, but unsure what the event would be. It turned out it was a band playing, with an artist painting Venice-inspired things on a huge canvas behind them and heaps of artistic, changing lighting projected onto the building facades of the piazza around the band. Pretty cool!