Museuming in Venice

For breakfast today, I had a hard roll with cheese, an apple-filled croissant, and tea. Cereal and yogurt were also available (and consumed by other members of the family). Our coffee snob, Matt, didn't like the coffee, so our first stop of the day was the coffeeshop we went to yesterday morning.

After breakfast, we wandered toward the train station. We finally came across a little supermarket (they're hard to find!), and stocked up on pocket-size Kleenex, shampoo, conditioner, and lotion. Here's a pretty archway we passed by:



At the train station, we stood in a slow-moving line and bought train tickets for Monday's trip to Florence. There weren't that many people in front of us, but several of them seemed to have trouble operating the ticket machine. I then got in an even longer line to get vaporetto tickets. We finally boarded the vaporetto around noon, and headed toward San Marco. We listened to Rick Steves' free audio tour on our iPhones.





The tour ended at Piazza San Marco.





The first order of business at Piazza San Marco was lunch. We found a little bar just off the square, and had tasty sandwiches. Mine was prosciutto and cheese, John & Beth had something that resembled salami (but they can't remember the name), and Matt had a panini.

After lunch, we went to the Correr Museum, which led us straight into the National Archaeological Museum. We hadn't been planning to visit either one, but a ticket for the Doge's Palace includes both of those museums. Photos aren't allowed inside the museums, and they didn't have any good postcards in the bookstore.

For our mid-afternoon geleto break, we thought we'd do what we did yesterday, and leave the square to stop at one of the zillion gelato shops. Naturally, we couldn't find a single one today, so we went back to the square and had some there. I had lemon, Matt had coffee, Beth had berry, and John had chocolate.

Next stop was the Doge's Palace, a spectacular sight. Unfortunately, this is another place that hasn't grasped the idea of selling postcards of the interior--you'd think they would offer a lot of them, since they also don't allow photos inside. On exhibit are the Doge's private apartments, the government offices, the armoury (John and Matt LOVED this), the Bridge of Sighs (coverd by scaffolding at the moment), and the prison.








By the end of the day, everyone was exhausted, and we had very sore feet. We enjoyed last night's dinner recommendation immensely, so we asked at the hotel again, this time for someplace that served fish. They guided us to Osteria Vecio Fritolin, where we had a delicious meal. We shared a mozzarella & tomato salad to begin with. For dinner, Matt had scorpionfish in red sauce with mountain potatoes. John and I both had the Venetian-style mixed deep-fried fish with scampi and polenta, and Beth (our non seafood fan) had roasted pork loin with chanterelle mushrooms. Everything was fabulous: Beth even ate a lot of her chanterelles, despite her aversion to the texture, because they tasted so good. For dessert, the kids each had a vanilla bean creme brulee.