Travels in Italy

Ostia is spectacular, the picturesque remains of a working port town cover an enormous area of red-brick and marble ruins on the banks of the (now scarcely visible) river Tiber. It gives much more of a feel for life in the Roman empire than yet another nutty emperor’s palace. (Not that some of those aren’t pretty spectacular too.)

Wandering along the deserted streets with weeds growing through the flagstones, sand blown over the mosaics and long grasses and wild flowers in the ruins, often shaded by umbrella pines, one also gets a sense of the “Romantic” that drew the 18^th and 19^th century travellers to Italy to write bad poetry about the fall of empires etc etc.

To get there from Rome you take the train (or is it a metro – it doesn’t spend much time underground?) from the railway station variously described as Pyramide (on the outside of the station building), Porta Ostiense (on the map), or Porta San Paolo (within the trains themselves). We found it easy and clean, takes about 20 minutes and the regular €1 metro (ATAC) ticket or Rome pass seems to work.  (And see recommendation 10 on the Blue Guides’ list of things to do in Rome.)

(Note that Ostia is covered in both the new Blue Guide Central Italy as well as in Blue Guide Rome.  More extensively it appears in the former.)

The Brenta Canal was built to facilitate navigation between Venice and the city of Padua. Wealthy Venetians built magnificent villas along the banks of the canal - the “Riviera del Brenta” - to escape the heat of the lagoon in high summer. Being in Venice in July we too decided to escape the heat and crowds of Venice and took a boat up the Brenta. It makes a great day trip.

We left our hotel on the Lido early in the day to get to the daparture point, one of the piers on the Schiavoni, just down from St Mark’s, by 9am. The boat that runs most days up or down the Brenta canal between Venice and Padua is called the Burchiello, named for the boat that made the tri hundreds of years ago. From the Blue Guide: “Those who, for one reason or another, chose not to make the trip up the canal in the family gondola took the burchiello, a large riverboat rowed by slaves or pulled by horses–a ‘marvellous and comfortable craft’, as Goldoni recalls, ‘in which one glides along the Brenta sheletered from winter’s cold and summer’s ardour’.” (According to the guide the trip can also be made by bicycle along a marked cycle route.) The time table is on their website (somedays it goes up from Venice to Padua, some days back the other way): www.ilburchiello.com and tickets should be bought in advance, we got them from a travel agent on the Lido (they add EUR 20 to the cost) but I think you can also do it from the website or hotel concierge.

[I’m still working on this post, there is more stuff in the Blue Guide (NB Blue Guide Northern Italy, not, for some reason, the Venice guide), we can recommend it as a peaceful day out with plenty to see but not too much hassle. We didn’t take the pre-arranged lunch (you pay less) but found agood restaurant in Oriago where the boat moors for lunch. I’d be interested to know what the lunch they offer was like if anyone has done that.]

A day trip to the island of Murano, famous for a thousand years for its production of glass.  The island is about 2o mins from Venice itself.

The day started – and indeed continued – gray, not very cold, with some light, inoffensive rain later in the day. Here is what we did: After the hotel’s excellent breakfast (we’re staying in the San Clemente Palace on its own island) the first step was to consult the small Venice library we are traveling with to decide what to do:

then to pack what was needed for the day. While waiting for the boat we had a look at the church on the island:

light, white and airy it’s in a state of disprepair inside. Here’s what the Blue Guide had to say: “The dignified Renaissance façade (c 1485) was restored in the 17th century (1653) . . . a number of interesting baroque monuments to the Morosini family . . . interior is dominated by an unusual and ornately decorated ‘inner chapel’ around the high altar . . . which consciously replicates the proportions of the Holy House of Loreto . . .” and set out for town on the hotel’s boat (here’s a picture of it on a sunnier day):

Our first stop was San Giorgio Maggiore, or rather it wasn’t, the hotel boat declined to drop us there, instead we had to stay with the boat to its usual destination of St Mark’s, then take the vaporetto (#41) back from San Zacaria just past St Mark’s Square back across the Giudecca canel to the small island of San Giorgio, with its enormous Palladian façade facing across the canal towards St Mark’s (see my picture taken after sunset at the end of the day). Our aim here wasn’t the gloriously proportioned church itself, but the exhibition in the Cini Foundation. The foundation occupies the monastery of which this was the church and we understood that the exhibition displays an enormous digitallised reproduction of someone’s painting of the miracle of the wedding feast at Cana. The original was “exported” to France, maybe by Napoleon’s henchmen – he looted an enormous amount of stuff to feed his imperial megalomania, some of which was recovered (eg the horses on the façade of St Mark’s). Equally it could have got to France some other way but we were not to find out, Monday, so closed: CHIUSO!

A pity, the issue is an interesting one, when is art in situ really in situ, or can it all be carted off to museums while we are shown near-perfect reproductions in the original settings? Or why worry about the original setting at all, why not digitally recreate that too?

We took a vaporetto further down the Giudecca, from there to catch the #82 (see my separate blog  on public transportation in Venice, you’re going to have to work it out, it’s actually pretty logical and makes getting around more fun), riding all the way round the bottom of the Bienale gardens and Arsenale, up the Fondamento Nuovo on the other side, across past the cemetery island and to the island of Murano. Actually to the second stop on Murano called Faro, which means lighthouse, when you’re there you’ll see there’s a pretty obvious reason why it’s called the lighthouse stop. Also why the café (below) where we had a cappucino is called the Café al Faro.

What Murano is, and always has been, known for is its glass. They’ve been moulding, blowing, coloring, adding fiddly bits to the stuff and SELLING it for around a millenium and a half. You may not like it, indeed some of it is pretty gaudy, but it’s what Murano is, and as I say, always has been, about.

Here is HV Morton in 1964: “indeed most of the glass on view looked to me hideous and I thought is sad to see such an ancient craft in decline. Among the memories of such displays are windows full of glass harlequins, some standing on their heads . . . and vulgar little goblets . . . One longed to see something simple and beautiful. Curiously enough that is what people said in the sixteenth century, when, looking round for something to take home they were repelled by drinking glasses in the shape of ships, whales, lions and birds.” But he thinks good stuff has been and still can be made; on the glass museum he says: here “can be seen the Venetian glass of one’s dreams: chalices, reliquaries, graceful cups, plates and bowls as thin as air.”

The rather more snobbish JG Links in Venice for Pleasure a couple of years later (1966) has the opposite view: “It is quite astonishing that anything so highly regarded throughout the world for so many centuries should be of such uniform hideousness, and we cannot blame the modern designers. The shortest visit to the Museum, and that will be scarcely short enough, will demonstrate that, with very few exceptions, it has always been the same.”

Anyway the good news, for us at least, was that JG was wrong. There is some fascinating and some very beautiful stuff in the museum, which traces the manufacture of glass back to, and before, the Romans. Ever wondered what the Romans used to mix their maritinis? Here are cocktail stirrers (well that’s what they look like) from 100 ad:

and some very beautiful stuff, diamond engraved from before wheel engraving was belatedly learned from Bohemia:

Anyway it’s all there, worth learning about the different periods of Venetian glass, its origins when descendants of Roman glass makers fled barbarian invasions to the safety of the islands in the lagoon in the 700s ad, its 1400s and 1500s heyday when Venice controlled much of Europe’s glass manufacture (confining it to the island of Murano because of the risk of fire from the 15 furnaces burning at 2,000 degrees F), it’s decline as production shifted to Bohemia and elsewhere, its 1800s revival as ornamental glass, which continues, with ups and downs, to this day.

We looked into a glassworks, managed not to buy anything, but always fun to see the guy blowing and moulding the blobs of glowing, molten glass. (Actually I thought these “Victorian” looking glasses were pretty good, with shipping they’ll send six of them home for you for €198):

We looked into the church of San Pietro Martire, there is a Bellini on the wall on the left of the side door that you enter by. Unrestored and badly lit it is not easy to see, a doge thoughtfully had it painted so that his two daughters incarcerated in a convent could contemplate it and pray for his soul after his death. Three beautifully painted birds on the bottom right of the picture, the Blue Guide tells us the peacock represents eternal life, the heron long life. And the partridge??Then lunch in a very local eatery down a narrow entrance on the other side of the canal from San Donato (which I’ll come to later). We had one of those “honey let’s eat someplace else” experiences (www.romebuddy.com) when we went in, we’ve traveled alot but don’t speak Italian and you go into these places, stand around wondering whether they seat you or you barge in and grab a table, how you order, what you order etc. Anyway we persevered and got an excellent simple lunch, some olives stuffed with anchovies served warm as a starter (olive a l’ascolana, I’ve not had them before), pasta, very tender breaded chicken breast, good house white wine (as we have found often in Venice the house white better than the house red).

After lunch we crossed back over the canal to the spectacular Santi Maria e Donato, a beautiful Romanesque church (Veneto-Byzantine according to the guide book) with an undulating marble and mosaic floor, some say to reflect the waves on the lagoon, others more prosaically say it’s the result of 1,000 years of subsidence. The Byzantine “praying” Madonna in the apse on a background of gold is stunning, how nice to see her not burdened with a screaming infant and having a life of her own. I am not sure of the significance of this or how common it is.

After that back, in a light rain, to board a much quicker vaporetto (#5) than the one we came on, a 25 mins trip from the Murano Faro stop to S Zacaria.From there we walked along the main drag that winds from St Mark’s in the direction of the Grand Canal to the Campo S Maurizio wherfe we had a reviving glass of proseco. All that was memorable about the square were the four overflowing trash cans around the well head in the middle – there is some kind of garbage collection strike on apprarently.Then back to wait for the hotel boat, but who cares about a wait with a view like this across the Giudecca canal at the façade of San Georgio:

and so back to the San Clemente island and the welcoming lights of the hotel: