Venice in 2003

February 13, 2003, I walked into a restaurant with my husband and another couple. It was 12:05, the restaurant should have been ready to be open for business. Instead, a worker had opened a 7' x 3' trapdoor, just inside the entrance. Laughing and ready to have a wonderful lunch, I stepped into space and crashed into the basement below. Fortunately, I lived. Too dramatic? You should have been there. Anyway, when the orthopaedist gave me the all-clear to travel, we decided to go to Venice for ten days, and stay put. Usually, we take very active vacations, but this was not a year to be dragging suitcases around Italy. So, we stayed at the American Hotel in the Dorsoduro quartiere of Venice, where I could easily return to nap and take the pressure off my back. It was a really beautiful time.

St. Mark's Sqaure after a hard rain, late at night. The Basilica almost looks like a cardboard stage set.



'Bush infame'. Well, they got that right. 'Infame', a wonderful word meaning vile, infamous, despicable, villainous. Another good word is 'brutta', meaning rough and uncouth, not of good appearance or character. The Italian language has a lot of one-word all-emcompassing descriptions.


We took the vaporetto out to the Lagoon island of San Erasmo for the Festa del Mosto, a community celebration of the first pressing of the grape. 'Mosto' is what is left over at the bottom of the barrel, the essence of the grape. At least, that is what I understand. There were only a few tourists, yet we were as welcome as if we were family. The food was great.

This is at the Tramontin Gondola Yard. The Tramontin family is fourth-generation, still building new gondolas at the cost of Euro 30,000 each. The first builder, the great-grandfather of the man in the center of the photo, is the designer of the oblique angled gondola, which allows the gondolier to guide the craft using one oar, necessary in the narrow heavily-trafficked canals. The Tramontins use four tools...a saw, an axe, an adze, and a plane.

2003 is the year we discovered Verona. Already thinking of moving to Italy for a year or so, Angel had the idea that we should go to language school first. Before the trip to Venice, we researched some schools and accomodations. Venice was prohibitively expensive for a month's stay. But I found a website photo log of Verona in all its beauty, and so we looked into Linguit.IT and traveled by train one day to check it out. Walking up via Porta Nuova, I fell in love. The photo is Piazza Bra, with the Orologio (clock tower) in the background, where via Porta Nuova empties into P.zza Bra.