Tuesday 15 August Venice

Went to video San Marco square, with only the pigeons for company, I bought some seed and fed them. We booked tickets to visit the Doges Palace and Basilica tomorrow. Boarded a water taxi down the Grand Canal to Tronchetto as we are having a day out in the Dolomites today. Went passed the lovely Leonardo art gallery and the massive fish market, a fabulous building that looks as if it should be a theatre. There is no one to meet us when we get to Tronchetto, which just happens to be the furthermost point that water taxis go to, and is the industrial area! After a while we give up and catch a bus back to central Venice as there is nothing doing here. We headed for the Cannaregio region which has a Mexican restaurant Iguana, on the canal at Fondamenta della Sensa which we fancied for lunch. We’d not been to this area yet, and according to our guide book most tourists don’t come to this unspoilt area of Venice. The Scuola Nova on Fondamenta di Misericordia is a grand Gothic building. The Madonna dell’Orto is a fabulous Gothic church and has a huge amount of works by Tinteretto on display, unfortunately it is closed, so we can’t see his paintings here, but there are some in the Doges Palace, will have to look out for them there instead. Wandering further we find the house where he lived at 3399, Fondamenta dei Mori. We walked around the Campo dei Mori square, named after the statues of 3 Moors which are carved into it’s walls. Over the bridge is the Ghetto area where the Jews were made to live back in the fifteen hundreds, only a few Jewish families still choose to live here now. We headed back to Fondamenta della Sensa and ate at Tofelis, an excellent little restaurant by the canal as the Mexican was closed. Lovely gnocchi and one of the best pizzas I have ever tasted, and a lovely local wine to go with it. It was a long walk back to the hotel, but another warm evening, so we sauntered back over the bridges, and stopped for dinner at Gianni ristorante for dinner and a nightcap along the way. Back at the hotel there was a message asking if we wanted to visit the Dolomites on Thursday instead as they had cancelled the trip for today and hadn’t managed to let us know on time.