Venice, Day 5 - 18th February 2016

A quiet calle

We started off today with a delicious buffet breakfast at our hotel. Our mouths watered as we chose items from a selection of cereals, yogurts, bakery items, toast with cute mini potted jams, fruit, cold meats and cheeses. Starting our day off with a big breakfast was a must to give us energy for the day, especially as I was still feeling quite ill, but there was no way I would let a cold get in the way of Venice.

After breakfast we headed off to a laundromat that we had googled, down near the San Marco area.It cost around €14 to wash and dry a load of laundry. When the laundry was done we made a quick stop into our hotel to drop the clothes off and use the toilets. One of the great upsides to Venice is, our hotel was never more than a 15 or so minute walk away, and was often on our way during our wanders anyway, so we could drop in to use the toilet instead of having to pay €1 to use a public toilet.

We spent our day just walking around and soaking up the feel of Venice. We started off near the San Marco area and worked our way around Venice from there. San Marco was one of the only open areas in Venice, with a large piazza area that was so different to the rest of the small calles that made up the city of Venice.

We stopped in a street adjacent to San Marco for a salami roll for lunch, which we ate standing up at a bar. Sitting down anywhere incurred extra charges for only a few minutes seated.

The garbage collect

After San Marco we walked around Cannaregio near our hotel, making our way into the residential back streets of Venice. The area was devoid of other tourists, and we only saw locals going about their daily lives. Old ladies pressed past us in small calles, wheeling their shopping along. Laundry hung from open windows across the canals. A garbage barge collected plastic bags of waste placed on the waterside. All the trade that we could see, happened by way of the canals. We passed a school, strolled through a rare patch of nature in a park and found an open piazza area where dozens of local children were playing ball games on the stone ground. Their parents sipped on warm drinks as they socialised, sitting on the few benches scattered around. Dogs were very popular pets and followed their owners to every shop they entered and every restaurant they ate at (this was common theme across Italy and England). 

We took note of every part of the atmosphere of living in somewhere as unique as Venice. In the residential area a waterborne ambulance carried a man to the nearby hospital. The hospital was, in its own right, stunning architecture that evoked a sense of beauty, instead of the usual fear and sadness that surrounds such a place of pain and sickness. A feeling instead, of healing, inside the strong stone building. We even slipped quietly inside the main entrance of the hospital, to find displays of old medicine practice, adding even more history to the old structure.




The Acqua Alta Libreria was a hidden gem in the residential area, a book shop with a gondola, overflowing owith various tomes and scraps of paper stacked into the wooden craft. The walls were crammed with books from floor to ceiling. The shop twisted outside, where sodden, stinking stacks of more books made up a set of stairs leading to a vantage point from which you could view the canals. It was the weirdest bookshop I had ever been in.





As the day drew to a close we made our way back to a more popular area, where shops were still lit brightly. On the main Rio near our hotel we found the Ca'Macana mask shop, one of the more unique mask shops in Venice. Ca'Macana run workshops where you could learn to make and decorate your own mask, and if I had had the time, would have loved to have done so. I left with a teal steam punk creation that looked both bad-ass and delicate.

AT 25000 steps we made our way back to Palazzo Abadessa. You can read about dinner here.