Sunday – Day 1 Venice

Today is our culture day and we’re off to the Gallerie Dell’Accademia – the academy of Fine Arts and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The two galleries are in the Southern part of Venice, so we caught a ferry the 5 stops down to Accademia. (A wedding couple has just gone past in a gondola – claassay).

On getting off the ferry, we took a wrong turn (it didn’t hit us between the eyes) and did a very nice walk to the next canal (Canal Della Giudecca) which has a beautiful promenade and from where you can see all the cruise liners who have stopped in Venice for the day. On the way, we stopped at a jewelry shop where Anne bought two necklaces. On returning to the ferry stop, we found the Academy 10 metres in the other direction.

The academy is housed in the school and Church of St Mary of Charity and in the lateran Canon’s monastery and houses art works from Venetian painters from the 14th to 18th Century. The art and the academy are both very impressive and very large, although they were some what fixated with religion in all of their painting. In all these sorts of things, my attention span is limited, so after a couple of hours, I’d read enough about which saint was gesturing to what saint, so simply put my own interpretation on what was being depicted. Anne was generous in her tolerance of my interpretations.

After the academy, it was a short walk to the Peggy G collection. On the way, we were delighted to come across two policemen with a speed camera, who were ticketing speeders on the Grand Canal. Despite the unique environment, the technology and protestations of innocence seemed very similar to that of road users.

Peggy Gughenheim was a niece of Solomon G, who’s foundation it is that has set up art galleries in New York, Bilbao, Berlin etc. and it is the Solomon G foundation that now administers Peggy’s collection. The first part of the gallery contained a temporary exhibition by two artists and Peggy’s collection has been moved to the building next door while the exhibitions are on. The exhibitions can go tomorrow as far as I’m concerned, as they are just self indulgent nonsense (one involving Vaseline) – enough said. Peggy devoted her life to promoting modern art – surreal and abstract and the collection was really interesting – Picasso, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Kandanski etc. We spent about an hour and half there and then headed back to the Canal Della Giudecca for lunch.

We had lunch at La Piscena – a restaurant jutting out into the canal, and Anne had Raviolini ripeni di rana pescatrice con Asparagi (Ravioli with fish and Asparagus), while I had Casarecce (pasta) with pheasant and red raddish with a bottle of Rosé. After lunch, we took a circuitous walk back to the Rialto bridge. To get there, you have to walk round the outside edge of the Grand Canal, but you can’t just walk by the canal, so you have to find you way through the little alleys and over the canal bridges. It took us about 2 hours and on the way we found two more beautiful necklaces and a pair of lime green leather gloves – we’re doing more shopping that we’ve done in years.

Dinner was in another one of the restaurants by the Grand Canal and I had one of the local specialties – Fegato alla Veneziana Con Polenta* – and it was superb. We had a merlot tonight, as drinking Rosé at night (as we did last night) the temptation is too great to push on into the second bottle.

After dinner we walked down to St Mark’s square. We hadn’t intended to, but Venice feels incredibly safe, it was a warm night and the walk only took about 15 minutes from the hotel (5 minutes to negotiate all the people on the Rialto bridge). The restaurants in St Marks (which are much posher than the one’s by the bridge) all have little classical groups that play for their Al Fresco diners and the punters like us who are passing by. It looked very nice, but after a couple of minutes had more the feeling of an up market beer festival band, so we wandered round the square, before making our way back to the hotel.

*Calf liver with Onions and Polenta