Tuesday – Day 3 Venice

I’m sitting on the balcony again writing our blog – today has been an absoloute scorcher and Anne and I have walked our feet off. The regular procession of gondola’s, ferrys and water taxis is cruising by.

Today’s excursion is again another long walk to cover an area of Venice we haven’t seen before. We really enjoyed the lunch at La Piscina down at Canal Della Giudecca, so thought that we would walk back there for lunch via the theatre district and over the Academia bridge.

The thing we’ve found with Venice is we just head off in a general direction, but then start making decisions about where to walk based on which way looks the most interesting. This usually works well, unless you have a specific goal in mind, in which case you end up going in circles for a couple of hours before you decide that you’d better focus and follow some directions to where it is you want to get to. This is what we did today – we headed off towards the bridge, but then found the theatre district, went off exploring in many random directions and before we knew it were back at St Marks Square, which was in totally the wrong direction from where we were meant to be going. We found lots of lovely little restaurants tucked away in tiny little piazzas and canals that we hadn’t come across before.

We did eventually get over the academia bridge to the other side of the Grand Canal, but saw another restaurant on the Canal Della Giudecca on the way to La Piscina- called Lineadombra, which looked equally good, so we had lunch there. It was fabulous – I had Carpaccio of sea bass with grape fruit and currents, then Tagliolini with scallops and asparagus and Anne had grilled scallops and courgettes rolled with yogurt and saffron sauce, followed by strozzapretti with scampi and pinenuts and basil. We shared a pastry and creamy desert and a desert wine – fantastic.

After about a four hour walk to get to lunch, we had a two hour walk to get back to the hotel – all in 30 odd degree heat. We crashed for an hour at the hotel when we got back.

Dinner at night – yes, we had a dinner – was back at the restaurant on the canal outside the hotel. It was a great final night dining in Venice by the canal. We had a drink before hand right beside the Rialto bridge and then finished up dipping our feet in the canal at the base on the other side of the Rialto bridge.