Giorno 90, 6 April: Gondola through Venice + Walk through Florence

Hotel Marcello, Florence, Italy, Giorno 90. Gondola through Venice + Walk through Florence

      In the morning, Joseph was in the mood to indulge himself with a few cups of espresso, egging Vito to do it too. They did. Let’s just say that Joseph and Vito was in really high spirits today.

Me, arms wide

      A gondola ride for the six of us costed eighty euros altogether—and it was worth it. Finally I experienced Venice from the water, which I didn’t do my first trip in 2007 (same time I visited Paris for the first time).  Our ‘oar-master’, Venetian gondolier, spoke enough English to be our tour guide as well, pointing out the natural museum and a high school and the notable glasswork and lace of Venice. We saw from the stores today how loaded Venice was with glass and masquerade face masks. During the circular route of our gondola ride, we switched seats a few times to change it up.

      What struck me were the mere inches between the water’s surface level and the porches of some buildings. The water was almost going under doorways. Our respective tour guide told us how no one lives on the first floors of these buildings since certain times of the year those floors are flooded with the water from the canal. Venice is ever so gradually sinking. The city was inhabited since the 10^th century BC and built up since then, in which the 117 small islands that Venice consists of are connected by 409 bridges.

Joe arms wide, and Vinnie sitting

Vito arms wide

      After stopping at a local market to get cheap lunches, we headed back to the hotel and then to the train station. In the busy areas, we were constantly bombarded by street sellers who held up dinky toys in our faces. Yesterday Joe swore that if another street seller asked him, he would scream at him. Fifty minutes later, he did, scaring the rest of us too (and then we laughed).

      We gave ourselves a good margin of time to get to the train station, in case we got lost. This time we found our way relatively quickly through the labyrinth and headed off to our next adventure: Florence.

      Vinnie and I shared a room at Hotel Marcella two blocks from the train station, a nice Italian room with a window out to a pedestrian street below. The others stayed at the nicer Bavaria Hotel, but it was the luck of the draw. We all put numbers into a hat last night—No. 5 and 6 were the unfavourable ones. But the hotel had wifi and we liked it. The middle-aged owner gave us bananas upon arrival, as a token of hospitality.

Duomo di Firenze

      We met up with the others, beholding the majestic Duomo di Firenze as the central marker between our two hotels. This one is shaped as a dome, beside a thick square tower of a clay yellow complexion. Wandering around took us to a nearby square which held statues of Dante and Macchiavelli. There was great guitar-playing projected from the centre of the square, so we walked over to watch a guitarist singing American songs (Coldplay and The Calling, ‘Wherever You Will Go’) with a slight Italian inflection. His luggage was right next to the microphone and a stack of CDs lay close by too. It made me sad to think his gift had led him into a possibly nomadic lifestyle, one of passion marred by probable economic distress. Yet a musician is above all an entertainer, giving soundtrack to the rest of life as the movement of business, economy, government, and other institutions all pump the main bloodflow of rich money. Making it in the arts is just ridiculously difficult.

      We strolled out of the square and spotted the Ponte Vecchio, a bridge with buildings built into the sides of it. Somehow I instantly thought I might’ve seen it in James Bond. Joe and Vinnie kept going off on how the video game character in Assassin’s Creed, Ezio, takes on places such as Venice and Florence, how they remember cyber scaling the heights of the Duomo and being all ninja-like.

      At night, we met up with Elsie, a dear friend of mine from high school. She let us raise our ‘spirits’ in her apartment and we caught up a little on her life in Italy. She’s been here since the beginning of last fall on study abroad, becoming nearly fluent in Italian. She didn’t seem any different beyond a possibly more refined, independent spirit, warmed by the Italian sun. She took us out dancing, and I remembered that we had once done salsa together at my friend Vincent O’Brien’s birthday years ago. We did a little now before going off to Kikuna and having an ale known as ‘Dragoon’, one of Elsie’s favourites. My friends really enjoyed Elsie’s company and vice versa, which made the night all the better.

The Ponte Vecchio at sunset