Venice - Monday 25th April

Our last day in Venice was definitely the best in terms of weather, it was hot!!! We had a couple of things that we wanted to do before we could say that we had “done” Venice. So we got on a ferry heading away from St. Mark’s square this time down to Giudecca. This is more of a residential area of Venice but it has great views looking back towards all the main buildings and some interesting churches.

The 25th April is also St. Marks Day and to celebrate, people are meant to buy their true love a single red rose and little boy scout troops were selling them everywhere. Lou didn’t get a rose.
We trooped up the bell tower of the San Giorgio Maggiore for yet another amazing view in the sunshine.

Our next step was the tip of the Dorsoduro part of Venice which is where the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, which is known as one of the plague churches. In 1630 Venice experienced an unusually devastating outbreak of the plague. As an offering for the city's deliverance from the pestilence, the Republic of Venice vowed to build and dedicate a church to Our Lady of Health. Most of the objects of art housed in the church bear references to the Black Death.

Most random statue with it's own security guard

We stopped for yet another lunch of pizza at this great little café and chilled out in the sun.
We still had the afternoon to look around before we had to get on the bus back to the airport so we went to the main park of Venice up in the Castello reigon. Here we had a nap in the sun complete with more gelato and this random almond brittle stuff that we bought from a local bakery. We had noticed in all the supermarkets we had been into that there are whole aisles devoted to sweet biscuits they just love them. How do they not get fat!

Cool sculpture on the harbour

Fully relaxed we had another dinner at Brek (primarily as we knew we wouldn’t get ripped off here) and began the long journey home.

To go into detail of why it took so long to get home would ruin the ambience of this blog so we will put it this way, it took us 3 hours to get from the airport to home, a journey that should take half the time. But anyway! We had an amazing time, out first taste of Italy was good one and we can’t wait to go back for more.









Highlight: The views overlooking Venice and the sleep in the sun.  
Lowlight: The trip home. It's always a downer.
Interesting fact: Venice has a reputation of being one of the most romantic cities in the world, we found this hard to believe, purely because of the amount of tourists and lack of real people with their own culture in the main centres. Maybe historically it was the case but now Venice is a commercial machine with little love.