San Marino & Venice

We left our Tuscan idyll and headed towards San Marino. We passed through Anghiari, a beautiful hillside town that was central to a battle between Florence and Milan in the late 1400’s. Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned to paint a depiction of the battle in 1503, but never actually finished it and someone painted over it about 60 years later. Yet again, another stunning old town.

We continued through the hills stopping sometimes just to enjoy the view. We really didn’t have much of an expectation for what we’d see in San Marino, and were pleasantly surprised by the old town atop a hill, accessed by a Funivia. It was a clear sunny day today so we could see for miles!

From the top of that we walked around the fortifications, and up the many steps to visit the three towers. These towers are represented on the San Marino coat of arms and flag.

We wandered back through the streets, down the Funivia, found our car and headed to our hotel. Our next challenge was to find somewhere open for dinner on Easter Sunday evening!! We didn’t really plan for this!! (Spoiler, we ended up at KFC 15km from the hotel.)

Next morning we headed to Venice for 2 nights. Our drive up there was through the Po Plains, a vast flat area with farmland, wetlands and irrigation channels. We saw flamingos!! (living) and a giant roadkill that looked like a giant rat, that we think was a Coypu. Had no idea they even existed. They look a bit Capybara-like. There was lots of opposite direction traffic, everyone heading home after their long weekend.
We made our hotel by noon and stepped foot onto Venice itself at 1pm.
Our plan was to use the water bus – the vaporetto– to explore as much of the Venetian archipelago as possible. First up we headed to Murano, home of Venetian Murano glass via the Grand Canal.

Once we reached Murano we wandered for a bit, grabbed a bite to eat and then visited a glass blowing museum and shop.

The glass blowing demo was amazing, first up he made a glass, then he made a horse. Apparently he has 19 seconds to make the horse once the glass is hot.

We managed to lighten our purse in the shop before reboarding the water bus and heading to Mazzorbo.

Mazzorbo is comparatively quiet and almost rural, with a vineyard at the base of Chiesa di San Michele Arcangelo, a 12th century bell tower.

Mazzorbo is connected to Burano by a bridge. Burano is so pretty, with quaint waterways and colourful buildings alongside the waterways. Burano is known for this, and it’s lacework.

Feet were getting sore by this time, so we and 304 of our best friends took the next water bus back to Venezia, via Treporti and Lido.

We meandered our way towards the Piazza Roma, stopping for dinner and some local wine, before continuing to walk

We eventually arrived at the Grand Canal in a location with no convenient bridge. We had to grab a water bus to cross the canal, then realised the next one coming would take us all the way to Piazza Roma. So we accidentally ended up with a nighttime Grand Canal cruise.

Needless to say, it was even.more beautiful than during daylight hours.

The #6 bus was waiting when we got back to the Piazza and in 20 minutes we were back in our hotel room. We should sleep well tonight, and hope to have weather as glorious as today’s, tomorrow.

And it was!

We headed into Venice about 9am this morning for an 11 hour walking day. We just meandered our way around various islands including Venice, San Marco, San Giorgio Maggiore and Giudecca.

We watched a seagull catch and eat a crab here (above), and another catch and eat a Cuttlefish that sprayed ink all over the place (below).

In two days we’ve seen seagulls catch and eat 2 fish and a crab – who knew they ate anything other than chips?!

We of course, had to be complete tourists and take a gondola ride. It’s extortion, but you can’t be in Venice and NOT go on a gondola! It was lovely and quiet and a relaxing half hour away from the crowds.

We visited a church that our gondolier said was his favourite. It was nice, the book-ended marble slabs that lined the walls inside and out, made the craziest faces / symbols if you looked long enough.

We had lunch in the shadows of the Rialto Bridge, literally. It was so much colder in the shade!!

We then walked to the area of Saint Mark’s Square and the Doge’s Palace and hopped a vaporetto to San Giorgio Maggiore, we looked at the San Giorgio Maggiore Church, then went to Giudecca.