Today our official tour began.
Nonetheless, we had virtually the entire day to ourselves before the group orientation in the evening, although we already met one of our fellow travellers at breakfast this morning and had a delightful conversation. If she is indicative of the kind of group this will be, I think we’ll have a really great time.
We devised that after walking 10+ kilometres each of the past two days we’d take it a bit easier. The extra incentive was that neither of us had slept the night before. Put that down to a combination of late dinner, plus mosquitoes and lots of noise through the wide open windows due to not having found the air conditioner controls until this morning.
Once we headed out it was initially just to wander around the residential areas away from the Grand Canal, where we discovered a local school and the campus of the University of Venice School of Economics.
Since simply wandering aimlessly is not my DIL’s jam, she looked for points of interest nearby, which led us to Venice’s historic Jewish Quarter, a fascinating enclave with Kosher bakeries and restaurants.
There was also a synagogue, with entry only via a guided tour.
Most interesting to me was a small museum located in 16th century rooms where a famous Jewish Venetian composer created the very first polyphonic Jewish religious songs, considered so revolutionary as to be almost heretical.
A second room featured selections of historic Jewish correspondence.
In 1896, two Scottish twin sisters, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, wandered into a Cairo bookstore hunting ancient manuscripts. The bookseller handed them some mouldy scraps of Hebrew parchment. Little did they know that they’d just stumbled upon a clue to one of history’s greatest manuscript hoards: the Cairo Geniza.
Fast forward to Cambridge, where a rumpled, brilliant scholar named Solomon Schechter takes one look and nearly faints. Why? Because he’s just been shown a long-lost Hebrew version of Ben Sira, a biblical-era wisdom text that had vanished for centuries. And thus begins the wild, messy, and utterly fascinating saga of the Cairo Genizah
As Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice with its antisemitic characterizations attests, Venice was not always an easy place for its Jewish population. Merchant of Venice was fiction; the displays here were fact.
Next we stopped into the Church of the Body of Santa Lucia. No interior photos are allowed for one simple reason: the mummified remains of Saint Lucy are displayed in a glass coffin that firms part of the main altar. I recently learned that most Catholic Churches consider it disrespectful to photograph human remains. Since it would be virtually impossible to police photographers who decided to photograph the saint’s body while taking pictures of the stunning interior of the church, photography is banned completely.
Whether the body in the glass shrine is actually Saint Lucy is a matter of faith. We can attest only to the fact that the uncovered feet were mummified.
It’s too bad we couldn’t take photos, because the church’s Baroque architecture and stunning paintings made for a wonderfully serene place of worship.
There were more canals to cross…
Time for lunch, and hands down the best meal we’ve had in Venice. Thanks to a recommendation by my DIL’s cousin, who lives in Tuscany but plans events all over Italy, we ate at La Zucca, which has been highlighting pumpkin and squash on their menu since its inception in 1980.
Our first clue that the food was going to be great was that we’d been unable to get a reservation. Fortunately the restaurant holds a couple of tables in reserve at each seating. Our second clue was that the menu was only in Italian; multilingual menus immediately indicate a tourist focus.
After walking back to our hotel, we found the controls and figured out the A/C, which prompted a late afternoon period of cool relaxation. We now have the option for closed windows and mosquito-free sleep.
At 6 pm we met our group leader Michela, who was very specific about explaining that she is not a “guide”, since that is a regulated profession in Italy.
After some preliminary conversations to get to know one another a bit, and getting a quick overview of what our days together are likely to look like, we all headed off to a local “bacaro” – a restaurant that served drinks and cichetti (sometimes spelled cicchetti), the Venetian equivalent of aperitivo or tapas. Completely counterintuitively, cichetti is pronounced “chick-etti”.
A snack was fine after having a big lunch, but we both felt we needed a bit more before calling it a night.
One of us was a responsible adult and had a slice of pizza. The other ate Sicilian lime and basil gelato scooped to look like a rose.
As far as “taking it easy”, we still logged 9.7 km and 13,000 steps.
Tomorrow we begin our day with a group breakfast, a walking tour, and more cichetti for lunch before a free evening, when we may try to catch a classical concert of Vivaldi and Pachelbel.
