“We’ve got two days in the campsite to give you a chance to go into Venice.” Marko tells us. We’d gone in after we arrived last night with Harry and Daryl for dinner, and whilst a day in Venice in 30+ degrees is tempting the washine machine is also tempting, and maybe sitting under a shady tree with my book.
Venice is one of my favourite cities (in a list that includes Berlin and Paris but NOT New York) and I don’t understand the bad press it gets. It is busy, but not like Rome is busy, or Edinburgh’s old town is busy, and it’s utterly unique. It’s almost like it’s not a real place, it feels fictional and everyone you see is a tourist (or a gondolier). Like we’ve invented time travel and this is where all the history buffs decided to go.
And they go because when they look down the Grand Canal from Ponte dell’Accademia it’s the same view that Marco Polo saw when he told his tall tales of distant China in the 14th Century.
It’s the same view that Canaletto painted two hundred years later and the same canal that Shelley and Byron swam in when they were whoring their way round Europe two hundred years after that.
It’s amazing.
But I’ve been before and we have A WASHING MACHINE at the campsite, so I do laundry and find that shady tree (because I bought a Thermarest chair for an undisclosed sum before we left and I’m buggered if I’m not going to use it), read my book and have a little sleep.
This blackbird helped me read my book.
In the late afternoon we head back into the city on the ferry from the campsite with Daryl and Harry again, learn about Leonardo (no idea why there is a museum to him, he was from Florence) and have another Italian meal that is nearly as nice as the one we had the night before.
I don’t know where we are going tomorrow.
Very few pictures as I mainly like cars, and it was dark in Venice.
I had an idea when I got the car that I’d raise money for Pendelside Hospice, where the previous owner saw out her days. I have been singulalry rubbish at remembering to link to this, but whilst there might not be a connection to most people I know they were amazing to Kathy at the end, shortly after she married my best friend. I can probably get any donations fund matched, they are, as all hospices are, a group of genuinely wonderful people.
https://www.justgiving.com/page/peter-shuttleworth-3
