Ships, bells and an amazing clock
Friday  16 December 2016

We enjoyed breakfast in the hotel dining room, while watching the locals crossing Campo Santa Maria Formosa, children being taken to school and a fruit and vegetable stall being set up.

Our first destination for the day was the Museo Storico Navale (Navy Historical Museum). Ian’s navigation skills were not as precise as yesterday so the route we took was quite circuitous. It was most interesting to see some of the quieter residential areas that we found ourselves in.

The collection of vessels in the Ships Pavilion was fascinating and wide-ranging. There were gondolas (including a hearse), fishing vessels, a royal barge and motor boat, canoes from Somalia, a torpedo boat, and the boiler room from the Elettra, a German World War 2 ship which had previously been used by Marconi for radio experiments. We spent several hours there and took a lot of photos!

Royal Barge detail

The boiler from the Elettra

Next stop was the San Giorgio Maggiore church, on an island across from St Mark’s Square. There we saw several paintings by Tintoretto. The church was designed by Palladio but I found its low-key white colour scheme quite unexciting.

St George and the dragon

A modern artwook

The highlight though was an elevator ride to the top of the campanile (bell tower) where we had some wonderful views over the city of Venice and the lagoon.

 The experience of riding in that elevator though was a bit disorienting, with brief glimpses through openings in the tower walls. We both felt some unease, especially Ian who has been seeing a psychologist about his long-standing fear of heights and had resolved to test himself later today by taking part in a tour of St Mark’s Clocktower. Before that tour though we needed some lunch so we took the vaporetto back to St Mark’s Square and shared a panini.

We made our way to the Correr Museum where we found our tour guide, a very vivacious young woman who, despite speaking incredibly quickly, gave a fascinating commentary as she led our group up the several levels of rooms inside the Clocktower. The tower was originally built in 1496-1497 and both the clock and the tower have had several changes over the centuries. A permanent clock keeper was appointed from 1551 and a keeper lived in the tower until relatively recently.

Four figures from the clock

One of the sections of rotating numbers on the clock

We are very pleased to report that, despite some initial nervousness, Ian enjoyed the tour and was able to stand on the top level of the tower and take photos of the spectacular views!

The next event for the day was to check out of our hotel and move to one close to the Santa Lucia station. This had become necessary because we discovered not long before leaving home that a mistake had been made by the agency that booked our train to Innsbruck which required us to catch a much earlier train than we had anticipated. Rather than try to find our way from one side of Venice to the other with our cases at 4 or 5am, we had decided to move!

When we arrived at our new hotel, the Antiche Figure, however,  we discovered that they were overbooked. They proposed that we could move to another of their properties, the Canal Grande, a short distance away. After our long walk with our cases, we were not at all happy with this suggestion – but what could we do?! A guide took us to our new accommodation, offered to provide us with packed breakfasts and suggested that, for a small fee, a porter would take our cases to the station in the morning.

After a short rest there, we set out for dinner at Trattoria ‘Vini da Arturo’, back near San Marco. We had enjoyed a meal there in 2013 and made a booking again. We remembered that our hosts had a collection of  bank notes from around the world so Ian produced one of our new $5 notes which they were very happy to receive. We had a lovely meal although we both struggled to keep awake by the end of it - jetlag seemed to be finally catching up with us! Then it was back to our hotel by vaporetto and finally to bed after a second day in wonderful Venice.