Travel Chronicles VI - Autumn - From Venice to Ferrara

Friday 11th - Venice - Up and Down, Right and Left

Friday night we were awoke by the extremely heavy rain that was falling and that worries us a bit for hat would had been our second and last day in Venice. As the morning came, for the first time in my life, I ad breakfast in a bedroom and I must say, it was nice. The rain had stopped by then, but it started exactly as, fully loaded, we walked out to the bed 6 breakfast to reach the station and leave the main backpack there for the day. We waited for the worse to pass and then, still under the rain, we marched back to the station.

From the Station, we marched to San Giovanni and Paolo's church, known in Venice as "San Zanipolo", the second most important church of the city and traditional burial place of the venedian doges and most important captains (for instance, the Venedian admiral Sebastiano Venier, leader the fleet at Lepanto is buried here, together with the last defender of Cyprus, Marcantonio Bragadin, eventually flayed alive by the Turks). We visited the basilica thoroughly and then moved towards Rialto.

Once arrived at the bridge, we had to face a problem which presented itself greater than expected. we knew the ferries would had been on strike, but I had read, and consequently erroneously believed, that a few runs would had been there anyway. I was wrong. As we found out, not a single ferry was running besides the ones connecting the main islands with the minor ones. So it was that we haded towards the "Accademia bridge" and from there to the church of Santa Maria della Salute. And we went right, and we went left, and up the bridges and down the bridges, occasionally got on the wrong track and walked back, and the few hundreds of meters that by air separated us from our arrival point became kilometers that we covered in over a hour, only to find the church closed for lunch.

We gave it up and took a long walk back passing along the "zattere", the northern side of Venice, and noticed how much high was the water, so much to occasionally invade the platform (indeed, the day after the water would had raised another 10 centimeters and flooded the city for the first time this year). We looked for something to eat and then we went to visit the "Ca Rezzonico" museum, also known as the museum of the '700 where, among many interesting things giving an idea of how a venedian noble mansion would had looked during the XVIII century, are hosted some wonderful frescoes by Tiepolo (which is one of the painters I like the most together with my father and in fact at the end I got him a book about these frescoes).

As we headed out from the long visit t the museum, our time in Venice was already close to the end. We took the long walk to the station again and then decided to eat something, first at a kind of self-service restaurant we had discovered the day before (called "BreaK") serving big mixed salad and where I was tempted to leave without paying after that no one present himself at the cash-machine for a very long while (No, I did pay in the end) and then at a macdonald which the signs called to be at "8 minutes walk" and that revealed itself to be at twice as much distance. As we headed back to the station and boarded our train to Ferrara, a shy sun poked out of the clouds. I think I heard him laughing.

Friday 11th - Ferrara - Spiders! Spiders everywhere!

By the time we arrived in Ferrara, we were pretty fatigued and having to walk from the train station to the cathedral (the hotel I got in Ferrara was right behind that) with the main backpack on my shoulders finished the work, totally exhausting me. The hotel itself was great, if not for a little problem.

While I was dealing with check-in, Susanne appeared with a strange face. Turned out, over the wall of the room there was a spider and a pretty big one at that, to be honest. Now Susanne is scared as hell by spiders and I jumped at the opportunity of filling the role of my dreams, the white knight in shining armor running to help the damsel in distress. Funnily enough the woman in charge of the place for the night gave me a kind of sweep ending in a spear-like broom. But it happened that the spider survived a perfectly aimed and pretty strong hit, falling down and hiding, and in the meanwhile another one, smaller but not less menacing, appeared from behind the bed. At that point, we decided to leave the ground to them and accepted the other room we were offered. And there we finally collapsed, the thought of the toothpaste only briefly passing through my mind.