Venice

Oh Venice! What a beautiful city! From the moment I stepped off the train I felt relaxed and content and this resulted in doubling the length of my stay here. My accommodation was a 15 minute walk (with 15kg backpack and 5kg front pack - looking not unlike a pregnant snail I imagine!) from the main station and located on a quiet canal/street within easy reach of all the places on my list! Casa Caburlotto is owned by an Order of Nuns and has a serene atmosphere and a curfew which means this is maintained by all guests. Over the course of several days my wanderings took me to St Marks Square, the Correr Museum, the Bridge of Sighs, the Rialto Bridge and the main harbour from where I took a boat to 3 islands: on another page. I also found an exhibition of da Vinci,s machines which I found absolutely fascinating ... never knew he invented so many things we take for granted – ball bearings for example! Anyway I will let the pictures speak for themselves:

View from my room

The tallest building is the Casa
where I stayed

Da Vinci made roots which bowed when dignitary walked by!

He did a lot with munitions - boat mounted rotating gun

Used cogs and pulleys to lift

Ball bearings!

Bridge of Signs

The Magi

The clock tower

Built in 1493 this tower was fascinating; lots of facts to report! Interesting ones I hope: a family inherited the job of clock keeper and with it their accommodaiton in the tower. The clock strikes at two minutes to the hour – few clocks in Venice strike on the hour as there are so many of them it woud cause a cacophony – they strike between ten to and ten past and thus no one is on time in Venice! One of the city,s main clocks (still cannot find the apostrophe on Italian keyboards!) strikes only twice a day – at five to mid-day and five to midnight,  but on each occasion it strikes  132 times to make up for all the ones it misses! The face of the clock has a series of concentric rings only one of which stays still: the others move very slowly in relation to each other and a pointer - the Sun - is used to show the day, astrological season, and cycle of the moon. In the centre of this face was a model showing the five planets revolving around the Earth: this was removed when science progressed! There is also a digital mechanism which shows the actual timeon a different level of the tower: huge metal  wheels have the digits written on them (on the wide ri if you can imagine) and rotate; set at right angles to the opening they look a bit like a water wheel and the minute ones moves every five minutes with a thud (remember a family lived in rooms surrounding the mechanism!). The hour wheel is inscribed with Roman numerals and the minute wheel is not: this is because the creator could not fit four symbols on the space allowed and so could not write 35 in Roman numerals XXXV – an oversight! On Jan 6th these huge wheels are removed and replaced with figures of the Magi and an Angel who promenade around a track passing in front of the Madonna and child and bow ... very simple mechanics but very ahead of their time at the time!  On the top of the tower are 2 Mores who are naked from the waist down due to economical reasons, who strike the huge bell. There – hope you ahve kept up I will be asking questions later!

View from the tower

Clock tower

Canival seasons

St Marks Square with scaffolding 

St Marks the other way