Venice: Day One

After our beautiful, but brief, stop in Assisi, we spent almost all of Thursday taking the train to Venice. We woke up on Friday morning to the sound of more rain! We were super bummed, but still determined to enjoy our vacation. We spent the morning browsing in glass shops {Venice is famous from it's hand-blown glass} and picking out souvenirs for some of you. On our way to lunch, we noticed that the streets along the grand canal were flooding! We thought this was due to all the rain, but we later found out that it's because of high tides. The pizzeria we stopped in had a little bit of water in the entryway. After we finished our pizza, we noticed that the floor of the restaurant was covered in a few inches of water! We knew this didn't bode well.

After lunch, we headed to the Accademia, the major art museum in Venice. A street near our hotel was covered in card tables, which people were walking on to avoid getting wet! We thought this seemed silly at the time, but on our way to the museum we encountered many flooded streets without card tables. By the time we arrived at the Accademia, we were pretty much soaked. Of course, it was still a very cool museum, filled with paintings from the Venetian school. Here's one of the most famous works of art, The Last Supper by Veronese. 

We decided to take a water bus from the art museum back to our hotel. There's no way we could afford a gondola ride {they're about 80 euros for a half hour}, so this was the best option for seeing the city by water. It was so cool to see the grand canal by sunset, even if it wasn't the most spectacular of sunsets that day.