Venetian Art Treasures
The next morning we ventured out in search of art treasures. Our first stop was the Gallerie Dell’Accademia, which had mountains of Renaissance paintings – it was mind-boggling. Not only that, they are enormous! I‘d seen photos of a lot of this work in art history books but the images were only a few inches tall. I was not prepared for the scale of some of these canvases. The ancient cityscapes put me in a time warp! I recognized a bridge that I had just crossed but all the people in the painting were alive 500 years ago!

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Next we boarded a vaporetto, which was like a crosstown bus on water, and traveled up the Grand Canal to the Friari Basilica, which had an incredible amount of art inside – huge paintings and ornate carvings and sculpture everywhere. In the afternoon we strolled to different exhibitions associated with the Venice Bienniale, which is a city wide show that imports art from all over the world.

Some of the craziest work we saw was from a living artist, Guiseppe Veneziano. Most of his work reinvents Renaissance art with modern popular icons, such as Cellini's Perseus and the Head of Medusa being replaced with the severed head of Ronald McDonald. His other paintings involve Hitler, Paris Hilton, Jim Morrison, Spiderman, Pinocchio, Batman and Chairman Mao.

We were also curious to see the print shop (Venice Printmaking Studio) where all these printmakers were working. The shop was located on an island north of Venice called Murano.  We took another vaporetto to Murano. On the way, we passed the small island of San Michele, which is a giant cemetery. There’s a lot of famous people buried there including Igor Stravinsky and Ezra Pound. We spent some time at the print shop looking at the prints and then sailed back to Venice as the sun was setting.

.......-----Vaporetto to Murano

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