*Ahhh Venice…A Cartographer’s Nightmare*

29Mar08
NOTE: PHOTOS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO UPLOAD...WILL GET TO IT LATER AND LET EVERYONE KNOW SO THAT YOU CAN ALL COME BACK AND SEE PICTURES FROM VENICE SINCE i KNOW THAT THAT'S THE ONLY REASON YOU ALL CHECK THIS OUT. NAW, JUST KIDDING.

Internet is, obviously, less accessible here in Verona…so I apologize if any one has been wondering where I have been.

Been hitting it pretty hard here so far…not a whole lot of free time, to be honest. Made it to Venice the other day and had a wonderful time, so this entry will be dedicated to that. Pictures of Verona will come later.

Upon getting off the train, the group congregated to get the information we needed to know about Venice and what we were going to be expected to do.

Getting instructions to meet in Saint Mark’s square, we were let loose to figure out how to get there ourselves. At that moment I heard some grumblings about how we didn’t get maps to Venice and yet were expected to figure our own way around.

The reason for the lack of maps was soon made apparent as every buildings exterior become its own street and (perhaps, perhaps not) makes a street with the other building’s exterior. Now just think about that…Venice is incredibly old and most of the buildings were built up as the city stretched outward. This leads to an incredibly convoluted and almost impossible to navigate landscape of alleyways, bridges, and town squares. The advice we were given was to follow the signs to Pallo Rialto (The Rialto Bridge) to San Marco (Saint Mark’s Paradise) which worked (for the most part) like a charm.

After we all gathered in the square we were given the tickets to the Civic Museum and The Duggal (Duke’s) Palace. After grabbing a coffee and getting my bearings, I headed for the civic museum, which, by pure happenstance, was featuring an absolutely wonderful exhibit on the cartography of globes (for those of you who may not know I’m going to school for map-making and Cartography as well as Geography). I totally geeked out for about two hours at how, depending on the era and source material of the globe, California was either a complete island or Baja Bay stretched all the way up to Oregon. You got to remember that these globes were all made between the 1500 and 1600’s and that California wasn’t recognized by all authorities as being connected with the continent until approx. the mid-18th century to the very early 1800’s. On top of that Alaska was almost never even put on most of them, it just stopped at some arbitrary line. (Which makes sense to me…I sailed up in that direction once. Simply the roughest seas I have seen over a long period of time. By that I mean, I had seen worse, but they were always due to either a storm or seasonal variations (like the North Shore of Hawaii). Knowing this, it makes sense that the sailors of the time wouldn’t even bother mapping out the coast of Alaska until it became profitable.)

After the Globes, came about an hour of people watching, Venice is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the entire world, but I noticed (and this might be due to going there during the off-tourist season) that there were still a lot of Italian speaking people there…this was true for Versaille, where a majority of the people were there from the home country.

I guess I just thought there would be some kind of massive touristic conspiracy and that all these places would be where only foreigners go to see a sampling of the country’s history…I guess that would be like thinking that there would be only foreigners at the Smithsonian or any of the monuments in D.C.

After the people watching I went to the Duggal Palace, which was kind of like an administrative court (it even had its own prison), as well as the residence of the Duke of Venice at the time (I might be wrong about that).

Don’t want to pick a fight here, but it was, hands down, the most impressive thing (built by man) that I had seen in Europe. I think that might have something to do with my own perspective though, as most of the rooms there had some kind of administrative purpose; where as, at Versailles, it was almost disgustingly lavish that it seemed to serve no purpose other than to salute the glory of the residents. Perhaps this more of a comment about myself, more than a comment about Europe.

Made it back after getting entirely lost for about two hours as I tried to find the train station (went left when I should have went right). The canals and rivers sticking in my mind, thinking about how people can even continue to live in the city (which, as I understand, is starting to become a real problem). So many different lifestyles in this world, I sometimes try to put myself in the place of some of them, and with the tourists, water, annoying Gondola drivers, curvy rivers, and lack of being anything other than “the city with rivers for streets”, I am amazed that anyone even lives in Venice anymore. I’m sure I didn’t see everything, and they are welcome to do what ever they want (and I’m sure they would think the same thing about people who live in the Minnesota-Wisconsin-North Dakota); I’m just saying that I don’t understand the lifestyle that the people who live in Venice enjoy…although I’m sure they do enjoy it.

More pictures of Verona coming soon…after that, I’m on to Vienna to get my Mozart on.

One last thing: it is a credit to mother that I can have a piece of homemade lasagna, prepared by an actual, honest to goodness, Italian Grandmother, and I still like mom’s lasagna better…you can say all you want about being conditioned to non-authenticity, but I’m going with my mom knows how to cook an Italian meal for people with German and Norwegian (and a whole lot of other) ancestry.