Water water everywhere!

And here are some non-crofter pictures (some of us stayed through the weekend). The first couple of pictures are to and from the Rialto Bridge, from which we played "Pooh Sticks" (the game Pooh and Piglet play, watching to see whose stick floats under the bridge fastest). We played with gondolas and vaporetti.

The second couple of pictures are from the neighborhood where we stayed (in Olga Rudge's house--a lovely three rooms, one on top of the other), which was a world away from Rialto. I couldn't help thinking about Las Vegas's "Venetian" while in the Rialto area--it had the same kind of decadent tourist vibe, which made us generally avoid it. Note the leaning bell tower in the third picture--Venice is gradually sinking, rotting, falling, and otherwise decaying, which adds to its charm (if not longevity). I hope Venice outlasts Vegas.

Getting lost in the canals and tiny alleys and dead ends of the other neighborhoods was quite nice, as were the gazillion little cafes. My favorite cafe was in the bottom of a building where Ezra Pound used to stay, with cheap cappuccino and a view across a little canal to a gondola building and repair yard. The last picture is the Salute (health) church (our vaporetto stop), named in honor of the end of the plague.

I appreciate the art in the Accademia, though it's really not what I tend to enjoy (I'm glad the Renaissance happened, but there are other artistic eras and I prefer). However, the Museum of Letters, Arts, and Sciences had a fascinating exhibit of Meiji era Japanese photographs that I went to see. The photos were colorized (painted by ukiyo-e artists), so they were part photography and part painting, and the exhibit statements included thoughts about the different depiction of women and men, sacred and profane, and such. The originals were produced (some by Westerners) to introduce the rest of the world to Japan as it opened itself to other cultures, and it was interesting to think about the artwork while in Venice, the ultimate merchant crossroads of East and West.