Mark & Paula's World Tour: A Venetian Carnevale!

As we sit on the plane writing this we are looking down at the islands of Venice, Lido and Murano with the snowcapped Dolomites in the background - what a great send off for us from our quick stop in Venice. We only had one full day to take in Venice but we timed it perfectly with the last day of their annual 10 day festival called the "Venezia Carnevale" which dates back to the middle ages, was abolished by Napoleon, then brought back again in the 1980's, and it was ramped up to a finale celebration on this Tuesday night before Ash Wednesday. The town was totally alive which surprised us for what we thought would be a sleepy mid-winter visit. Elaborate costumes were the theme (think of the movies "Eyes Wide Shut" or Marie Antoinette) and as we weaved through the action in Piazza San Marco we started to realize we needed to fit into the theme and join the fun. The masks do have a little history – during the black plague the doctors of Venice wore masks with various herbs packed inside thinking it would protect them from getting the disease from their patients, creating masks with large "beaks" so they could fit in more "medicine" and thus be better protected. We suspect it didn't work that well!

Midway across the island, we jumped in a Gondola and had a tour through some of the smaller and older canals as well as through the main Grand Canal. The entire island is actually over 400 tiny islands clumped together and the only way to transport anything to a business or house is by water. The navigation system is amazing and the services, from police and ambulance to Fed Ex, all coexist along with the water taxis and the over 500 gondoliers. The sad part of this ancient city is this extensive network of canals is also their only system of sewage and to this day all sewage is dumped from residences into the canals. On low tide there is pretty good stench coming from the hundreds of years of toxic brew.

The focal point of Venice is the Piazza San Marco and the famous Basilica de San Marco – built in 11^th c. it's where the tomb of St. Mark lays in rest after some Venetians took (or stole?) his body back from Alexandria a few hundred years after he died. A couple of amazing takeaways for us were: 1) the ornate frescos throughout every surface and wall of the church. All tiles were less than 1cm x 1cm and crafted to create massive images (see picture we snapped against the rules!) 2) the front entrance of the Basilica has statues of four bronze horses sitting on top. The story is that Napoleon had them moved to the top of the Arc de Triomph in Paris (see below trip notes), but they were returned to Venice after Napoleon's reign was over.

As night fell the parties started up throughout all the piazzas on the island and even more full costumes came out. We saw many private parties with everyone in full attire that created settings much like it would have looked in the same restaurants hundreds of years ago (well except check out the one guy in drag!).