Caribbean Travel - Venice After Our Star Princess Cruise

We spent the first night in Venice aboard the ship. And we went back and forth to San Marco on a shuttle vaporetto, it docked south of the city. And was the biggest structure in Venice while it was there, the ship sailed majestically up the lagoon past San Marco Square, when John Lazzatti and I reached Venice at the end of our Star Princess cruise.

A later visit with one drink each cost us 56 Euros or $84. Total $132.00, " The book was nineteen Euros and the four drinks were sixty-nine Euros. The Life and Times of the Legendary Venice Landmark, i bought a copy of Arrigo Cipriani's book called "Harry's Bar. There's a small bar and a sprinkling of tables in a not very large room. We tried one straight up and one on the rocks. We had two martinis each served in very small glasses. We quickly found our hotel and headed for Harry's Bar, for our fist afternoon in Venice while still being housed aboard ship.

The breakfast provided was very basic-no hot food and a very limited amount of other offerings which were undistinguished, in contrast to the breakfast in Rome. The hotel was a few steps away from San Marco Square. We had separate rooms. For five nights we stayed at the Best Western Albergo San Marco for 583 Euros (about $874 each).

Most of the help were non-Italians with a number of Bangladeshi in some places. We never sought out or needed expensive restaurants and were always satisfied by the places we found just roaming around the streets. And at lunch we often had tasty pizzas, the breads were delicious, house white wine was uniformly good. But had a full menu of Italian food, often the restaurants called themselves pizzerias. We ate lunches and dinners in small places which were very reasonable.

Discovered the Coin department store near the Rialto and found some good buys. John L. Or a coffee shop with tempting pastry, a fish market near the Rialto Bridge, a beautiful campo, and making all sorts of serendipitous discoveries: a new church, getting lost in the maze and labyrinth that is Venice, but that was the fun of it, often we'd get lost. Starting around ten and then rejoined each other for lunch at two, we wandered alone in various sections of the city.

And are a nuisance, shed feathers, leave droppings, they fly into people. One piece of advice to the city fathers: stop selling pigeon food in the Piazza San Marco and cut down on those thousands of pigeons. Late October and early November are good times to go because you avoid the huge high season hordes. But the city made you forget the cold with its beauty and uniqueness, bone-chilling and penetrating dampness at night, very cold weather, at times, and we had, 2007, 2007 to November 14, we were in Venice from November 8.

Two glorious churches among a hundred are Santi Giovanni e Paolo and La Basilica della Salute (the dome presently covered in scaffolding). We toured the Doge's Palace and actually crossed the Bridge of Sighs and saw the prison cells. And the Doge's Palace, the lion symbols, the stone wells that are everywhere, cloisters, quiet secret gardens, baroque churches with great art, colonnades, the Grand Canal, reflections of the sinking houses on the canals, the Rialto Bridge, gondolas, the Bacino, the Bridge of Sighs, we'll remember scenes at night along the canals. Unreal and ethereal, venice is a magical city of dreams.

Florian in 1720; people started sipping espressos at the Caffè. The shimmering city where life is more unique than in any other city in the world, magical sunsets, carnevale items in stores with scary costumes and masks, the campos, the palazzos, the marble statuary, but its glories live in your memory forever: the library in the San Marco Piazza, venice is a drowning city.

" We went to the Lido by vaporetto and strolled along the beach in front of the hotel where von Aschenbach pined over the Polish boy of fourteen in Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice.

In one room is a full size gondola loaded with books and in the other room another large boat replete with books, in addition to all the shelves. A bookstore Libreria "Acqua Alta" with used books spread out over two large rooms advertises itself as the most beautiful bookstore in the world.

The museum boasts several Jackson Pollock canvases so I bought a tie there with a Pollock motif on it. Their stone gives their names and dates; in the beautiful sculpture garden Peggy Guggenheim is buried alongside fourteen of her beloved dogs. It is housed on the Grand Canal in an unfinished palazzo which is a work of art in itself. Crossed the Accademia Bridge and went to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, one day I visited the Vivaldi museum.

" he quipped, "I don't think dogs in America speak English either. And the owner replied that he understood English but didn't speak it, i stupidly asked the owner if the dog spoke English. You'll get worn out before he does. An interesting art gallery near her museum is the Bac Art Studio where you may be greeted by the owner's Jack Russell who insists that you toss a ball for him to fetch.

It gave us something to do in the evening since we didn't want to attend operas at La Fenice or string quartets at various venues. In Venice we discovered the Inishark Irish pub where we met British and Irish tourists.

A bellman pulled our two big bags behind him and led us across San Marco Square to a water taxi pier right outside of the Hotel Baglioni. On the morning of our departure we ordered a water taxi. We wondered how were going to manage this with our heavy bags. And we were to leave by plane, this time we had arrived in the city by ship. Many years before I had arrived and left Venice by train which is a fairly easy maneuver since vaporetti stop at the railroad station.

For a total of $180, the trip was 100 Euros and we tipped the boatman an additional twenty. It took us a half hour with the throttle wide open to reach a dock outside the airline terminal. Then another and came out on a big waterway behind Venice, we zipped up one canal. The boat was a mahogany-like speedboat resembling an old Chris Craft. We sat in a comfortable cabin that could easily hold twenty persons. A water taxi docked and our bags were loaded aboard.

Venezia, ciao. Now it was time to head home by way of JFK. And feasted on the visual delights of Venice, enjoyed a cruise on the Star Princess, we had seen Rome. We walked pulling our wheeled bags behind us. At the boat landing a sign said that you could wait for the shuttle bus or take a seven minute walk to the terminal entrance under a covered walkway.