After our secret nights of Venice and gondola tour, which was fine, not spectacular (I think we are toured out, and our guide was no Figgy), but interesting and pretty to be wandering in the quieter district of Venice, we found a restaurant a little off the Venetian Robson Street and settled down for a late, serviceable, but mediocre meal.
This trip continues to be exactly like life, full of wonder and disappointment and surprise and introspection and shiny things and mundane and tired and fed up and glee. I'm not sure why I choose to blog my travel experiences as opposed to write them in a private journal... part of me thinks that the one or two readers that are following our journey might be disappointed that it is not all Disneyland, but I like it like that. It is real. And I like sharing all of me as I go because it will be impossible to answer the question, "So how was your trip?," when we get home. Anyway, dear reader (Vicki and mom ;o), I'm just going to continue to lay it all out there and capture it the best way I know how so that when I look back in years to come these few weeks can hopefully come alive again as a full experience.
Over dinner tonight Bill and I were trying to sum up Venice; to me Venice is like a beautiful young girl who has been snapped up and sold into prostitution. If you could just wash all the make up off and keep her safely away from the ones who want to exploit her, her beauty could shine through. There is no denying the uniqueness and charm of Venice. AND, as has been our experience in all of the destination spots so far, there is no escaping the commercialism and tourist traps. It's kind of like shopping at Winners, you've got to weed through a lot of crap to get to the gems.
One thing we learned on our tour was that the women back in the day (somewhere between the 13th and 19th century, I can't exactly remember when), strived to achieve the ideal beauty image of the time -- blond hair and skin as white as pearls. When you look at the Venetian skyline, you see lovely rooftop verandas on some of the homes. Women would sit in the sun on these verandas wearing a sombrero type hat that would shade their face so their skin would not darken. The top of the hat was cut out to expose their hair, which they had soaked in a lightening agent (camel urine) to bleach it. Arrrrgggggh! Even then, women striving for unrealistic ideals of beauty. Sigh.
Anyway... Lots of lovely, lots of not. And today!
We tromped through town with our suitcases in tow, got our four door, manual transmission, rental Fiat with our GPS that is only in Italian it turns out, and pointed toward Treviso. The sky was gloomy, gray and rainy, and the scenery was pretty boring, we could have been driving down the island highway, but we were both pretty excited to be on our own heading into this new solo leg of our adventure.
We found our way without too much trouble and decided to point to a restaurant that came recommended in an article we had read about why to stay in Treviso over Venice (Vicki, we should have read this article that you sent us before we booked Venice!).
Just so you know, right now, we are in our perfect room (I'll get to that soon), so full from another perfect meal (more on that later), and I have just taken a bite of biscotti made by our lovely B&B host Donatella, dipped into local Valpolicello Superiore from the neighbouring vineyard... Bill is groaning because he is so full, but just demanded that I hand him the entire bowl of biscotti because... Yes. And. Fuck it! Oh. So good.
Where was I... Treviso. The Trattoria, TONIdelSPIN was perfect in every way. We asked the waiter to recommend something for us to share, so we settled on a lovely pasta dish with shaved truffle, fried cheese with porcini mushrooms, and a mixed salad, and tiramisu for desert. We soaked up the ambiance, Bill's nose present in all of the tables around us (some families with small children, some people our age dining with elderly companions, maybe some business people), and Bill tried to wrap his head around being in this place where his family had come from so long ago. It was so beautiful.
After lunch we did our best to muscle up against the rain and poke around the town, but the rain was relentless and we had arrived during siesta -- all the shops and attractions were closed between noon and 3:30pm (the first time we have come across this, which indicates that this is the first non touristy place we have been) -- so we accepted the moment as complete and headed to our next stop, Verona, about 90 minutes drive away.
To make a long story short, we found the first bar with wifi (coffee shops are called bars here) and sat under an umbrella and searched for a place to stay for the night. Verona seems like a lovely town with lots to offer, but it's still raining, so after a quick internet search we settled on a place about 10km outside of town that seemed like it would be lovely (but I never quite trust the Internet). Ca dei Coci B&B is perfect in every way.
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