Another sunny day and warmer temperatures! Today was our Accademia day. Yay! In this museum are so many pre- and early Rennaisance paintings. Although we’ve been here a lot of times, it is still amazing to see all the incredible altarpieces with their saints, annunciations, and coronations all gilt and stil beautifully vibrant. There are also some dark Byzantine looking pieces with dark outlining and weird skeletal painting on the outside of the the bodies. The museum also had some new rooms open with paintings, especially by Carpaccio, of Venetian history. In a painting of San Marco, the piazza looked just the same hundreds of years ago. The only things missing were the pigeons!
The hotel here was offering “snacks” in the afternoon. So we sat outside and people-watched while having a snack of tuna tartare with parsley pesto and baccala – hardly the type of food one thinks of as a snack. It’s fun to watch the people go by. There are Italian women in stiletto heels, children on scooters, and all sorts of tourists. We’ve run into many fewer Americans while we’ve been here. In the breakfast room at the hotel we are the only ones.
For dinner we ate the restaurant across the way again. We both had the carne regional seasonal menu. It was good but not as good as the other night but we were not feeling really adventurous or up to trekking over bilions of bridges looking for something else.
Tomorrow we head to Palermo. First a boat and then two flights will take up most of the day. We rent a car there for most of the rest of our trip. We’ll have a little more flexibility to explore some out of the way places. Should be fun!
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