When confronted with the possibility of rain, John and I decided, so what, we won’t melt. I guess given our actions today, we had a meltdown. After having a quite nice breakfast at the hotel, we put on our rain gear and ventured out into the cold, howling, rainstorm to visit churches with incredible artwork. In Venice you can buy a pass good for a year and go to all the churches. Once there, you’re given either a laminated information sheet or an audio tour describing the church. After buying our pass we first went to Santa Maria del Rosario which is also called Gesuati. It has much decoration by Tiepolo. We continued on and saw San Sebastiano. While enjoying the churches and artwork, we were also enjoying the ability to get out of the tempest.
A couple of more churches and it became apparent that we were soaked – pants wet up to the knee, shoes wet, jackets beginning to soak through etc. And now were several canals away from the hotel. It’s not like you can just hail a cab and get a ride home in Venice. So John made the executive decision to abort the tour and head back. On the way back we passed a market where we picked up some provisions for lunch. Finally back at the hotel, we crashed. We got up briefly around 3 PM for our room picnic but then, at least I, fell into a soporific state, sleeping, waking briefly and then sleeping again until almost 7 PM. I guess I was tired.
We went downstairs in the hotel and enjoyed a glass of wine and potato chips at the bar. Unfortunately our Albanian friend was not on duty. Around 8 PM, when we deemed it late enough to go find some dinner, we ventured just across from the hotel to Ristorante Agli Alboretti. They had a tasting menu to celebrate spring. Or at least some rain-soaked, chilly, windy season. John had the fish tasting menu with courses of mussels, risi e bisi, sea bream and Venetian biscuits and I had the meat tasting menu with sopressa with polenta, pasta in a meat ragout, pork chops and the biscuits. Plus we got with this, prosecco, a glass of wine to pair with the meal and a glass of moscato with dessert. Hard times must be a-happening because this all cost E30 each. It wasn’t like this was some touristy place because there were several tables of Italians eating there.
Of course there were some Americans and, of course, they needed to talk to us.
So here we are at the end of the day pretty full, a little rueful that we couldn’t have accomplished more on the sightseeing end, and wondering if we’ll ever be able to sleep tonight given how much we slept today.
I guess I’ll know tomorrow.