Day 2 in Venice! (With Mama!)

The next day we attempted to go to Ca Rezzonico, But apparently picked the only day that it wasn’t open on to go. Which was in the guide book but somehow we both missed it. Oh well, now we knew where it was the next day! So we decided to go to the Academia museum.  That museum is the “greatest museum anywhere for Venetian Renaissance art and a good overview of painters whose works you’ll see all over town.”

One benefit: you can take pictures in here. No flash, but better than the other museums that are not picture friendly. It had some amazing paintings. There were lots of funny descriptions that Rick Steves provided. Such as “swarming beehive of saints,” or the party version of the Last Supper, with Protestants and “a black man”, to the “even the spear couldn’t deter his worship.” We spent like two hours in this museum. And I started wondering how many “Madonna con Bambino”s exist in (1) one museum or (2) all of Venice. My guess is more than 2-300 hundred.

After the Academia museum, we bought a vaparetto (public boat) pass for the next few days. TOTALLY WORTH IT. If you will be there for longer than 3 days, you will use it. A lot. And it will help with the lots of walking you want to avoid. Then we went towards the Costume Museum (it is technically called Plazzo Mocenigo, but it was described as the costume museum in all the books). Rick Steve says to avoid this museum, but if you have the museum pass- it is so worth it! It was super interesting to see the different clothes that people wore back then, as well as how the house would have been set up. It was a cute little museum.

Then we went to Ca’ Pesaro, the “modern” art museum. It needs a new definition of modern however, because there were only about 5% of the museum as modern. It also hosts the Oriental Museum. Apparently a rich dead Venetian guy went to the “orient” and donated all of his stuff to the City of Venice to start a museum about it. There is a lot of swords and pottery and other kink-knacks. The guy was actually nice (a rarity in Venice) and told us we could take pictures in this part of the museum.

The rest of the museum was actually pretty interesting. It was showcasing the acquisitions that the city Museums had made throughout the years at the modern art showcase “Biennial” that is hosted every 2 years. I’m sure that some of the paintings were “modern” in 1903 when they got them,, but they are not modern now. It was actually pretty nice museum- because of this. Neither of us expected to enjoy the museum (modern art is not my taste, it’s just weird and most of the time I could paint it). There were some amazing paintings- and I even wrote down some names to go look them up later. I of course gave the piece of paper to Mama so now I have no clue what those artists names were, but many of them were in the style of Edward Hopper (who I fell in love with the summer). I apparently like real life like paintings with a touch of commentary on life.

After this museum, we went to the bus station to figure out where Mama was to catch the bus to the airport (since she would be taking a different one than I did). We bought her ticket and then caught a vaparetto back to the hotel. We decided to go to Hard Rock for dinner. It was a nice place, but super expensive. The table set up was weird too, but the food was pretty good.

Then it was home and to bed/ See you around the globe!