Why unload the produce when you can just sell it canalside?
I’ve got to start with the last, while it’s fresh in my mind. We just saw Swan Lake at La Fenice. The Mikhailovsky Ballet from St. Petersburg was fantastic, especially the swan, but the theater was unbelievable! Don’t know what it looked like before the fire, but it is breathtakingly beautiful now. Gold up the ying-yang, cherubs galore, chandeliers, marble, you name it. We sat in the relatively small orchestra section, but the boxes surrounding us must have gone up six or seven levels. It was almost as much fun observing the Italian social mores as it was watching the opera. These people really are classy dressers. I love watching the three generation families. People don’t have children until they’re pretty old (guess they can’t afford to move out and marry) and families we’d look at and wonder “parent or grandparent?” are invariably “parents” because the grandparents are there too! Several little girls doing grande jetes in the aisles, and staying up very late for dinner afterwards, as we did (the dinner , not the leaps). The Italians aren’t having very many children anymore -- and what a pain managing strollers and paraphernalia up and down the stepped bridges and on and off the vaporettos, much less water safety in Venice--but they sure do enjoy and are tolerant of the ones they do have.
Charlie already has a reputation for being “intense” and painstaking. (What else is new?) The women are enjoying teasing him, and he eats it up. His progress is slower than he’d like -- cutting the tiles especially -- but I think he’s enjoying it. He’s learning as much from the other students as from the teachers. They’re working with smalti, which are glass tiles, and they have to be cut with a hammer on a wooden anvil-type thing. The women are complaining of cut fingers and nails.
I decided to walk the Dorsodouro area and I think I covered every last alley. By the time I got to the Academia (my ultimate destination) I was too tired to actually go in the museum, so got on a vaporetto and came back for lunch with some of the gang. Thought I’d go back in the afternoon but was still flagging, so took a vaporetto all the way around the perimeter of the city, just for the ride and to see a different view of the city. It was really the “local” and took a couple of hours. As we neared the end I could see I’d never make it back in time to change and go to The Theater for our big cultural event, so got off thinking I could walk faster. Well, run is more like it, fearing C. would be anxious over my delay. Got back twenty minutes late, huffing and puffing, and found him just emerging from the studio. He was so engrossed, he hadn’t missed me! I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or relieved.
A long and wonderful day!
24,368 steps (many of them running!)
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