The Travels of Eric and Lorna

Here's a link to a video of St. Mark's Square I posted to YouTube. http://youtu.be/K3W1UPorPjY

One of the first things we did in Venice was to visit the Naval History Museum in Venice .  This was a really cool museum.  Given that Venice was a major world power for several hundred years, and the navy had a lot to do with this, and given that the city is on the water, naval operations have been of major importance throughout the history of the city. First off was these cool, huge anchors outside.  Me for scale.  Those of you who know me know that I am not a small guy... The museum had many scale ship models.  These depicted all kinds of ships, even dating back to galleys and other ancient ship types. There were also lots of cool globes. And sea chests. Ship model. Sabres Near the museum is also the entrance to the Arsenale, which was the shipyard where the ships were made.  It's still an active naval base, so you can't go in, but you can see the very cool towers that once held the gates. The entrance to Arsenale....

To see a longer ride on the Grand Canal, including the famous Rialto Bridge, go to this link http://youtu.be/7CcvPvGkpuo

Hi Everyone, I forgot to post anything last night.  So to compensate, here is a video of a ride on the vaporetto along the Grand Canal.  This was our first ride when we were just getting to Venice.  I have a lot of videos, but unfortunately Blogger has a 100 MB file size limit.  Perhaps I'll put some on YouTube and post links.  More words about and pictures of Venice to come soon.

On Monday the 24th we took the train to Venice .  Train travel in Italy is great. It's cheap and the trains pretty much go everywhere.  The second class seats are large and comfortable.  I can't imagine paying for the first class seats, as I can't think of what would make them worth the extra expense.  Anyway, we arrived in Venice that afternoon. Venice is incredibly photogenic.  It's also a lot larger than I had thought.  It's not huge, by any means, but it was larger than I had expected.  There are no cars in Venice, so it makes walking around the city much safer and more enjoyable than many places I have been.  I was also very surprised at how clean it was.  The streets are clean, and graffiti is minimal.  They must spend a great deal of time and effort cleaning the streets. Venice is also a very well run city, probably the most well run I have been to in Italy.  This is likely due to the massive amount of tourist traffic...

Our time in Bologna ended on Monday the 24th, sadly.  I must say that I really enjoyed Bologna, and would urge anyone interested in seeing a real Italian city to go there.  It might not have the historic sights of, say, a Rome (what city does?) but it's friendly and comfortable, and the food is amazing.  This is real life Italy. Other things we did there include the Archaeological Museum of Bologna (of course), and the Museum of Modern Art .  The archaeological museum was good, if a little old.  It lacked much English translations of things, but had a very nice collection of Egyptian and, particularly, Etruscan artifacts.  They also had the largest collection of Greek pottery I have ever seen.  There was literally room after room of it.  This is because the Etruscans traded widely with the Greek colonies in Magna Graecia (Greater Greece, now known as southern Italy.)  They also had a temporary exhibit of a reconstruction of the famous re...

Saturday we took a day trip to Bolzano, also known as Bozen .  This is a town in the South Tyrol region of northern Italy.  It's in the Alps, and from both an architecture and cultural point of view, it seems a lot more like part of Austria than Italy.  Many residents speak German, and signs were in Italian and German.  The town itself looked a lot like the towns we visited in Switzerland back in 2005.  It was also very crowded, presumably because it was a Saturday.  They were setting up for their Christmas festival, but it wasn't ready yet. Here are a few pictures of the town. Bolzano's cathedral Street view The main square The hills around the town Also the main square But of course, the reason we went to Bolzano was to see Otzi the Iceman , who is housed at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology .  For those of you who have not heard of him, Otzi is a natural mummy of a 5,300 year old man from the Bronze Age who was fou...