SECOND FULL DAY:

Having seen the major tourist attractions on our first full day in Venice, our second full day was dedicated to art and culture. We started at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Venice’s Scuole were like a combination of fraternities; trade guilds; social clubs like the Elks or the Rotarians; and insurance companies. And the Scuola of San Rocco was the biggest of them all.

The Scuola’s interior is absolutely remarkable, and is adorned with great artwork, including Tintoretto’s monumental fresco cycle in the Chapter Hall, often called the “Sistine Chapel of Venice.” Tintoretto spent twenty years painting the interior of the Scuola, and he got the job through trickery. The Scuola had a competition to decide which artist would decorate its clubhouse and there was a law at the time that no Scuole could refuse a donation. Tintoretto jumped the line in the art competition by sneaking a painting into the Scuola that he intended to be the centerpiece of the work he planned to paint if he won the competition.

The Scuola could not refuse the donation and ended up liking the way Tintoretto’s painting looked on their ceiling. This resulted in Tintoretto not only winning the competition but also having a pretty sweet paying gig for the next twenty years.

After the Scuola, we toured the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. It doesn’t look like much from the outside but inside it boasts not only the most famous work by the great Renaissance artist Titian, “Assumption of the Virgin”, but also the tombs of Canova, Monteverdi and Big Tish (our youngest daughter’s nickname for Titian) himself.

Our next stop was Ca’ Rezzonico, which is a palazzo on the Grand Canal and also houses a museum of eighteenth century Venice.

We then had lunch at Osteria Ae Saracche where we observed other diners engaging in the custom of ending their meal with a dessert involving dipping cookies into sweet wine. It looked so good that we had to try it ourselves.

After lunch, we visited the Gallerie dell’Accademia, a museum of pre-19th-century art that includes works of art by renowned Italian artists like Veronese, Canaletto, Tintoretto, Titian and Bellini.

Our last art gallery of the day was the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Unlike the other museums we had spent the first part of the day visiting, this one contains modern art, including works by Picasso, Magritte, Jackson Pollock, and Kandinsky. The collection is in the home along the Grand Canal where Peggy Guggenheim resided in for the latter part of her life, and so you can not only see the art that was such an important part of her life, but get a sense of what her life was like while living in Venice in the 1950 and 60’s.

We ended our day with an activity that no trip to Venice is complete without a ride in a Venetian gondola. We boarded our gondola just before sunset, and so we were able to begin in the daylight, see the sun setting over the palazzos, and end our ride bathed in the lights along the Grand Canal.

It was an amazing and once-in-a-lifetime experience that made the entire trip worthwhile.