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Ravello is one of the towns along the southern side of the Amalfi coast, only a few miles (but about an hour’s drive) from Positano. It’s higher up in the mountains, which gives it a bit of a different feel from the other towns that we visited. We were totally shocked to discover that: a) there’s a whole network of small towns up there, and b) they’re not entirely inhabited by gnomes or, in fact, any other kind of mythical creatures. We spent the day there walking around the town and then doing a hike along a goat path to some of the even smaller ones nearby. Here are a few pictures of the church there, the view, the local health food store, and some of the nearby vineyards.

And here’s one of the “roads” that we spent a while walking along. Not only was it almost possible to almost touch both sides of the “road” by stretching your arms out, but it was two way and also served as a walkway between towns. Seriously.

And here’s a picture of the local entrant into the creepiness olympics. It’s hard to see, but what we have here is about a liter of some poor guy’s blood in a glass container, which is proudly (and disgustingly) displayed in an altar there. They even have a painting nearby of a woman kneeling beside a recently decapitated body, drying her tears with one hand while collecting a bit of spraying blood in a jar with the other. People are seriously strange.

And finally, here’s a picture of a local “don’t do that” sign, posted in the piazza. If anybody has any idea what the thing in the top middle means, please add a comment. And forget about writing “don’t kick tanks” either. That’s mine.

A few weeks ago, we finally stopped procrastinating and went into the Basilica at St. Mark’s, and judging by the crowds that are already piling up outside of the place, I’m glad we didn’t wait any longer. I’ve learned a lot about Venice since we’ve been here (obviously), but it’s pretty funny now to look back and what my idea of it was before. And since pretty much the only things I knew about it before were that there were canals and St. Mark’s here, this seems like a pretty good time to look back on it…

One thing I had only a vague idea about but that everybody else seems to see as the highlight of Venice is the pigeons. There are A LOT of pigeons in general, but the piazza at St. Mark’s really takes it to a new level. And for some reason, when confronted with such a sea of pigeons, at least 75% of the tourists just completely lose their minds. I can’t think of another way to explain the sudden, uncontrollable desire to have giant rats with wings land on you, which is what everybody does. Here’s a picture of a woman who is probably sane in other circumstances covered in the things, along with one of the crazy people who sell pigeon food all day in the square to enable this insanity.

Another thing I didn’t know was that St. Mark’s is so named because the remains of the man himself are kept there. I also didn’t know who St. Mark was, but hey. In any case, St. Mark was one of the four evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), who seem to be the upper echelon of saint-dom, at least here in Italy. In the early days of the Venetian republic, some local merchants went to Alexandria, appropriated Mr. Mark’s remains, and brought them back here, where he became the city’s new patron saint. Venice already had a patron saint at the time - Theodore - but he was pushed aside in favor of the new one. Theodore is supposed to have killed a dragon, which is pretty cool by me, but I guess they liked Mark better. The evangelists each have a symbol (Eagle, Ox, Human, and Lion - Mark), so the lion became the symbol of the city, and today there are lion decorations on all manner of things. A funny side note here is the Venetian justification for the theft… Mark was supposed to have passed by the lagoon in a boat and had a vision that he would be laid to rest there. The funny part is that Venice didn’t even exist at the time. Sounds fishy to me. Anyway, here’s a picture of the man himself and an (admittedly bad) one of a mural on the facade of the church that depicts the body arriving there, and is also the oldest known image of what it looked like.

Another thing I didn’t know about Venice was that most of the things here were stolen (ok, plundered) from other places. The facade of the church itself looks a bit like a patchwork because it was used as a gallery of loot for a few hundred years. There are also some really impressive sculptures of horses, called the Triumphal Quadriga, in the upstairs of the church that were taken from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade when Venice laid a smack down on that city. Here are some pictures of the facade and the horsies.

And to wrap things up, here are some pictures of the interior of the church (yeah, it’s about solid gold), the Piazza and Piazzetta from the balcony, and of course the obligatory creepy shriveled hand relic thing. I can’t help myself, I’m sorry.

Just as I began to get over our experience with the creepy shriveled hand relic thing a few weeks ago, Hannah and I took a seemingly innocent stroll over to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. I might have suspected that we’d see something creepy, since we were in the same neighborhood as the hand - and because we nearly always do - but I remained unprepared for what we found there. First, though, the building itself is absolutely spectacular. Tintoretto apparently spent about 28 years making paintings for the place, which is a really long time even on the metric system. In any case, while everybody else was focusing on the amazing ceiling, I was on the hunt for creepiness, and boy did I score. In a little room off to the side, in the middle of a table was THIS.

Now, what that is is something that looks very much like a human head in a fancy case. I’m tempted to believe that it’s a fake head except that it looked so darn real, and the fact that it seemed just imperfect enough really convinced me. The strange thing about this one was that it came out of nowhere. No warning (lawsuit in the U.S.), no information (typical in Italy), no nothing. Even the internet has proven no use in this case. It’s not clear what will be required to top this one, but I feel confident that a) it exists, b) it’s here, and c) we’ll find it.

Last weekend there was a big art fair in Bologna, so of course I was dying to go, and I managed to convince Hannah to come along. She’s a pretty good sport like that. The fair itself had 240 galleries from all over the place (but mostly from Italy), and it was huge. There’s so much to see that by the end of the day your feet hurt like crazy and you basically have no idea what you’ve just seen. This was my personal favorite, though… I’m a sucker for this pen and ink stuff.

While we were there, we decided to spend Sunday touring around Bologna. I had no idea what to expect, and after spending most of Saturday at the art fair, which is in the industrial part of town, I wasn’t expecting too much. When we got to the city center, though, we found that it is really quite a beautiful place. There were some great things to see, and the fact that it’s a university town seemed to make it seem really ‘alive’. One interesting thing was that almost all of the streets have arcades, like the one here.

Funny how all of these cities seem to have their own distinguishing characteristic. I imagine the city planners hundreds of years ago saying “How can we be different from Florence? I know, let’s build crazy arcade things!” or “I know, let’s build our city in the middle of a lagoon!”

Apparently there was quite a contest going on to see who could build the biggest tower in Bologna, with seemingly unpleasant results. Our guidebook said that there were over a hundred of them but that now they’re down to 15. Not a great success rate, and given the lean on one of the towers that was near our hotel, it’s pretty clear that these things don’t end well. They said that this thing was tilting by 3.5 meters.

We climbed the taller tower in the background of that picture (only 1.5 meters lean) and got a fantastic view of the city.

There was a huge basilica there that was originally supposed to be bigger than St. Peter’s in Rome. I thought this was really funny, but the Pope apparently told them that they weren’t allowed to make it bigger, so they just stopped building it. It’s still pretty darn huge… the third picture here is of the corner of the thing, where they clearly just lopped it off when they had to stop building. It’s also in the center of the first tower view picture above.

Just because I seem to have to add some ‘creepy’ things to each post here, I’ll throw these in. They have what they call an anatomy theatre at the old university, which is where the students would dissect cadavers back in the day. The room was amazingly immaculate, with wooden sculptures of various people, but right in the middle there were these crazy skinless guys. Cool, but creepy!

OK, this is just weird. While we were in Florence, we noticed that at a few of the churches they had some ‘relics’ of various saints and other figures. I had no idea what a relic was, so allow me to explain… it’s an actual part of a person’s body, usually a bone, encased in some kind of elaborate case that proudly displays the creepy thing. In most cases it was a small piece of a bone, maybe a finger or something smaller and was from a saint who was identified on the container. Some of the containers were shaped like an arm, for example, and had a little window somewhere along the length to display a little piece of bone, presumably where it actually would have been in the person’s arm. Here’s an example (it’s a tooth).

I find this all very, very strange. But what we saw in Florence paled in comparison to what we saw today at the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Click with caution.

Yes, it’s a hand. Creepy.