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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.

Picture yourself sitting in your kitchen about to have dinner. Maybe you’ve cooked up some lovely fish item. It’s the end of the day (and you’re in Italy), so you’re relaxed, things are going well. Maybe you’ve even had a glass of wine or two… what the hell, it’s $3 a liter. Then, picture yourself, poised to take a bite, looking up and seeing this:

Egad! This is what happens when you live in a city where the humidity is almost always %98, except for when it’s raining, and its name in Italian is extra-fearsome-sounding - muffa (pronounced moo-fa). For full disclosure here, I want you to know that I’m basically writing this whole article simply as an excuse to say that word a few times. In any case, after about ten minutes of broken Italian at the hardware store, we discovered that we had a muffa problem and were provided with a product having a seemingly inconceivable name. I bring you the Smuffer!

The Smuffer is basically just bleach in a spray bottle (spruzzatore, also funny), but it leaves the muffa begging for mercy, and now that our whole house has been properly smuffatized and we’ve learned some muffa-prevention tips, we’re hopeful that the situation is under wraps. Four muffas in that last sentence alone… I’m good.

Burano is another of the well-known islands here in the Venetian lagoon, and Hannah and I took a trip out there this past Sunday. Though the island is well known for the lace that has traditionally been made there, we just went because it sounded like a really cool place. And is it ever. While things here in Venice are generally very old, very ornate, and very grey, Burano decided instead to go with very quaint and very colorful. I think this was a good decision for them, and it makes for a truly beautiful place just a thirty minute boat ride from Venice.

Burano has got to be the most photogenic place I’ve ever seen, and if I had any idea whatsoever how to take a good picture, I’m sure you would be so convinced. As it is, I’ve just got some decent, humble pictures here to share. Here are some of the general colorfulness…

You may notice from a few of these pictures that Burano also seems to be the laundry capital of the world. I’ve never seen so much laundry in my life, or such a uniform display of it at nearly every single house. But I’m digressing. Oh, and they also have tons of cats.

And to wrap this up, here are a picture of my beautiful wife and of Venice in the distance seen from Burano.

By the way, I know that colorfulness isn’t really a word. Promise. I do proofread these things, you know.

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 week was Carnevale here in Venice. Carnevale is a lot like Mardi Gras in the U.S. except that instead of people throwing beads and women exposing themselves they have people dressing up in crazy outfits and lots and lots of fully clothed tourists. Someone told me that during the week of Carnevale the number of people in the city literally TRIPLES from 60,000 to 180,000 (interesting article here). This has the effect of changing the streets from looking something like this…

To something like this…

All right, both of those were taken during Carnevale, and the second one is a Hare Krishna parade that we got stuck in, but you get the point. If I can’t exaggerate, what do I really have left. In any case, we had a great time during the whole thing, and here are a handful of pictures we took. I wanted to get more pictures of people in the whole Carnevale get-up, but since you mostly see them at night, we didn’t manage to get very many good pictures. Here is a link to a picture, so you get the idea.