Today was the scavenger hunt. I was on a team with Sam and Scott, and we got to San Marco early to finish our assignment. We didn’t plan for the Acqua Alta, so we weren’t prepared for all the routes to the tower to be blocked by water. We decided to explore until the tide went down and then come back later so we didn’t have to buy shoe covers. We started on San Marco, then moved on to Accademia, and finally ended up at the parks that Napoleon built before we headed back to find our tower. We stumbled across a lot of really interesting parts of Venice that we wouldn’t have noticed if we had found the tower right away and then met up with another group.
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| Public Records |
While we were in San Marco, we found Teatro La Fenice, the Venetian opera house. We went into the lobby, but the tickets to see the theater were expensive, so we didn’t go in. Then we found an empty courtyard that led to the post office, public records, and a Corte dei Conti, which means court of audit. Basically, we found a courthouse in Venice. It was interesting to see something so familiar in such a different setting. The building was really old and really pretty, with a courtyard and a well in the middle. It’s easy to forget in a city so full of tourists that the people who live there permanently need access to the same records and services that we all access at home.
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| Courtyard of Corte dei Conti |
After we left the courthouse, we went to Chiesa di Santo Stefano, an old church with amazing architecture and some of the original art still in it. No pictures are allowed in the church, which was surprisingly nice. I’ve spent the whole week taking pictures and sometimes I didn’t fully appreciate everything I was seeing because I was too worried about taking a picture of it.
After the church, we crossed the bridge to Accademia. We had already seen most of what we saw today from our previous trips to Accademia, so we didn’t stay there very long. We saw the courtyard of the Guggenheim museum, but we didn’t go in because the tickets were expensive. We also saw Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute close up instead of from a vaporetto. After seeing the Basilica, we decided to go to a part of Venice we hadn’t visited yet, so we took a vaporetto east of San Marco to the part of Venice Napoleon remodeled during his short reign.
There is a very distinct difference between Napoleon’s Venice and the rest of Venice. The streets are wider and straighter, and there are parks. This part of the city was clearly planned much better than the rest of the city, but it doesn’t have as much charm and history because of it. Napoleon erased part of Venice’s history when he tore down and rebuilt this part of Venice. “The more historically self-conscious the writer of any form of historiography, the more the question of the social system and the law that sustains it, the authority of this law and its justification, and threats to the law occupy his attention” (White, p. 13). Just as he did by building the Correr, Napoleon used the authority of his law to change the narrative of Venice by changing the physical structure of the city.
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Even though Napoleon erased centuries of history to build them, I did really like the parks in this part of the city. We walked through the parks and we found a really strange statue surrounded by a moat filled with turtles, and then we found a playground. This was the first playground I’ve seen in Venice.
When we were done playing on the playground, we found our tower and then met up with another group to take a gondola ride. Then we met the rest of the group for our last dinner together in Italy. I’m going to miss being in Italy, but a part of me is excited to sleep in my own bed again. I’ve had so much fun this week, and I’m really glad I had the opportunity to visit Italy.
Source
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
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