Day 20

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Today I woke up around 8:30 a.m. We met upstairs in the big living room to talk about the last couple of days. A lot of people were worried about the work we need to do for art history. I don't know why because we have the rest of summer to do it, and it is supposed to help us but oh well. We Went to the Fortuny Museum after that. I really enjoyed it (much more than Ca' Pesaro). There was an ecclectic mix of work and the exhibition space was pretty cool. It was inside of Fortuny's house, and basically there were floors that were left the way he had it while living there, but with the works exhibited. We couldn't take pictures and I didn't buy the catalogue but it was a really neat show. There was a piece by Anthony Gormley in there that I loved, and there was also a James Turrell piece that was almost exactly the same as the one in Arsenale.

After Fortuny, most of us headed back to the house to eat lunch, then regrouped around 1:30 p.m.

San Michele from the Alilaguna boat

lovely Burano

We walked to the Fondementa Nouve (Don't think I spelled that correctly) boat stop and took a ride to Burano island. It was a very relaxed day at the islands. We spent about an hour and a half on Burano (It's next to the famous Murano glass island). It was a cute place because there wasn't a whole lot of tourists, and all of the houses were painted in the same bright color palette, very different from Venice. The girls and I got some gelato and picked up some small souveniers. I did two sketches while we were there as well. We then got on another boat to Torichelli, which was about a 5 minuted ride and even smaller than Burano. It only has about 60 residents on the island, so you can imagine how deserted it felt. The main "attraction" there was a small Byzantine church at the end of the canal, that was maybe a mile or two walk. There were some really beautiful byzantine mosaics in this Extremely old church. I think it was build in 700 A.D.?? Not sure though.

"The Devil's Bridge"

Snuck a picture in the Byzantine Church!

Ah, finally on my throne.

We finally made it back to Venice around 7:30 p.m. and then about 8 of us went to this really nice little restaurant that Matt knew about. It was delicious. I had Risotto and a Gnocchi dish.