Breakfast at the Fish Market, long walk through the city, visit (but not by me) to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. In the gift shop were large purses made out of sea sponges! Camilla, Alice and I waited for Martin and Holly in a café where we worked on our sketchbooks and got more and more sleepy. Finally, it was slightly later than what we'd planned on.

We rushed back to the hotel where they'd allowed us to leave our luggage, and rushed to the ferry, and rushed to the train station. We sat there in sudden calm, watching people wash around us like a laundromat.

The train was very civilized, with seats grouped in fours around teeny tables. Outside, the farmland was just starting to sprout, probably wheat. Trees with white flowers and one that might have had green flowers. Farm buildings like cubes of cement.

Florence is lovely, lots of tall buildings and something that we now recognize as Italian.

We had a reservation at a youth hostel, five flights up a stairway with threatening notes pinned up at various places it indicating that the hostel's patrons might be a very very rowdy bunch.

A burly African dude greeted us and led us to a room marked "private," which was crowded with silent people texting, and mysterious stacks of things like mattresses, suitcases, bedding, bookshelves, and stuffed plastic bags. "Please wait," he said. We waited. Occasionally, people would bustle in, move a mattress or take a towel out of a bag, and leave again. Out the open window you could see down a narrow chute to a filthy alley. 

The dude came back after about twenty minutes. Very nervously, with much hemming and hawing, he said, "I must inform you ... the website said ... it was quite clear. Quite clear."

We stared at him, sensing impending doom but, in our exhaustion and foreignness taking a sudden dislike to him, the mysterious goings-on in the room, and the silent zombies texting all around us. He might have bad news for us but he was getting no help from us. He couldn't do it. He shifted stance and said, "I must talk to my manager," and left again. We waited.

He came back. "The website was quite clear."

We stared at him.

Finally, he blurted out his news. "There is an age restriction. Eighteen to 35. Because it gets noisy. We are going to have a party, it's Friday night, surely you can understand that."

We could not. We thought about the five flights of stairs, and of our luggage, and the fact that we wanted dinner and wanted it at once, if not sooner.

After some bickering, he allowed Martin to use the "staff only, this means you!" computer to find another lodging.

We walked back in the direction of the train station and up four flights of stairs and into a narrow hallway painted green with arabesques over the doorways. A computer screen displayed something in Arabic script. Martin spoke French to the lady, who led us across the hall, through a doorway and down another hall to a family room with five beds, a kitchenette, and the only fully functional bathroom we had or would encounter in our travels. Out the balcony we could see the Duomo and red tiled roofs. All right then!

We had a luxurious, endless dinner with truffle ravioli (the best meal I had on this trip, and possibly ever), gnocci, and a divine lemon sorbet. As we ate and chatted the conversation waxed hilarious (no wine in sight, though) and a couple of Indian dudes were drawn like flies to honey, offering us, on seven separate occasions (we counted) a bouquet of roses or possible one or two of them, or one or two for each lady, or possibly some other combination, why not?

The Duomo (where we met one of the rose sellers again) is a fantastic confection of a building, enormous in its impact. White, green and pink marble in smooth or ornately carved sections, and the famous brick dome, a marvel of contemporary engineering, that rises over a wooden interior dome.

Breakfast in the hotel is a hoot. It is served until 10:00, and we stagger in at 9:59, to join other bleary tourists who cram around tables the size of briefcases and pick at their stale croissants and granola. Our table is always mysteriously animated, given that we start out looking like rumpled bed pillows. We explain epigenetics to each other, and the dilemmas of taking psychiatric drugs, and determine whether pigs have wings (they could, with minimal alterations to their DNA. Also, you could breed sheep with butterfly-wing wool).

Immediately after breakfast we went in search of lunch. Food is important, everyone knows that. But to French people, it is a daily experience of art. To plan meals, to eat them, and to discuss them afterwards, that is a truly satisfying way of living. The rest of us are learning.

We go to the Fish Market, where there are indeed fish but also farmers' stalls and shops, as well as a few trinket stands.

Then we walked. Venice is such a satisfying place to walk! We found a museum of Greek icons, which had paintings on wood and stone of saints doing remarkable things. There was the Assumption of Mary, the Day of Judgement (horrible to behold!), and St. George and the Dragon. I love sacred art because it has that double element of the thing and the meaning of the thing, which to the uninitiated often seems rather peculiar. Like the saints traveling along inside a holy pea-pod to witness Mary's assumption.

In that same courtyard was a Greek church, full of gilt and lovely icons. On the ceiling was a picture of God. I saw God on the ceiling of churches in Russia, too. It's a bit shocking, given Commandment #2. But, on re-reading it, I see that we aren't allowed to depict ANYTHING in nature. So, depicting God is no different, I guess, than depicting a saint or a pea pod or, basically, anything that I, personally, paint.

We tried to have coffee at a canal-side restaurant, but they wouldn't serve us because you can only have coffee in a café. So we moved to a canal-side café and had an enjoyable hour there sketching and eating tiramisu.
 
We walked along the seaside amongst enormous crowds, including dozens of handsome Africans selling handbags and dozens of rather hunched looking Indians selling squishy balls with eyes on them.

Then we ducked into the maze of alleyways again and the crowds melted away. We spent several hours in the garden of a small restaurant over cannolli, spaghetti with mussels, and tiramisu (again!). After the table was cleared, we played Belotte with charming French playing cards.

We had spent the day walking. After a nap and dinner, we spent the evening walking, stopping at fountains to refill our water bottles (hoping that the water was potable), edging through narrow passageways, striding past wine-drinking merrymakers, marveling at stone buildings and at rotting stairs into canals and at the growing moon.

Then, when we were deliciously aware of being lost, we came into a small plaza. A palace dominated the area, with an imposing doorway that at first we thought might be a church (maybe it was). Massive candles in red holders flickered from the balcony. The silhouette of a motionless man stood in a lighted window.

We circled around, trying to peer in through the doorways. A mystery. We consulted our map, and after some discussion, settled on a passageway that we could follow to take us to some other place. But look!

A caped man with a black hood had appeared in the square directly in front of the doorway, holding an ironwork lantern with a candle in it. We stared. He was joined by more caped men, some of them with extremely well dressed women, in sequins, feathers, and silks. They stood there, silent. We huddled in our passageway, staring.

Eventually the doors opened, the people with their lanterns filed in. The doors closed behind them.

At 6 in the morning, we took off for Venice, and then caught a bus from the airport to the Grand Canal where we got tickets to cross in a passenger barge, a Ferrovia.

Our hotel was peculiar and pleasant, with twisting passageways and stairs that went up, then down, then sideways to the rooms. Camilla and I shared a room just big enough to fit a double bed, with stone walls covered in thin upholstery fabric, a faux marble floor, and a bathroom with a nonfunctional shower. We loved it.

Then we went out! We walked and walked and walked. It was like going through a fantasy novel, with mountebanks, jugglers, peddlers and priests jostling together on the paths, and canals winding through it all.

We suddenly came upon a gondolier. No, we didn't want a ride. He left, and then we did want a ride. Camilla and Martin went rushing after him but he had vanished. Obviously, he was the one we needed. After he materialized again and loaded us into his boat, he guessed that he should speak French (he was right) and then overheard me talk to Camilla and switched to English. Alice asked him to speak Italian, which he obliged with. 

In the evening, we walked through cheerful passageways until midnight.