In the end, while I still walked around trying to take inn at least small portions of the Venecian beauty, Mom and Dad found an open Travel Acency which agreed to change one of their cheques into lire. Thousands, yes, millions of lire. We kids felt like playing Monopoly with all this money between our fingers.
Our path took us right back to St.Marco where we had seen a posh restaurant. Sitting down at one of the outdoor tables there, right in the middle of everything, my Dad could sense that this was an expensive place, so he only ordered drinks; two coffee for the adults, four small cokes for us kids.
How were we to know that coffee for an Italian means a miniature eggcup filled with three drops of gunpowder, the coke bottles were the smallest we had ever seen, the bill was higher then the Campanile............. This was after all Caffee Florian!
My parents are wise people. We had our drinks, we were still a happy family in the middle of a fairy tale, dad payed the bill and we went on to feed the pigeons before taking a gondola ride.
I am writing an article about Venezia for the moment, and article which I hope can be a background paper for taking tourists to Venezia, visiting hidden and unknown places in between the more famous ones. My first idea was to focus on travels in the footsteps of famous writers. Before my last trip to Venezia a few months ago I got a better idea; why not travel accompanied by all the Muses, not only litterature. So during my Venezian week in October when I travelled all by myself, I was not alone at all, I travelled with a sisterhood of spirits showing me a Venezia of litterature, music, art, food, colours, water, people.....an unconventional gathering of muses, I know, but they were there all together with me.
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The Venezia tale will continue tomorrow.
This blog already has quite alot of stories from Venezia. Here is the Florian story told in other words, with photos from my birthday last year, here is a cute tale of pigeon feeding on St.Marco.
The Blue Bookshelf is focusing on books from and about Venezia these days. From there is is easy to find the books and order them yourself.
