A Walking Tour of Venice — Venice, Italy
This morning, we opted to follow a leisurely pace. (We are on vacation after all!) We slept in and enjoyed a light breakfast in the apartment while we washed a load of laundry. By the time we headed out for sightseeing, it was close to 1pm.
The weather was warm and sunny, which made for a perfect day to do a walking tour of Venice. In addition, the vapretto company was on a one-day strike. There was only minimal or "essential" vapretto service in operation. All the more reason to let our feet do the walking today.
We strolled along the boardwalk from our apartment in Castello and headed towards San Marco. At one point, we decided to avoid the craziness of San Marco square and ducked into one of the alleyways. Venice has a million of these tiny alleyways and even though we were armed with a map, we knew that it did not contain every single alleyway. This did not dissuade us one bit. Instead, we wanted to be adventurous and see where the day would take us. Although the alleyways and streets of Venice are not exactly grid-like, we found that there were enough marked signs for major landmarks to guide us in the general direction we wanted to go. And every now and then, we would check our map to get a sense of where we were.
Our first destination was the famous Rialto Bridge. It offered us stunning views of the busy Grand Canal. From there, we explored the sestiere of Santa Croce in search of one of the restaurants recommended by our AirBNB host. Unfortunately, by the time we found it, the restaurant was closed until dinnertime. Instead, we stopped by another nearby restaurant for to enjoy panzerotti, gnocchi with crab, and siciliana pizza on an outdoor patio.
After lunch, we wandered through the alleyways of San Polo, where we saw one of the many churches (Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari) and one of the schuola (Scuola Grande Di San Rocco).
From there, we ventured into Dorsoduro and stumbled into Campo Santa Margherita, a neat little area with shops, kiosks, and cafes. Our favourite part was strolling along the boardwalk of Zattere, which is situated along the south border of Dorsoduro. The views along this point were so picturesque and gorgeous. We decided to take a little break at an outdoor cafe and sat on its patio to people-watch, and enjoy some refreshing gelato.
By this time, it was approaching dusk, which was the perfect time to take photos of the wonderful scenery around us. We continued to stroll along the Zattere and reached the end point, whereby we could see San Marco on the other side of the Grand Canal. We kept snapping several photos as we made our way across the Grand Canal, through San Marco square and back to Castello.
One of the nice features of our day was that we were able to avoid the massive tourist crowds. The neighbourhoods we toured consisted of fewer people, which allowed us to fully enjoy the ambiance of Venice.
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