Day 8, Friday, Venice

The forecast for Venice this Friday was bright sun with cool temperatures.  Sounded perfect, until we left the hotel and it started to pour.  The forecasts here seem very unreliable.  A fast walk to St. Mark's square started the day. Fast is the only pace our group has been subject to and the grumbling is starting to get louder. 

Doge's Palace

Fortunately, Massimo, the guide we met at St. Mark's for a tour of the Doge's Palace and St. Mark's Cathedral was wonderful and walked SLOWLY while showing us each room of the Palace. 

There were plenty of places to sit as he talked, so I was relaxing and enjoying his lectures. The word "Doge" means "Duke" and each Doge was elected by a council for life.  The Palace was the seat of government and the present palace (many previous incarnations were destroyed by fire) has three wings, one for the Church and two for the government.  The rooms or chambers were stunning, the clicks incredible, and the crowds a bit dampened by the rain, so we could get a good look at each item that Massimo was explaining.  

St. Mark's Cathedral

Massimo continued his tour at St. Mark's. 

The Cathedral is awe inspiring with unbelievable decorations.  The most remarkable are the mosaics where each stone is smaller than a finger nail.  Unfortunately one cannot sit in here, and there are no photographs inside, so I'm starting to fade again. 

Jewish Ghetto

Fortified by a wonderful lunch, we make our way to the Jewish Ghetto of Venice. There we toured four synagogues built by the various groups of traders and merchants that settled into the ghetto. 

Jews were thought to be in the region of Venice as early as the first century CE, but the real influx of Jews came in the 11th century as the Venetian Republic became a great center of shipping and trade between East and West. Their number and importance grew in Venice, so that in 1516 the Venetian Republic declared by law that all Jews must live in the area of the "geti" or furnaces where the former ironworks had been.  The Jews agreed to this, agreed to set up money lending shops (at the request of the Republic), and agreed to be locked in at night in exchange for the freedom to worship as they wanted.  

We visited four of the five synagogues that were established by the Jews - two Ashkenazi (one from German Jews), one Spanish (from the Jews expelled from Span), and one Levantine (Jews from Greece and Turkey.  The Ghetto was dissolved in 1866, after which time Jews could live anywhere in Venice.  The synagogues of Venice are the oldest in Italy, except for the synagogues of ancient times in Rome, all of which have been destroyed.  The Melton group will attend the fifth synagogue tonight for Kabbalat Shabbat services and then have dinner at a Kosher restaurant in the Ghetto area.  

I'll end with a picture of one of the canals.