Day Twelve -- A Sunday in Venice

Today we headed for the Jewish Ghetto in Venice. This enforced area for Jews was enacted in 1516 under the Venetian Republic. Jews were locked onto this small island at nights and on Christian holidays. It was the first ghetto. Napoleon tore down the gates in 1797.  But during WWII, the Jews were rounded up from this ghetto and sent to Nazi concentration camps. There is a memorial on one of the walls with bronze plaques that depict the atrocities that happened to these Venetian Jews. 

 

Today it is a bustling place with a synagogue, a kosher hotel and a kosher restaurant. In the corner of the square it is a bit jarring to see a booth that houses Italian police. We left the ghetto in a more solemn mood and joined hundreds of other people out for a Sunday stroll.  At one point I put my arm around Gayle to whisper something in her ear and brought my hand back covered in pigeon poop. This is our third incident of pigeon poop.  They are everywhere. So we headed back to our hotel room to wash up. Then we headed to S. Maria Della Salute Church because I read they were doing a 3:30 p.m. organ concert of Bach music.

 

The concert was lovely and the setting was amazing.

 

Plus the church has a splendid view of the canal.

 

We noticed that the building next door had an intriguing statue outside and we walked over to take a look. It is called "The Fate of a Banished Man." 

 

Next we took the vaporetto to San Marco. We were hoping to get a gondola to take us under the Bridge of Sighs but the Sunday crowd there was overwhelming. The line for a gondola was long and the weather was sticky. We opted to get back on the vaporetto and leave the crowds behind. Unfortunately they were also on the vaporetto. We had noticed a statue several times as we have gone up and down the canal and it reminded us of "The Fate of the Banished Man". So we got off at the San Samuele stop to get a closer look.

 

We couldn't get close enough to see its name and so we tried to skirt the building to get a closer look.  When we came around the backside we saw the most amazing statue inside. We snuck inside to take a peek. Wow! 

 

We took a flyer and decided to do some research about it when we got back to our room. It is an exhibition called "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable" by Damien Hirst.  Now we were hungry. We found an outdoor restaurant in the Campo San Toma.

 

While we were eating a man proposed to a woman in the Campo San Toma. I don't know how big of a surprise it was since there was also a professional photographer there to record every moment.  We were tired by then and so decided to call it an early night. With gelatos in hand we returned to our room to blog, share photos and do research on Damien Hirst. It turns out I have seen a piece by him at the Broad. It was a sheep in formaldehyde. I was not impressed. But this exhibit looks amazing. I guess there is another art museum in our future.