The Beautiful Canals of Venice

Today we drove to Venice and it was the perfect day. The skies were cloudless, the sun was shining and there weren't too many crowds. We arrived in Venice around 1.30pm, caught the Vaporetto to our hotel in San Samuele and were in awe of just how much of a treasure Venice really is. It's simply beautiful... Makes you warm and fuzzy inside...

We arrived in our hotel, and behind a wrought iron door we found this...

We walked through the narrow streets and discovered the lovely bridges over the canals... and then we found Mario. Mario was our gondola captain, who was 5th generation gondola captain and rode his Dad's gondola. He was sweet and told us some of the history of Venice, and pointed out palaces and buildings of interest, including Cassanova's house, Napolean's palace, Marco Polo's palace, the gondola factory and some 16th century churches.

We then went for a walk to San Marco, which was another over-supply of luxury wares, stunning jewellery and labelled brands, and people wanting to be seen paying 17 Euro for a gelato... but on the nice side, there were small quartets of musicians filling the air with light jazz and classical music.

We had a lovely dinner outside tonight in this tiny little street next to another Australian family and talked for about 3 hours before calling it a night. It was just a beautiful setting to be in.