The sun forgot to come out today!

 So what do we do when the sun stays behind the clouds?  A bit of laziness was our solution! After 15 days in Venice.......with sun every day......we are a bit lost.  The nice part of this is that it totally slowed us down, which was really nice.  We slept in late and decided that our first project of the day would be laundry.  After breakfast we headed down to the laundry room.  We stopped by to ask Carlos to give us some instruction on the washers and dryers just so we would not goof things up totally.  It all worked fine, the result being clean clothes.  A couple of the heavier pieces were still a bit damp and we have run out of coins to continue the dryer.....so we have a strange 'wallpaper' of slacks and trousers hanging from convenient spots.

Our mid-day excursion was over to the Palanca vaporetto stop.  This area is the busiest on Giudecca and also has a nice, small produce shop and the Coop store.  We timed this for lunch at one of what is considered to be a very popular local hangout......only open for lunch from 12:00 - 2:30.  The outside seating was several inches deep in overflow lagoon water, but the tables were still full!  There were wooden boxes under each table for people to put their feet on........and seawee on the pavement!

We took a look inside and saw an open table where folks had just left next to the window and went in to see if we could be seated. It worked out great and we had a wonderful lunch.  The trattoria, called Il Palanca, was packed right up until 2:30.....when we left and they took in the menus and signs!  

Very quiet day as we headed to the back side of the island and the Coop

Back to the room for resting, reading, painting and folding laundry for the afternoon.  We had tickets for a concert in the evening at 7:00, with a tour of some of the Foundation buildings at 5:00 (the Vatican Chapels........check it out online) and aperitivi at the San Giorgio Cafe at 6:00 before the conert.  It was raining, so we decided to skip the tour and showed up 30 minutes late for the aperitivi......and were the only ones venturing in!  Had a nice aperol spritz and a glass of wine, and then headed close by to the concert.  

The theater, Lo Squero, is adjacent to the Cafe and exhibition building.  It is quite spectacular as the stage wall is totally glass and the building is cantilevered out over the water.  The concert was truly amazing.......three violins and a cello.......as talented a group of musicians as we have ever heard......we mean crazy talented.  This will end up as a highlight of our trip.

After the concert we put up the umbrella and walked the 5 minutes back to the Residenza.  We had a nice dinner with wine and have just checked the weather.......sun should be back tomorrow!

A Pleasant morning at Peggy's Palace

 Actually, before we start blog adventure, we wanted to show a couple of pictures of our accommodations here at Centro Vittore Branca.  While it has a rather simple presentation on the exterior, we have come to appreciate the challenge of designing and building in the shadows of Palladio and Longhena.......and I suspect the authorities weighed in heavily with respect to design.  

On the interior, it is again simple, but decptively complex.  There appear to be about 40-50 rooms which vary quite notably in layout.......although all are planned around the same basic square footage.  They are quite efficient (rather small) in the spirit of either a dormitory or a monk's cell (the full complex was once a benedictine monastary)!  That's why we opted for the one layout here that has two connecting studios.......called the family suite.

This has worked out really well for us.  The extra space afforded by the two rooms provides us each with a bathroom, a kitchen and a desk/work space, plus two closet facilities.  I suspect we would have found the single room layout a bit tight......at best.  A couple of images probably give a better feel than the descriptions.

A BIT OF A 'MIS-STEP' THAT SHIFTED THE DAY!

Strange things happen when you least expect them.  On our way to the vaporetto this morning, we had a chance to run to catch what we thought was the vaporetto to the Zattere, which is where we needed to go for our daily adventure.  First problem was, as it turns out, it was the wrong vaporetto........second problem was that as I handed Andrea her transit pass, I fumbled it and it fell to the deck.......and believe it or not it slid right through one of the 1/4" cracks and into the water!  It is almost inconceivable that it could fall and somehow slide right through such a small opening.  We jumped on the boat, which was when we realized it was not the right one.  We had to ride over to San Zaccharia and get off and take another vaporetto linee 2 back to where we came from and beyond.

We decided to stop by the Venezia Unica office in San Marco after our morning excursion and see if we could get a resplacement card.  This was not a minor incident, as the cards cost about $150 for unlimited transit and event access.  In the meantime we continued on our way.  More about the card replacement later.

AND NOW BACK TO A VISIT TO PEGGY'S PALACE

The destination in question is the Peggy Guggenheim Art Collection in Venice. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro sestiere of the city. The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century palace, which was the home of the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim for three decades. She began displaying her private collection of modern artworks to the public seasonally in 1951. After her death in 1979, it passed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which opened the collection year-round from 1980.

The collection includes works of prominent Italian futurists and American modernists working in such genres as Cubism, Surrealism and abstract expressionism. It also includes sculptural works.  The location of the museum is rather spectacular.......being in a central location directly on the Grand Canal.  Part of its enchanting presence comes from the relatively low scale of the building(s) and the marvelous integration of terraces and small courtyards into the landscape design.  It is an oasis of green in a dense part of Venice.

The collection is principally based on the personal art collection of Peggy Guggenheim, a former wife of artist Max Ernst and a niece of the mining magnate, Solomon R. Guggenheim. She collected the artworks mostly between 1938 and 1946, buying works in Europe "in dizzying succession" as World War II began, and later in America, where she discovered the talent of Jackson Pollock, among others.

Alexander Calder

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Vasily Kandinsky

Gino Severini

Pablo Picasso

Paul Klee

forgot to look for the artist's name!

The Guggenheim Cafe for Lunch

ONWARD TO GET ANDREA'S VENEZIA UNICA CARD REPLACED

We had assumed that this might be (if we were lucky) a relatively straightforward process of going to the agency and processing a replacement card.  We headed back the the VeneziaUnica office in Piazza San Marco, as that is where we got our cards 'augmented' for a week of extra travel in October.  The ladies there were understanding, but told us they could not process the replacement card and that we had to go to the bigliterria at the Rialto Bridge.  We had no choice so hiked over there.  The density of people just increases whenever you get close to San Marco or the Rialto .  The Rialto is worse because the calles and streets are so narrow.  

We had to circumnavigate Piazza San Marco as the water was even deeper today.  About half of the piazza was covered in about 6-12" of water.  When we finally got to the ticket office, the lines were horrendous.  First it was busy because school had just let out.......and secondly, it was almost the end of the month, and everyone with passes like ours has to go to get their tickets updated for the next month.  We waited almost an hour in line......but eventually got through and Andrea got her new card.  Quite the ordeal.......and rather exhasting.  

To get home from Rialto we had to take a boat to Accademia, and from Accademia walk across Dorsoduro to the Zattere vaporetto stop, where we got a boat to Palanca.  From Palanca all we had to do was grab a #2 and go two short stops to San Giorgio.....but managed to jump on a #4.1......which bypasses San Giorgio, so we ended up back in San Zaccharia/San Marco.  We then jumped back on a #2  and finally made it to SG.  Very tiring to say the least!

Once we made it back to San Giorgio we had a brief rest and then had a lecture to go to at 6:00.  It was about a new digital art piece on the 'Mask of Time' and some form of dialogue with theater and nature.  We had met the artist a few nights earlier up on the roof terrace.  We misunderstood and thought that this was more of an exhibit that you could stop in and look at.......but in fact it was a lecture and film presentation.  We arrived at 6:35, just as the film finished and the Q+A session started.  Our italian is nowhere near sufficient to listen and understand this type of dialogue.......so we stayed for 10 minutes and then headed back to the vaporetto to go the Palanca to try to find some food for dinner.  We had missed our intended shopping time in the afternoon because of the card disaster.......so were short on food.  Luckily, the local produce market was still open and we grabbed some essentials (including a bottle of wine!) and headed home.  There was a really beautiful sunset!