The unique city. The most beautiful city in the world. Venice. Anna takes us there. Takes us along Venice’s canals. Under its bridges. To its palaces and churches and houses and museums and cafes. Takes us there at the most special time in the Venetian year. We learn how to “read” the city. We meet Venetians. We learn about the culture. We move through centuries of history, look at the architecture, get shown round famous interiors, see wonderful paintings. Seeing Venice with a great guide – it’s as good as it gets. Another way of putting that: if travel experiences were paintings, this one would be a masterpiece.
“this Venetian gothic style”
“wherever you pull up outside a house you’ve got posts”
“you wanted to have your home on the Grand Canal”
“there are only a few places where you can walk along the Grand Canal”
“ours is the building with the posts that are in red and white”
“wherever there are green awnings we know that’s a museum”
“we’re looking at the 1700s”
“your main rooms were never on the ground floor”
“Wow, takes your breath away”
“look how clever, these are not pillars, they’re painted to make it look grander”
“we bumped into some elegantly dressed people”
“masks allowed them to do things that they wouldn’t normally do”
“a beautiful dress typical of the 17th century”
“the less you know about somebody the more you want to know about them”
“this mask is called a moretta”
“you put the button in your mouth and that means you can’t talk”
“you were allowed to show off as much cleavage as you liked”
“it’s a rhinoceros”
“the painter we most associate with Venice”
“the canal has not changed very much”
“with Venice you think, ‘Wow, it looks exactly the same’ [as a 300-year-old Canaletto painting of Venice]”