This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.
Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!
Most of the major tourist sites in Venice require advanced booking and take a couple of hours to explore. We visited quite a few of those, as you’ll discover in other blog posts, but today I want to focus on some of the brief stops we made between those more planned out places, because they were amazing, too, and often taught us just as much about Venice without requiring reservations or huge amounts of time.
For example, one morning we made a point of arriving at Rosa Salva right as it was opening for the day. It’s a pastry shop that has been operating in Venice since 1879, and it’s a great place not only to hear the Venetian dialect, but also to have a traditional Venetian breakfast. The place was quickly filled with customers, but they may or may not have been speaking the local dialect. My Italian is so elementary (actually, not even that. More like toddler-esque.) that I wouldn’t know the difference. But still, listening to locals going about their business was a great way to start the day.
The traditional Venetian breakfast is, hands down, a cornetto. Cornetti (the plural) look a lot like croissants, but as this article explains, they are quite different. Cornetti are softer, less flaky, and much sweeter. They’re quite often filled with flavored creams (pistachio is popular) or jams. Delicious.
I have to admit that it took me a while to get used to the sugary breakfast that all Italians seem to favor. Between cornetti and gelato, I’m astounded that they don’t all have diabetes. But according to this article, they eat a lot less sugar than we Americans do during the rest of the day, and in fact they are much less prone to diabetes and obesity, and have a longer life expectancy. We could learn a lot from the Italians.
So off we went, cornetti in hand (mine with apple jam, Dear Husband’s with vanilla cream) on a little side trip to see the spiral staircase at the Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo. While “palazzo” is often translated as “palace”, sometimes it would be better described as a grand urban residence about the size of a Victorian townhouse. There are hundreds of them all over Venice. Any self-respecting member of the patrician class had one.
This particular palazzo, though, is unique in that it has a beautiful external spiral staircase that was built in 1499. The staircase is prominently featured in Orson Welles’ 1952 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello. The palazzo, and in fact that branch of the Contarini family, got the “del Bovolo” designation because of this staircase. Del Bovolo means “of the Snail” in the Venetian dialect.
I learned about this gorgeous staircase as I do a lot of unique things that most tourists know nothing about: the Atlas Obscura website. You can purchase tickets and climb to the top, and the guidebooks say there’s a spectacular view up there, but it’s hard not to find a spectacular view from the top of anything in Venice. There’s also often an art exhibit, which my guidebook says is underwhelming. Because of that, and the fact that the place has very strange and limited hours that didn’t fit our schedule, we chose to just admire the staircase for free from outside. It was definitely worth that visit, but we weren’t heartbroken about avoiding the climb.
About a 6-minute walk from the spiral staircase, if the angels of navigation are watching over you, you’ll find yourself at the Campo Santo Stefano, one of the biggest squares in Venice. If the narrow alleys start to get to you, it’s always a bit of a shock and a relief to come across the odd open space, but that’s not what brought us there.
No. We were there to see yet another oddity suggested by Atlas Obscura: The statue of Niccolò Tommaseo. He was an Italian linguist, journalist and essayist in the 1800’s. Impressive enough, I guess, but not something I would normally go out of my way for, except for the fact that Tommaseo’s statue, built in 1882, 8 years after his death, has an unintentionally hilarious feature.
It seems that this statue, which is built out of Carrara marble, was a bit top-heavy, and required extra support. So, given the man’s profession, the artist chose to create a stack of books standing behind him. Nice touch. But the books’ placement, and the fact that they’re partially covered by the man’s coat, gave the locals just cause to give it the nickname “caga libri”. Bookshitter. Honestly, how could I be in the vicinity and not pay a visit to the bookshitter? I would never have forgiven myself.
Don’t ask me why, but with that visit, we worked up an appetite. And we were lucky in that our AirBnB was about 2 blocks away from the best street food in all of Venice. Really. Just ask their website.
But in fairness, I tend to agree. At Acqua e Mais, for a ridiculously reasonable price, you get this paper cone filled with an assortment of fried seafood straight from the lagoon. Shrimp, octopus, sardines, you name it. Plus a fried wedge of polenta, the ultimate comfort food. It was so satisfying that my mouth is watering just thinking about it. I wish I had thought to take pictures, but the ones on their website are pretty accurate.
As a bridgetender, I am, of course, fascinated with bridges, and Venice has them all over the place. (No drawbridges, though.) But aside from the most famous two bridges in Venice (Rialto and Academia) which span the Grand Canal, two lesser-known ones caught my eye, so we made a point of visiting them when we were nearby.
The first one was the Ponte dei Pugni, or the Bridge of Fists. (If Atlas Obscura sold stock, I would definitely invest. They’ve already enriched my vacations with suggestions like this one a thousand times over.) I suspect the majority of the tourists who cross this little bridge don’t know its history, but it definitely has an interesting one.
It seems that the various neighborhoods of Venice used to be controlled by clans, and starting in the 1600’s, each year from September to Christmas, it was tradition for these various clans to meet their neighbors on these bridges and have epic fist fights. At the time, these bridges had no railings, so people would do their best to knock their rivals into the nasty canals. It sounds brutal, and city authorities really didn’t like the practice, but at least they weren’t using sharp, fire-hardened pointed sticks like their ancestors did, so they tended to look the other way.
There are many such bridges where these fights occurred, but the Ponte dei Pugni is the most famous. At the top, you can see 4 marble footprints where the fighters would stand at the beginning of their bouts. They would draw huge crowds along the canal banks, and the rich would sponsor the best fighters.
The last of these fights occurred in 1705, when it turned into a riot, and people began throwing roof tiles and pulling knives. All the subsequent bloodshed caused these events to be outlawed. There’s a famous painting of one of these battles, called La Guerra Dei Pugni by Antonio Stom. The original hangs somewhere or other in the city. I’ll include a picture of it here. You can also find an extremely faded printed banner of it hanging beside the bridge. But if the painting is at all accurate, these events caused a heck of a ruckus.
From fisticuffs to f…. Well, let’s just say… another bridge. (Thanks once again, Atlas Obscura!) This bridge reveals even more about the history of Venice and how social norms were perceived and how deviance from those perceived norms was discouraged.
Dear Reader, I give you Ponte delle Tette, or the Bridge of Tits.
I should start off by saying that most people think of Venice as an island, but really, it’s 118 small islands surrounded by canals and linked by 400 bridges. Islands make it easy to segregate people, and Venice definitely knew how to do that. In an earlier post, I discussed how all the glass artisans were segregated to the island of Murano and not allowed to leave for fear of giving away their secrets. I’ll be getting into another Venetian segregation that came to have worldwide ramifications in a future post, but right now I’ll talk about their segregation of sex workers.
By 1412, it is estimated that there were more than 10,000 sex workers scattered throughout Venice, so city officials decided to make a better impression for visitors by creating an official decree that all sex workers had to move to one area, the Carampane di Rialto. There, they could ply their trade, but they were required to adhere to a strict curfew. (So the men would get back to their wives and children at a decent hour?) They also could not leave that island except on Saturdays, and if they did so, they were required to wear a yellow scarf so that people could distinguish them from “marriageable” women, who wore white scarves. To break these rules would result in a brutal flogging.
At the same time, though, they were encouraged to drum up business. (Cassanova was a frequent customer, which surprised me. One would think, given his reputation, he would not have to pay.)
Here’s where the story gets even more strange. In the 16th century, these women were losing so much business to homosexuals that they approached the Doge and asked for help. Well, my goodness, homosexuality! We can’t have that, now, can we?
The Doge, in his infinite wisdom, decided that the perfect solution would be to allow these women to put their breasts on display, to attract men away from these homosexual acts (because, yeah, that’s all it takes). As you can see from the photos, there are windows around the bridge, and, you know, location, location, location. The women were also allowed to line up topless along the bridge at night holding lanterns. In fact, the government paid them to do so. This was also a way to exclude transvestite prostitutes. Because we can’t have those, now, can we?
This “red light district” segregation went on until the 18th century. At that point, the government decided to let the younger, more attractive prostitutes work all over the city, assuming this would bring in tourists. (Apparently prostitutes were viewed as attractants rather than repellents at that point. What a difference a few centuries make.) The older or less attractive prostitutes remained segregated. (It makes you wonder who decided who met the attractiveness and age standards. Was there one particular official assigned to that task? It’s a safe bet that a lot of money and/or favors changed hands.)
Now the bridge seems just like any other in Venice. If only it could talk. I’d offer up my services as the ghost writer for its autobiography. Really, I would. I suspect it would have a lot of tea to spill.
On another day, we got up early and went to the nearby Rialto Market. Think farmer’s market, Italian style. We got there as they were setting up. The fish market area had some insanely large fish and some creatures I have never seen before in my life. I must have been too stunned to take pictures. While one vendor was putting ice in his booth, we watched a seagull stealing fresh octopus from the crate behind him.
We got sun-dried tomatoes, and tiny, fresh strawberries called frangolini which were the sweetest strawberries I’ve ever tasted. As this was Dear Husband’s first trip to Europe, I sent him into a little shop to fend for himself. Trial by fire. Despite not knowing the language, he managed to purchase some fresh mozzarella and salami. Then we went to a bakery and got some really good, crusty bread.
As we were going to be doing a lot of outing and abouting on that day, we decided to pack a picnic lunch, so the plan was to run back to our AirBnB and make sandwiches before setting off. But my back was in agony, so DH had me sit on the steps of the Rialto Bridge, and he took the ingredients home, stopping on the way, with his newfound foreign traveler’s confidence, to pick up some olive oil at a co-op. He made sandwiches with the crusty bread, salami, mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes, and olive oil. Fangolini for dessert. It was to be the best picnic I ever had. (How lucky am I?)
Meanwhile, I was sitting on the steps of the Rialto Bridge, giving my back a break and watching the people come and go, and enjoying a lazy morning in Venice, when I was rather aggressively told to move along by someone wearing a vest that said “Respect Venice”. Now, please understand that there was no place to sit anywhere in the area, unless you planned to buy something at a restaurant. No place at all. And the stairway was extremely wide. I was not restricting anyone’s passage. And I’m pretty sure I don’t look like a vagrant. But no. I could not sit there. So I got up, and moved to another part of the bridge, and stood. But my back was still killing me, so I leaned on the railing. Again, Respect Venice told me to move along. The only way I could linger in the area was if I stood without leaning on anything, and adjusted my position a foot or so every minute or two.
I know what it’s like to live in a city plagued by tourists. I lived in Historic St. Augustine for many years. So I understand how hard it is for locals to remain patient and accommodating. But under certain circumstances, a tiny bit of flexibility is warranted. And if you don’t want people sitting on your stairs, then provide benches somewhere. End of rant.
When DH got back with the sandwiches, we headed out to a bookstore that I had been looking forward to seeing, because it’s so unique. (Yep. Thanks, Atlas Obscura.) It’s called Libreria Acqua Alta, or High Water Bookstore.
As everyone knows, Venice is prone to flooding. Water and books don’t mix. So this cozy, overstuffed bookstore has leaned into its circumstances, and has all its books in rowboats, bathtubs, plastic bins, and one long, narrow room is dominated by a long, narrow gondola. Outside on their patio, books that weren’t so lucky, the ones too water damaged to sell, have been made into a stairway that leads you up to a nice view of the adjacent canal. There’s also a “fire escape”, which is basically a window onto the canal. (There was a boat moored below, but who knows if it’s always there.) Apparently, the place is also known for being welcoming to cats, but the only one I saw was sound asleep, out of reach, behind the cashier.
I could spend the whole day in a unique bookstore, but we headed on from there to a church that I read somewhere is considered by many Venetians to be the most beautiful one in the area. This is Italy, land of the beautiful churches, so I was intrigued. And this little church does not disappoint.
Santa Maria dei Miracoli was built in 1489, simply to house the image of the Virgin Mary that can still be seen behind the pulpit today. That image is said to have worked miracles. Hence the name of the church.
It’s a simple church, in that there are no pillars and it’s all one big, uncomplicated room. But the barrel-vaulted ceiling, with its 50 square panels, a different painting in each one, is more ornate. (You get a better sense of it in the video short taken by DH that I’ll include here.)
Santa Maria dei Miracoli’s current condition is thanks to a 4-million-dollar restoration that was taken on by the Save Venice organization. The original budget was 1 million, but then, when they removed the marble cladding, they discovered that the marble was infused with 14 % salt due to flooding over the years, and it took a special cleaning process to remove that salt. If they had not done that, the marble would have burst. They also restored the ceiling. You can see what a great job they did by looking at both the damaged marble, below, and an image from the 1973 movie Don’t Look Now, in which Donald Sutherland walks past the church. It’s quite obvious that it was in a horrible state back then.
I felt more at peace entering this church than I did in any other church in Italy. (This church, too, appears In Orson Welles’ Othello, by the way.) I was sitting in a pew and gazing up at the ceiling when a woman came in with an extremely well-behaved Italian Greyhound. She sat down, and the dog perched prettily on the kneeler. Unfortunately, it moved before I could aim my camera.
From there, we headed to a nearby piazza to enjoy our picnic lunch. It had the added bonus of having one of Venice’s many deliciously fresh water fountains on hand, so we refilled our bottles. It was a tiny space that, as it turns out, sits right across from a carabinieri substation. This could have posed a problem, because technically you’re not supposed to picnic in Venice. I can sort of understand that. Tourists would probably leave food and garbage all over the place, and they’re trying not to attract pigeons. But the restaurant food here is expensive. We didn’t leave food or garbage. But we had to eat surreptitiously, which is kind of hard to do when surrounded by pigeons (which I swear were already there). Fortunately, we saw no one emerge from the substation, so we were not fined.
While eating our delicious lunch, I reflected on the fact that there’s so much to see in Venice! It would be easy for a tourist, pressed for time, to rush from one popular venue to the next, never leaving the “tourist triangle” of the Piazza San Marco, the Rialto Bridge, and the Guggenheim Museum. If you do so, you will enjoy those places, yes, but you will have missed out on so much.
To get a sense of the real Venice, you should allow yourself some time to go to some of the quirky, less visited places, and you should also get lost in its many neighborhoods. Wander down its spiderweb of narrow alleys, cross over its bridges, sit in its less frequented piazzas. Do so without a destination or plan. Just let the spirit move you. (Except avoid the area around the Train and Bus stations. It’s the only ugly part of the city, in my opinion.)
Everywhere you look in Venice, you’ll be treated to lovely canal vistas (both Grand and otherwise), creative and unusual art and architecture, unexpected open spaces, and churches galore. It is a city that was built with beauty in mind.
I discovered that I had a lot of pictures that I wanted to share with you that didn’t exactly fit with any particular post. That inspired me to create a slideshow video for the first time. I have a newfound respect for people who do this type of thing on a regular basis. It’s a lot harder than it looks. But considering the fact that it’s my first effort, I’m kind of proud of the way it turned out. Let me know what you think!
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