Travel and Tweets

The Doge’s Palace is an impressive historic building with a humongous set of brick and marble walls.

It is located in St. Mark’s Square next to the Basilica San Marco.

The Great Hall has intricate multi-colored mosaic ceilings and  shiny gold accents. Many of the paintings in the Doge’s Palace were painted by Tintoretto and Titian.

There were tons of secret passages (the way that you can find out how many of them there are is to do the Secret Itineraries Tour yourself). One example of a secret passage in the Doge’s Palace (see if you can spot it in the picture below) is in the Council of Ten Room, connecting the main palace to the first set of prisons.

I did the tour and it was very interesting. I even got to open the secret door and confuse the people walking on the other side of the Council of Ten Room!

There was a ton of old armor, swords, axes, and shields on display.

To exit the building we crossed over the canal on the Bridge of Sighs, circled through the second set of prisons, crossed the Bridge of Sighs again, and left the building (with a lot of pictures).

Later, I saw the Bridge Sighs from the outside when I was walking across an otherworldly crowded bridge across the same canal. 

Murano is a totally awesome island in Italy. It is home to the famous Venetian glassblowing; I got to see a cup and a horse being made. I also got to try glassblowing myself. At first I was nervous because I did not think that I could do it (I thought it would be hard to blow the bubble, and if I somehow could accomplish that, I thought that it would completely explode). But then it turned out to be super fun. I made a big fat glass bubble, and it stayed together like it was made of diamonds!

Then, they dunked it in the bucket of water and it went bang, crash, bop, kaboom! If you want to see a picture of the glasses that we bought, check out the featured image. I also bought a black dragon figurine with huge white fangs. We cruised in on the water bus and got a tasty lunch (I got a panini pressed salami sandwich… yummy).

Murano is a unique and amazing Italian wonder.

Venice has boats instead of cars, so I decided to write a post about it. I got to ride on a ton of boats in Venice.

The water taxi is the most expensive, the fastest, and the coolest boat in Venice (but the other boats were awesome too). As we zoomed out of the airport on the water taxi (aka speed boat) to the dock in front of our hotel, I looked out of the window and felt the wind in my hair. We saw one gulp of shags (aka cormorants) and three cotillions of terns (cotillions is not a number, but instead it means a group of terns).

I took the water bus on a zig zag path across the grand canal. The water bus is like a bus, but in the form of a boat! We also took the water bus all of the way out to Murano (learn more about Murano in my post about it coming soon).

Gondolas may be the most well known boat in all of Venice, but they are also the most easily confused with the traghetto, which is a larger canal transport boat. A gondola can have an ornament on the front, it can be a hawk, an angel, a flag, a vase of flowers, or countless other things (it is usually an angel though, just like the one on the gondola that we rode). I recommend taking the gondola early in the morning so that it is not crowded… but not too early or it won’t be open! A traghetto is an elongated gondola with two drivers! Traghettos only cross the grand canal. You can use them instead of bridges.