27th Anniversary Trip to Venice

May 11-18, 2025

May 16, 2025 marked our 27th Wedding Anniversary, so what better way to celebrate than a week in Venice, Italy?

Our home from home for the week was in Campo Santa Maria Formosa, near the intersection of three of Venice’s six sestieri: Castello, Cannareggio, and San Marco.

May 11

After landing in Venice we were picked up by car that took us to the dock where our water taxi took us to our hotel. We checked in and proceeded to one of my favorite nearby monuments, the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli.

After enjoying our refreshments, we took a short walk to the Ospedale, Basilica di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, and Verrochio’s equestrian monument to Colleoni.

After a short rest, we took a lovely stroll to and through my old neighborhood, between Santi Apostoli, Campo dei Gesuiti, and the Fondamente Nuove, ending with dinner at my old favorite local Trattoria Casa Mia; still delicious, though Gabrielle and Giulietta, the proprietors in my day, have long since retired.

May 12

Our first full day in Venice naturally began with a walk to Piazza San Marco and a turn around the square and the Piazzetta.

And after our passeggiata around San Marco, what could be better than breakfast at Caffe Florian?

Fortified with delicious cappuccino and a cornetto, we set out by vaporetto to Palladio’s church of San Giorgio Maggiore on the eponymous island across the Bacino di San Marco. While there we took the elevator to the top of the church’s campanile for extraordinary views of the city.

From San Giorgio Maggiore, we got back on the vaporetto to go two stops to the Isola della Giudecca to see Palladio’s other great Venetian church commission, the Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore.

From the Redentore we took the vaporetto back across to le Zattare, walking with a brief detour by the lovely gondola cantiere to church of San Sebastiano with its painting and fresco cycle by Veronese.

As we had walked and ridden vaporetti from east in Castello where we were staying all the way west to the other end of Dorsoduro, I thought it would be nice to go home via vaporetto the entire length of the Canal Grande, so we walked a little further to the Stazione Ferroviaria and took the number 2 for the scenic route back to San Marco.

May 13

Tuesday was our day to visit the Accademia and see some of the great monuments of Venetian painting: Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto. So we walked via San Marco, Campo San Stefano, and over the Accademia Bridge to the galleries where we feasted our eyes and reminded ourselves why we fell in love with art and art history in the first place.

May 14

Having been back in Venice for a few days, my sense of direction was coming back, so I was ready to take some of the more complicated and beautiful routes around the city. So we set out for one of our longer walks, over the Rialto Bridge, through the market and through Sestiere San Polo to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco with its truly incredible cycle of paintings by Tintoretto, my personal favorite Venetian painter.

After the Scuola Grande, we walked around the corner to the Chiesa di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, with the great Titian Assunta altarpiece, the Monument to Canova, et. al. From here nostalgia truly kicked in as we briefly visited Ca’ Foscari where I studied thirty-three years ago.

May 15

After a cappuccino and cornetto, we headed to Piazza San Marco to visit the always somewhat overwhelming Palazzo Ducale, with the great rooms decorated by Tintoretto, Veronese, and other Venetian masters. Rooms overflowing with history, as this was where the Doge, the Consiglio dei Dieci, the Maggior Consiglio, the Senato, the various courts, met and ruled the vast Repubblica Serenissima di Venezia for centuries.

Following our morning spent in the Palazzo Ducale, we crossed the Piazza San Marco to the Museo Correr, where we enjoyed the Neoclassical Rooms, with sculpture by Canova, historical Venetian collections including maps, books, and decorative arts, the sale monumentali of the Library, and the Pinacoteca with reconstructions of the historic architectural interventions and gallery hangings by Carlo Scarpa.

We then decided to take the long way home, walking first to the Arsenale, stopping in front of its gate to enjoy the lovely quiet of that part of Venice and having a coffee at the bar there. We then walked back to Campo Santa Maria Formosa via my favorite quiet streets in this sleepy and still workaday part of the city, past San Francesco della Vigna and through Santi Giovanni e Paolo.

May 16: Our 27th Anniversary!

As we had the big night at the Opera this evening, we decided to take it easy during the day. So after our breakfast we headed across the Campo di Santa Maria Formosa to the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia, a private cultural center which houses a library, a historic house museum, a contemporary art exhibition space, a caffe, a bookstore, and a lovely garden. The building also contains beautiful twentieth-century architectural interventions by architects including Carlo Scarpa. The current exhibition was an excellent monographic show on John Baldassari.

Then to Verdi’s opera Attila, which premiered in this very house, Gran Teatro la Fenice, in 1846. And, appropriately for a wedding anniversary, it even had a happy ending. After a prosecco in the lovely bar room, we proceeded to our box in the third circle. La Fenice is without doubt the greatest venue that I have ever attended an opera in; it’s tiny size and great acoustics really brought the music to life. The splendor and beauty of the place really brought us back in time, and made us feel for a moment like members of a family in the Libro d’Or. The singers and musicians were terrific, and this will be one of the most memorable evenings of my life.

May 17

We began our last full day in Venice with a walk to Ca’ d’Oro, which unfortunately was mostly closed for renovation, but the cortile was open and we were able to enjoy it’s exquisite beauty and the lovely view of the Canal Grande and the Rialto fish market.

From the Ca’ d’Oro we walked around the corner to the Traghetto Santa Sofia, where we took the traghetto which is Italian for “ferry”, but in Venice refers to a gutted gondola that is used as a shuttle for crossing the Grand Canal at various points between the three bridges. Passengers typically stand as they are rowed across. The service costs two Euros. We crossed here, getting off the boat at the fish market and walking through San Polo, into Dorsoduro by Ca’ Foscari to Ca’ Rezzonico, the Baroque palace on the Grand Canal designed by Longhena and now housing the museum of the 18th century, decorative arts, and a pinacoteca, or picture gallery of Venetian painting from the 16th through 18th centuries.

From here we decided to walk to the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Salute, the subject of my undergraduate senior thesis. Along the way we stopped at the Saudi Arabian pavilion of the Bienale d’architettura and saw an interesting exhibition on contemporary Saudi architecture and design.

From the Salute we proceeded back home taking the longer route over the Accademia bridge and through Sestiere di San Marco, through Campo San Stefano, Campo Sant’Angelo, Campo Manin, and back to Santa Maria Formosa.

May 18

I took a quick walk to San Marco to take my leave of San Marco and San Giorgio. At 11:00 our water taxi picked us up, took us through canals by Santi Giovanni e Paolo, out along the Fondamente Nuove, by the cemetery island of San Michele, past Murano, to the airport. Then on a plane and back to real life after a truly splendid and memorable anniversary celebration.