European Trip 12: The Doge’s Palace, Museo Correr and St Mark’s Basilica, Venice.

Wednesday 2nd October 2024 (day 19)

A wet day was forecast, so we had booked tickets to tour the Doge’s Palace. Unlike yesterday, when we just wandered around, we made our way straight to the palace, just off St. Mark’s Square, passing through some of the poshest shopping streets along the way. Most of the high-value brands are represented:

…and many more. We walked through the arcade around the edge of St Mark’s Square, and passed Cafe Florian, where live music was being played.

The Doge’s Palace:

The Doge’s Palace is amazing and huge. It demonstrates proof that Venice was at one time, one of the most wealthy cities in the world.

To the modern eye, everything is OTT, with as much gold-leaf decoration as could be feasibly included everywhere you look.

Every wall and ceiling is decorated and there are so many rooms, you cannot keep track of where you saw what. The following images are therefore a cross representation of the whole and are labelled only where I am confident of what/where they were.

Many of the ceiling paintings very cleverly show a scene as if looking up from below:

There is one immense room which has a painting of “Paradise” on it. The artist was selected by winning a competition in the 16th century, when the palace was rebuilt following a fire.

As with many such buildings, the palace was also a prison, housing the unfortunate people in the attic area, but as a result of overcrowding the mortality rate was high, so they built a purpose-built prison on the other side of the canal with a bridge to it; the “Bridge of Sighs”. We crossed the bridge, which has windows on each side, affording the prisoners a last view of the outside world.

In this purpose built prison, there was a supposed limit of 10 inmates to a cell and to be fair, there was probably room, but conditions were not just a function of population density.

Museo Correr:

The Museo Correr, is a museum of art and antiquities, at the far end of St. Marks Square from St Mark’s Basilica. We paid a quick visit after leaving the Doge’s Palace.

As it is housed in the building which surrounds the square, the interior is worth seeing in addition to the art-works.

One thing became obvious by its absence on many of the statues though:

The collection is large and varied. There are just a few examples here:

The original owners of this apartment must have been very wealthy as there were many richly decorated rooms:

St. Mark’s Basilica:

Towards the end of the day, we noticed that the usually long queues for entry into St Marks, had disappeared, so we went in. This is another astonishing building, which is quite dark inside, but when you get used to it, you realise that every part of every wall and ceiling is covered by mosaic and all the floors are laid with geometric pattern of coloured marble.

Outside on the balcony:

So we reached the end of a tiring day. We feel as though we have ticked-off the main things on the list of places to visit in Venice, but there is plenty more scope. Tomorrow is another day.