20100525 – Venice and Burano

We got lots of sleep last night. We need it after being up for 32 hours. Break fast at our hotel was at 7:30. We had juice, muesli, yogurt, filled croissants and coffee.

We left the hotel, caught the vaporetto and cruised down the Grand Canal to Piazza San Marco. Our destination was Burano.  This meant that we had to catch a different boat to get there. We just missed the 8:30 departure, so we killed time by walking around the neighborhood northeast of the piazza.

We caught the 10:30 vaporetto and sailed for Burano. We got there about an hour later after making stops in Lido, S Niccolo and one other. The weather was sunny and warm so we were in shirt sleeves.

Burano is known mostly for its lace, its colorful houses and its leaning church tower. It also has lots of eating places but not too many tourists.

We wandered through the town looking at the houses and lace shops. We went into the church and saw a restored painting by Tiepolo of the crucifixion. When we got hungry, we ate lunch at Restorante al Veccio Pipa. We had an enormous amount of good food ordering three plates which we shared. Our first course was pr0ciutto  with avocados. Then we had spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce and frito misto – a huge pile of lightly fried seafood. Everything was very good, but it was too much to finish.

After lunch we walked back to the vaporetto stop and took the boat to the Fondamente Nova stop in Venice. We walked across that neighborhood, caught another vaporetto at Ca’ D’Oro, got off at Rialto Mercato and walked to our hotel where we took a rest.

Before we went to dinner, we had to get out and take a walk to keep from falling asleep. Our destination was a pizza restaurant that was recommended by Rick Steves. His directions to the restaurant were hard to follow so I got out my GPS and it guided us right to it. When we got there, it wasn’t open yet so we wandered around in our jet-lag daze.

At 7:00 we were seated in the outside terrace of Osteria Trattoria Al Nono Risorto. We both ordered a pizza – Ann’s was vegetarian and mine was sausage with gorgonzola cheese. I also had a beer ala spina. The pizzas were good but a little too large to finish.

When we walked back to the hotel, we walked to its other side into Campo Cesare Battisti Gia Della Bella Vienna. We wanted to see where the crowd noise was coming from that Ann heard last night. We discovered that this is a hot-spot for the young crowd for Venice’s version of a pub crawl. There are several small Cicchetti bars that sell wines and toothpick munchies. People socialize at the bars until late at night. We recognized a couple of bars that we went to with the Bensons a few years ago.

It’s now closing in on 9:00. We are going to bed for a long sleep to try to shed our jet lag.