Thursday, September 25, 2014

Mom's 1953 Europe Road Trip - Those Places Thursday: Venice

From Mom's Europe trip diary, in the "PLACES VISITED" section: 
September 25, Friday – Venice, Italy
Day was very cloudy.  Walked up to St. Mark's Square [Piazza San Marco], went inside the church [Basilica di San Marco], saw the clock on the adjoining building [Torre dell'Orologio] strike ten, then went for a walk along waterfront.*  Came back to hotel,** lunched, and then took a boat to the Lido [di Venezia], Venice's summer playground.  Came back to the hotel and had tea.  After supper went to bed.

* This was probably the Zattere, a waterfront promenade next to the Giudecca Canal.

**The Regina Hotel, where Mom and her friends stayed, was located on Venice's Grand Canal:
Gerrie Guokas looking out of the Regina Hotel onto the Grand Canal, Venice, Italy, September 24 or 25, 1953 -
 photo by Joye Murphy or Sylvia John on Gerrie's roll of film






This hotel, a former palace converted into a hotel in 1900, still exists today. It was combined in 1979 with the adjacent former Hotel Europa & Britannia to form the Hotel Europa & Regina:
Hotel Europa & Regina (Venice), [12 December 2011] / Abxbay (Own work) / CC-BY-SA-3.0


The night before, my mother and her friends had taken a gondola ride shortly after they arrived:
Grand Canal from gondola, Venice, Italy, 24 September 1953 / Geraldine Guokas Pape / CC BY-NC-ND 4.0




They'd also walked to St. Mark's Square, which they returned to today, where they heard the Torre dell'Orologio (at left in the photo below) strike ten, and toured St. Mark's Basilica (at right in the photo below):
Venice Scene [in the Piazza San Marco, Torre dell'Orologio at left, Basilica di San Marco on right; 1 July 2007]
Forrestn (Own work) / [Public domain]


The basilica is especially known for the shimmering mosaics of gold glass tesserae covering the ceiling:
St. Mark's Basilica, Venice, detail of its mosaics [2005] / Ricardo André Frantz [Tetraktys] / CC-BY-SA-2.5

The walk along the waterfront was probably on the Zattare, pictured below, along one of the canals:
Venice - Zattare [November 2004] / Nino Barbieri (Own work) / CC-BY-SA-2.5

And Lido might have looked like this, outside the Hotel Excelsior, built in the early 1900s:
Beach cabins in front of Hotel Excelsior (Lido di Venezia) [18 May 2014] / Florian Fuchs/Wikipedia / CC-BY-SA-3.0

This is the 49th in a series of posts transcribing entries in my mother's 1953 Europe Trip journal.


© Amanda Pape - 2014 - click here to e-mail me.

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