Circle Tour

On Friday the 14th of March we got up early and caught the bus for the Salzburg Hauptbahnof, where we boarded the train for Innsbruck, then got another south toward Florence. The Florence train (actually it runs from Munich all the way to Rome) was, let's say, the least modern of all those we've been on so far. It seemed old, not all that clean, and the toilets offered this view of the railbed. We were rather tightly seated in a six-seat compartment, but the worst thing (considering our hopes of soaking in the view through the Alps) was that the windows were so dirty that we could barely see through them at all.

But we did make it to Florence, and tugged our rolling bags down the streets to the Hotel Enza with only a little difficulty finding it. (You may be able to see "Enza" below the "Hotel" here if you squint.) The room was nice and the location convenient--which meant we only walked three or four or five miles the next day . . . but the first night, we just went to find a good place to eat. Not far away was a restaurant with a 13-euro "touristica" menu (several courses, limited options, but usually a bargain price). We had good pasta and excellent Italian beef.

Florence was something--vast churches, squares, museums, palaces, and more art than a person can stand. We got in to the Accademia museum to see the famous David, just by going early in the morning and walking right in, which was quite cool. He's very large and impressive, especially his right hand . . . we couldn't take photos there, but there's a copy outside near another big building not too far away.


We also saw the Duomo (enormous, the 3rd largest church in Europe, or so they claim), and crossed over the river on the famous Ponte Veccio, an arched bridge with little jewelry shops all along it, and saw about 34,000 more Renaissance paintings at the Pitti Palace, where they have an amazing number of paintings and statues and so forth crammed into a large number of not-so-large rooms. Then we decided to have ice cream, and somehow managed to buy it at what must be the most overpriced shop in all of Italy--18 euros for two big cones. It was delicious, though . . . late in the afternoon we went back to the Duomo and found that the lines were gone and we could actually go inside--it looks like you could put a football field inside with no trouble. We had a late dinner that night, savored it all, and managed to get back to the Hotel Enza in good shape.

The next day it was time to catch the train to Venice, which turned out to be much nicer than the one to Florence. The island of Venice has a causeway built out to it for trains and cars, but it only goes to the north side, and from there on everything moves on foot or by boat. We got day passes on the vaporetto (water taxi) and made good use of them. Marlyce had found a hotel we could afford on the south side of the island, so we took the next vaporetto around to the Zapore stop,. rossed one bridge, walked a hundred meters to the little white palace with the flagpoles in front, ducked down a four-foot-wide alley for fifty yards or so, came out on another canal, crossed two more little bridges, and there was the hotel (six rooms) just around the corner. Out the window was a little canal and a sign on the house about an actor name Cesco Baseggio who lived there from 1911-34. On the right you can see the view from our window.

Venice is something else--canals and little streets/alleys in a hodgepodge everywhere. You can't really go in a straight line anywhere, you just head off in a general direction and keep going. Most things aren't very far apart, though. We were 20 minutes from St. Mark's Square, half an hour from the train station on foot, and we walked back there on the day we left so that we could see the Farni church, where they have Titians and Donatellos still in their original places around the interior, not crammed together in some museum. (The day before we got lost trying to find the church, when I made the mistake of trying to navigate using the map, and arrived too late to see it.)

It's all disappearing into the sea, of course, but quite slowly, and it's all so beautiful in its state of gentle decay that it's rather stunning.



Everywhere you look there's a photograph begging to be taken; I was grateful to have a digital camera with a very large memory card, but still sometimes I just put it away and looked for a while. We took the vaporetto down the Grand Canal the first evening and it was, indeed, grand. And we toured the Doge's palace and crossed the enclosed Bridge of Sighs, which leads from the palace to the prison across the canal. Here's a view of it from outside. (Byron mentions it in a poem: "I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs, / a prison and a palace on each hand . . .")

The next day we went out to Murano, another island where they do a lot of glass-blowing. We saw one of the groups still making fancy pieces by hand, and bought a little fish for the mantle at home, and had lunch on a canal there . . . and then took the vaporetto back, and saw some more art, and wandered around the city some more. In the courtyard (right next to St. Mark's cathedral) there are big columns that look cut off, because they've sunk and had the courtyard raised around them several times. The food in Venice was wonderful and expensive, but who can complain? As long as you try not to think about the euro/dollar conversion ratio, it seems almost plausible.

And then there was Duino . . . we got there via train, bus, and another bus by mid-afternoon of the next day, found our little hotel with only some difficulty (we always seemed to have to wander a little before getting to them). Then the only person at the hotel was a maid who spoke no English and was unwilling to do anything beyond giving us the keys. M. tripped and fell, bruised her elbow and scraped her knee and was out of sorts for a while, and there was a cold, bitter wind blowing though it was clear. But eventually we got ourselves acclimated, and the owner showed up and made us feel more welcome. The Adriatic is astonishing, and was especially so the next day, when it warmed up and we toured the castle (there's Rilke memorabilia everywhere, and lots of other writers and musicians stayed there--Lizst, Mark Twain, etc.). We bought some cheese, crusty rolls, chocolate, fruit, pesto, and wine at the grocery and had a picnic feast out on the rocks of the Rilke Walk, which runs for a mile or two from Duino along the coastal cliffs to Sistiana, the next village. Life is hard.

The next day our train for Lyublyana didn't leave until late afternoon, so we caught a bus to Trieste (just 10 km or so to the east, around the bay) and wandered around there for a while. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire for a long time, and has some of the same feel as Salzburg, but with the ocean right there it has its own feeling too. Here we are taking one of those camera-at-arms-length disgusting tourist photos, in front of some large and beautiful building.








We made it to Lyublyana--just a couple of hours to the north and a little east, in Slovenia--after dark, but managed again to find our hotel without too much trouble, aided by the fortress that sits up on a hill in the middle of town--also kind of like the one in Salzburg--but lit up beautifully in blue after dark. The hotel (the Pri Mraku) turned out to be rather more plush than the others we stayed in, with lots of built-in dark cabinetry and a big breakfast included.

The next day we took the funicular train to the top, walked around the fortress, saw a pretty interesting 3-d show on the history of the city, and climbed to the top of the tower, where the views were again quite something. We spent some time wandering through the big open-air market in the center of town, where they were selling everything from vegetables and fruit to clothes and shoes, as well as Easter candles and flowers. (Here's a photo of the back of it, and the river that runs through the center of town.) Marlyce found a brown shirt of just the sort she's been searching for ever since we arrived, and I got a nice sweater.

The weather turned cold and damp, and we found ourselves retreating to the hotel for naps and rests (and more tv in English than we can get in Salzburg) at several points. Still, we had a grand local soup (apparently improvised, since the waiter couldn't really tell us what it was) for lunch--8 euros for both of us, the bargain meal of the whole trip. Then we went out looking for another cheap meal (tired of the 50-euro dinners and still nearly full from lunch) and ended up in a quite refined upstairs dining room, after the first several places we came across turned out to be serving only drinks. We ordered salads and they turned out to be grand meals in themselves, M's with salmon and mine with steak.

The next day we woke up to snow falling, which made the trek back to the train station pretty damp. We walked through the market again, and despite the moisture M found someone selling the beautiful skirt with lots of needlework that she had spotted the day before. It was quite something watching her with a sort of curtain wrapped around her so that she could try it on . . .
The train ride back was fine, and the windows were clear this time, so we got to enjoy the little villages and snowy mountains along the way. We even discovered that the train stopped at the Salzburg South station, close to our apartment, and just as we came to the bus stop we saw our bus pulling away--and the driver stopped to let us on--so we made it back in very good time. As much fun as we had, it was nice to see our building, and open the door to find everything waiting for us. And that's certainly a long enough report for now.