Monday, we all woke up at the crack of dawn to bring out our bags to be taken down the hill to the buses. After we cleaned up the last of what was in our room, we went down into town to buy our last Molesini sandwich for our long bus ride ahead. We said our last goodbyes to the various local Cortonians (our teacher’s daughters, the angels, Gino the caretaker…) we drove away. I finally got a bit emotional about leaving this amazing place as we made our way down the hill. For the next several hours, I slept until we arrived in Padua where we visited the Arena Chapel painted by the famous Renaissance artist, Giotto. It was also the last student presentation. Afterwards, we were given time to explore this university town, also being the site of a Shakespeare play. The town was quite adorable. My favorite part was the vast open, park-like space in the middle with lots of winding bridges over small streams, statues, and pathways meandering through it. Finally, we all boarded the buses one last time to go to our last destination together: Venice. We were stuck in traffic, when all of a sudden the bus was driving on this long bridge completely surrounded by water to get to the edge of Venice, which was the last place that vehicles could go on the islands. We unloaded our bags onto these huge boats that would bring them to our hotel. As soon as we arrived, Venice seemed almost magical, with its super confusing alleyways, endless bridges, and canals. It was so refreshing to be near bodies of water and never have to worry about moving traffic. We were all quite exhausted that first night; after we unloaded ourselves into our lovely hotel, we ate some pizza for dinner before going to bed.
Tuesday, we woke up early for a full day ahead of us. Our first stop was San Marco, the beautiful church of Venice with is amazing mosaics decorating the walls, floor, and ceiling. It was especially nice to go out on the upper balcony to get a better view of both the interior of the church and the outside views of the crowded piazza and water in the distance. Our next destination was the fancy shmancy Realto bridge, with its many shops along the bridge. It was nice, but I enjoyed the less touristy parts of Venice we explored next. Venice is essentially a maze of tiny streets, bridges, alleys, and canals. It is very difficult to not get lost. We ate lunch at a restaurant with delicious pizza (yes I have eaten it for two meals in a row now), and then after we found the modern art museum, Ca’Pesaro. This museum had a lovely collection; it was also the first paintings I have seen in a long time that were not Renaissance-style, so it was a refreshing experience. I fell in love with a Pierre Bonnard piece, an artist I am loving more and more. There was also an incredible Klimt painting which I could not tear my eyes from. On our walk back to the hotel, we stopped at got delicious gelato at a place called Grom. There are Groms all over Italy, and they are so good because they use all natural ingredients. They definitely have my favorite fragola (strawberry) gelato out of all the fragola gelatos I have had. They also had pink grapefruit, which was a perfect complementary flavor to strawberry, in addition to being a perfect color palette of pinks. Everyone else then went to relax at the hotel, while Chloe and I did a little extra exploring. We walked through some residential areas (we were surprised to see people actually living in Venice; not just tourists). These areas were especially fun because all the young children were out playing together, and there were open produce markets, and overall, lots of people activity. After dinner that evening, we walked to San Marco again to see it at night. It was nice because there were small orchestra groups playing at different stops along the huge piazza and people were dancing everywhere. It was a very festive night.
After a morning walk on Wednesday, we gathered with some other people on our program to take the Vaporetti (water metro system in Venice) to a college art school in another part of town. Because the art school was near the Jewish ghetto area of Venice, we explore that part of town next. It felt so out of place, yet comforting, to see Jewish boutiques along the streets and a man saying, “Shalom,” to me. The best part was that we stumbled upon a Mediterranean restaurant owned by some Israelis. We ate the most delicious lunch there: we ordered these tiny dishes of Israeli appetizers (there were 24 of these dishes total) that filled our table with colorful vegetables, salads, falafel, pita, and hummus! You have no idea how happy I was to be eating hummus. It was a great afternoon! That afternoon (after Grom gelato of course), we went on a gondola ride through the narrow canals of Venice! I felt like I was in a movie. It was also nice to see Venice from a new perspective. In the evening my whole program met together at a bar to have the saddest happy hour ever: our final farewell to each other. The whole thing felt surreal. Basically, everyone hugged everyone goodbye, cried, took pictures of each other…I could not believe I would not be seeing these amazing people anymore, after three crazy months. It really was a blessing to work with such an inspirational group of artists. After, my dinner group made our way to La Zucca, the tiny restaurant recommended to us by some teachers who ate there the night before. It was so delicious: a superb last meal of Italy. There were really interesting things on the menu like pesto and asparagus lasagna, pumpkin suffle, fresh ricotta and tomato taglietteli…Needless to say, we ate very well there.
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