Italy Part Two

Monday, September 19
We had our first “Italian breakfast”. This was much different than we expected. Coffee shops there do not have places to sit. It’s normal to just go in, order your croissant, your “shot” of coffee, eat it standing up at the counter, then pay and head out. It was good though. This coffee was so much better than the airport coffee.

After breakfast, we headed over to see the “The Most Beautiful Bookshop in the World”- The Liberia Alta. It was quite the sight to behold. Because some of the shops in Venice can flood easily, a lot of the books in this library have become petrified and are now part of the decor. You can climb these book steps and you can also see the wall of books that are hard as stone.





There’s also a gondola parked outside of the shop that you can stand in and have your picture taken.

After leaving the Liberia, we went on a gondola ride. This was pretty cool. It was nice seeing the city from a different perspective. The boat drivers could drive boats around each other and past each other better than most people drive cars. I never saw anyone bump into each other even when passing or going around corners where other boats were.

Some other pictures of the area.

Lunch was amazing. We found this cute little shop where they made everything from scratch and got to sit outside and enjoy the beautiful weather while we ate. I ordered Gnocchi – oh my word – it’s the best I’ve ever had. I’ll never eat American Gnocchi again.


Trevor ordered a noodle dish with shrimp. We didn’t realize that they don’t shell the shrimp over there so it was funny watching him figure out how to get the meat out of the shell. He enjoyed the experience though and he said the food was really good.

After lunch and a bit of a rest at the hotel, we went back out for some more touring. The Navel Museum was very interesting. The had all kinds of ships from different eras and places.






This was a torpedo that you ride on and then jump off of before it hits its target. That’s crazy!





Trevor being Trevor… haha


The Chair of the Doge



Pens used by Nepoleon.

We went inside of a Catholic Church that you can tour. It was kinda creepy and it had a very weird feeling to it. There was glass cases with what looked like plaster bodies inside….probably of some saints that we never heard of. And of course, a spot where you could burn a candle. We didn’t stick around long.

Next stop…We had heard that the Rooftop Terrace was the best place to go for the perfect view of the whole city. We tried to get tickets for sunset, but they were all taken. So we got tickets for 4:30 and went then. It’s at the top of their mall and the view is all that it says it is.

And we are still going. We packed a lot into this day. Next stop is the Da Vinci Museum. It was full of replicas of Da Vinci’s paintings and inventions. It would have been totally awesome if they had been the real deal, but this was the next best thing.

When we left the museum, we were pretty tired and decided to head back to the hotel for the night. It had been a very long and full day. Trevor stopped at a seafood place on the way and got a box of mixed Fried Seafood. It had some sardines, calamari, and shrimp. It was really quite good.

He also got some Chicchetti – Fried tuna/hushpuppy like thing, French bread with salmon/cream/arugula, and French bread with a fish salad mixture topped with a caper. I did not have any of that but he said they were all very good.

We also had some Calzone leftover from the night before. That thing was HUGE. So we finished that off and were quite full afterwards. We chatted with the kids some and learned that some of the places we had seen were scenes from one of the Spiderman movies that had been filmed in Venice. I had never seen the movie so I had no idea. The kids found the locations online and texted them to us. How cool to have been to those spots and never even know it. haha. So of course we decided we should watch that movie so we could see those spots that the kids were talking about and maybe revisit them the next day. So that was how we ended our day. Watching Spiderman, Far From Home.

Stay tuned for Part Three