Spent the 2019 Winter Solstice in
Skopje, Macedonia. Two weeks later I winged to Istanbul and hopped on a connecting flight to Venice. I am back in my usual digs in Venice, an old nunnery which has been converted into a hotel. The building, once the Palazzo Rizzi, is located on the Fondamenta Rizzi, about a five minute walk from the Piazzale Roma, where all buses from the mainland terminate. The hotel is still owned and operated by St. Joseph’s Daughters of Caburlotto, the religious order that occupied the nunnery. As befitting an old nunnery, the rooms are tiny and spartan, to say the least. My bed is about three feet wide—all that was needed by a nun—and my ankles hang over the end, but the room does have a desk and enough electrical outlets to keep all my devices topped up. What else does one need in a room? There is also a midnight to 6:00 a.m. curfew. You cannot enter or leave the building during those hours. This is of no importance to me. Venice is not a night-life city by any stretch of imagination, and I myself would never have any reason to stay out past midnight. The Fondamenta Rizzi, the walkway on which the hotel is located, does not even have a convenience store and is as quiet as a tomb after nine p.m.
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| Fondamenta Rizzi on the right (click on photos for enlargements) |
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| The old Palazzo Rizzi, later a nunnery and now a hotel |
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| Venice |
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| Venice. The leaning bell tower is not a photographic distortion. It actually does lean that way. |
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| Canal of San Luca |
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| The Piazzetta in Venice |
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| The Piazzetta in Venice |
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| Piazza and Church of San Marco |
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| Grand Canal from the Rialto Bridge |
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