What we saw

We did what we usually do in Venice, a lot of pleasurable and aimless wandering and a little specific viewing of favourite places and new events. We wandered over the wooden bridge to look at the collection of Venetian paintings in the Accademia.

And then along to Ca'Rezzonica to admire the Longhi paintings. It is the museum of the Venetian 18th century, housed in a handsome Baroque building with a beautiful ballroom, decorated ceilings and windows facing the Grand Canal. It's easy to imagine the life of the Rezzonica family living there in style in the eighteenth century.
From there we walked back over the bridge to look at a small temporary exhibition of African art

which was almost overshadowed by the beauty of the room in which it was displayed.

I like to see art in intimate, personal places and for this reason the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery is one of my favourite galleries in Venice.

What makes it so good is that it is art collected by one person, showing her area of interest and enthusiasm and in many cases still hung in the same position in her former home. I do wish that they had kept some furniture in place and a few plants to give the feeling that she had only just left the room.

There were such delicious things to see

enjoyable even for a woman on painkillers with an aching back and a thumping headache!

In the courtyard leading to the Grand Canal there is a Marini sculpture that always makes me smile.

 It causes many different  reactions in people that are as amusing as the sculpture itself!

Well, really!

We had the added bonus of seeing a temporary exhibition of fin de-Siecle Parisian avant-garde's paintings, drawings and prints - a real treat!

Lovely Vallotton prints

and other delights.

In 1867 the American consul in Venice, Dean Howells, described the month of October as,

 "the month of the Sunsets and of the English....  the party which fills the gondola with well-cushioned English middle age, ruddy English youth and substantial England baggage. We have learnt to know them all very well: the father and the mother sit upon the back seat, and their comely girls at the sides and the front. These girls have the honest cabbage-roses of English health upon their cheeks; they all wear little dowdy English hats, and invariable waterfalls of hair tumbling upon their broad English backs...."

'Dowdy little hats' - the cheek of the man! The well-cushioned parents and the comely girls are all now back in their respective homes, but we had a lovely time all together in Venice!