From Morandi to Mondrian

A clue about the weather
in Murano...

Venice is all about island hopping and today we hopped over to Murano and Burano.  Murano was in Winter mode - lots of open shops but no real demonstrations of glass blowing.  We did see an artisan in action making a vase and a horse but were rather sad to find out they were just for the demonstration and would crack immediately - the vase blew up as we stood there.  We didn't wait to find out the fate of the horse.  A craftsman was making roses for his shop out of tubes of glass, using his studio inside the shop.  Overall we managed to find quite a number of things that we liked despite the plethora of hideous monstrosities for sale (just being made of murano glass does not make something beautiful).  Hideous monstrostity covers the glass reinterpretations of "The Scream", "Weeping Woman", "The Kiss" and something vaguely Chagallian - we were searching for a baseball bat at this point.  Bringing our purchases home may be a challenge...we are thinking of taking out shares in a bubble-wrap company.

Burano was quite a different experience.  A wonderland of colour - like walking through a giant gelato store or a rainbow or a box of textas ... there are really no words to describe it. 

 

One of the colourful characters
that you see in Burano
(do you think she matches her house?)



The place was almost deserted - not even the Australian tourists we keep tripping over everywhere we go - and we wandered through the coloourful alleyways and along the canals enjoying the visual feast (worried I would never get Jo out of there she loved it so much - Jen).  We tried to decide what colour we would paint our house if we lived there and ended up planing our own street that would be painted in nothing but black and white ( our rebellious sides appeared). 

The boat rides to and from the islands had the ethereal quality that we have come to expect from Venice and we decided it all looked like the best sort of watercolour or the way Morandi would have painted landscapes if he had taken a break from still-lifes.

We ended the day with dinner at a fancy restaurant above a wine bar in the Rialto Mercato, then a cruise down the Grand Canal in the nuimber 1 vaporetto - magic!  What a way to end a day.