San Marco Plaza, Basilica, Doges Palace, Venice, Italy

After lunch at Gam Gam, most of us went our separate ways with plans to meet for dinner. We headed to San Marco Plaza...our chance to see it in the daytime. It was now easy to see all of the tables that were lined up, ready to be walkways when the area flooded. Every 3 to 4 tables one was removed, as a passageway, and stacked up on a nearby table. You can just see the legs of an upside table to the right in the photo.

There was no line to get into the Basilica. The main area is free but there is a fee for each of the separate areas, like the Treasury. We just wandered around the main part of the church and left. We have seen much more beautiful ones inside than this one. Although the outside was pretty spectacular.



We did pay 12 Euros each for admittance to the Doges Palace. That was worth it. The courtyard is absolutely magnificent. Many of the rooms are HUGE and the paintings on the walls and ceilings were really something to see. We had about an hour to tour the palace. Not enough. And we are not the 'read every label' tourists. The place is just so big! Be aware that there are staircases to climb and one seems to just go up and around and up and around and.......After the hour, I had enough and found it difficult to find the way out. We had to cut around ropes to get back to the staircases taking us back down to the courtyard.



At this time of year there are not a lot of tourists. (Typically the rainy season, the plaza had been flooded the week before we arrived and it was raining the day we left.) Still it was amazing to meet up with two of the couples from our group, who just ended up being in the plaza same time we were. The lack of crowds made it easy to spot someone you knew.