Hi All!

Yesterday, I had a great day in Venice! It was especially nice, because the day I arrived it basically monsooned all day, and I think there was more water coming from the sky than there was in the Venetian canals! Nevertheless, I did do some walking around (mostly to get to indoor sights) and then the rain finally stopped around 5 pm. Yesterday, however, was a perfect day, and I've posted a lot of photos from when it wasn't raining.

I hadn't fully appreciated before that basically from around 900 - 1500 Venice was not only a major power and trading city, but a vital link between East and West. While most of Europe was still struggling in the dark ages, Venice continued to be connected to the Christian Byzantine Empire in the East and to trade with Muslim countries. This is reflected in St. Mark's Cathedral (San Marco) which really looks like a Byzantine Church with architectural themes that sometimes resemble a mosque. Of course, as Rick Steves points out in his travel books, this is partly because the Venetian army sometimes ransacked the East. In fact, a couple of St. Mark's most prized treasures were the result of the looting during the Crusades, when the Venetian army sacked Christian Constantinople, and carried off things from Hagia Sofia. So, in one sense, visiting St. Mark's was a good prelude to my visit to Istanbul in a few weeks. (Hopefully, Istanbul is also done with rain for a while!)

All in all, Venice was a fascinating city of canals, culture and history. I'm glad I was able to stop there, and I spent my last night on the San Marco piazza drinking chianti and listening to live music. It was a blast!

This morning, I caught a train to Rome, and already have managed about 7 hours of touring, including the National Museum, the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain. One of the things I'm already noticing about Rome is that everywhere you look you find bits and pieces of ancient history. It's hard to put it all together, but by focusing on a few things, I'm starting to get a sense of how this city evolved and changed over more than 2000 years. One thing that I hadn't expected to see so dramatically at the Pantheon was the change in street level. You walk down into the Pantheon. It's clear that when the building was first built, you walked up the steps to it. In fact, you can still see the steps in the excavations on the side. But, like pretty much everywhere else, if you want to see the "actual" place, you have to go down 10-20 feet. (I saw the remnants tonight of a racetrack built by Emporer Diocletian. The shape of the track is still visible in the modern piazza, but at one end you can see the excavations of where the track actually was -- and it's 25 feet beneath current street level.

Tomorrow, I'll be heading to the Colluseum, the Roman Forum and the Vatican. I finally have a hotel with wireless internet in the room, so I hope to be able to post some more tomorrow!