Venice April 3&4

What an end to our cruise! Empires of the Mediterranean, indeed.

By the end of our two days in Venice, I am now understanding more about how the shape of ancient Western civilization has led to our own. This was a big picture learning for me. I have both a new appreciation for the Venetian empire and some new examples of civil religion run amok.
When I was first learning about the religion of Ancient Greece (and subsequently Rome) it was easy to dismiss the society as "pagan" i.e. unenlightened. But in the religion of the Venetian Empire which was Christian, I found a fascinting example: the Christian appropriation of ancient Greece's civil religion. It was as if the Venetians picked up the religion that Greece had formed and translated its symbols into Christian ones. The stories that Venice told about itself were clothed in the iconography of Christendom and served to justify their accumulation of wealth and power for over 1,000 years.
When I put together a presentation about this trip, I will use that thesis to tie it together.
The wealth of Venice is amazing. Even in its decrepit current state it is easy to imagine its former glory. Our boat tour of the grand canal took us by palace after palace, all built by the people who ran the interlocking structures of religion, government, and business. It was all the same thing. That accumulation of wealth and power was no accident, but a well-honed structure designed for stability and control. The unifying figure of the doge--elected for a lifetime by an incredibly complex process--was simultaneously the head of the church, the government, and the economy. An even more complex system of rules and protocols kept him from exploiting that concentration of power too much. In this way, the Venetians constructed a society that lasted from the 9th to the 19th centuries.
It was an amazing accomplishment. Yet, included within it, were the seeds of its own destruction, as with all empires. We who live within the succeeding empire of the Western world should take heed, lest we think our own empire can last forever.

In any case, Venice was an amazing place to experience. After checking into the hotel, we took the hotel water taxi to St. Mark's square and did some exploring on our own. I tried to find the shop where I remembered purchasing a set of crystal wine glasses over 40 years ago. There were many beautiful shops selling expensive glassware as well as lots of other luxury items, but I couldn't find the one I remembered. The square was mobbed with people, including lots of school groups again. We did a bit of shopping, and then ducked into St. Mark's cathedral. We did not have to pay to visit the main chancel, but did pay to see the reliquary, the area containing the most valued saints relics and gifts to the church from centuries of pilgrims who offered their prized objects to the doge's church--gold cups and plates, reliquaries containing parts of saints' bodies. The lateness of our start meant that we had to plan for a next day of sight seeing. Rol did a really smart thing and bought us a full day's worth of experiences for the next day: a gondola ride, a guided tour of St. Mark's and the Doges' Palace, and a guided boat ride along the Grand Canal.

The gondola ride, put us into a traffic jam of gondolas weaving in and out of narrow canal spaces between buildings. I even recorded some gondoliers' singing. Ours didn't sing, but he warned us to sit still and not move about the boat. He steered and pushed with his oar and sometimes his feet pushed off buildings on the side. Every building is on a water front on at least one side, and the most important buildings are along the Grand Canal. We met up with some folks we had seen on the cruise, and had some snacks and coffee before seeing St. Mark's again (with a guide, this time) and the Doges' Palace, now a museum. Both of these buildings and their contents told the story of the way the Venetian Empire was maintained with the aid of Christian symbolism. They were decorated with stories from the bible, but definitely built to impress. St. Mark's holds the purported body of Mark, the evangelist, stolen from Alexandria Egypt by Venetian merchants who brought it back to Venice to "protect" it from Muslim raiders in 832. It lies under the altar, where it has been protected ever since. Hence the whole church is the reliquary. It is decorated with stories to tell the Christian gospel, from the Hebrew scriptures and stories to the Gospels and the Book of Revelation.

In the Doges' Palace, we saw art collections and items to take your breath away. In one room, a whole collection of coins, coins minted by centuries of Venice's economy. But a small collection of coins seem to have come from 1st century Palestine.

One was a coin from the Roman empire, with Caesar's image on the front. I can imagine that a powerful nobleman from Venice had it in his collection, and used it to illustrate Jesus' answer to the religious authorities in Jerusalem in the Temple: "Should we pay taxes to Caesar or not?"
Jesus answered, "Whose image is on that coin?" The image on the coin says that it belongs to Caesar. The image on a human being is the image of God. So render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar and to God, what belongs to God. Other amazing sights: reconstructed apartments of the Emperor Franz Joseph and his wife, Elizabeth, the same "Sissi" who had constructed the resort home that we visited on Corfu; an 18th century library with bookshelves, precious volumes and a large globe; samples of all kinds of luxury goods from Venetian merchants from the 10th to the 19th centuries. The collection is so vast and so varied, that I can imagine centuries of museum curators' working to preserve the items and catalog them.

After our overwhelming walk through the Doges' Palace, we had one more amazing tour--a narrated ride along the Grand Canal, where more sights and displays demanded our attention. Writing about all the things we saw would take up more time than I have to describe. Suffice it to say that the cumulative wealth is still amazing. We strolled some more around the area of the secretive shipyards, where the Venetians protected their shipbuilding expertise by hiding it. The compound is a navy installation now.
The hotel that we'd been staying in is a converted pasta factory. It is on the Guidecca island, across from the main area of the city. The next day, we took another water taxi to the airport for our flight to London.  From there, I would be going on to Scotland while Rol returned home.
[Note: I'm finally posting this near the end of my sabbatical, April 24, on events that happened near the beginning of the month.]