Our absolute favourite museum in Venice is the đź“ŤPeggy Guggenheim Collection. Established by, you’ve guessed it, Peggy Guggenheim, in 1951 and housed in her former home, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. Because of you’re going to have a home in Venice, why not make it a Palazzo. The museum houses an impressive collection of modern art, including works by Picasso, DalĂ, Pollock, and Kandinsky and is considered one of the most important museums in Italy for modern art. What is there not to love?
The museum hasn’t changed much from our last visit other than the temporary exhibit showcasing Jean Cocteau a versatile French artist part poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist, and critic. While we were not fond of the homo-erotic art relying too much on the theme of a single part of the masculine anatomy, his film and art did leave us impressed with his body of work.
Leaving the museum with our cultural batteries recharged, we headed for Apéro along a canal. Our plan was to repeat the apéro followed by the crossing of the lagoon for the view on top of the tower, but with the added crucial stop by an ATM between the drinks and the tower. We had a specific location in mind but found it full with a line up and people settled in with full glasses. The wait just seemed too long for us, so we opted to walk to another cafe a little further down the canal to sit and enjoy the sun, warmth and the breeze from the canal which were all the key elements of our plan.
We made the all-important ATM stop before catching the vaporetto to the Isla di san Giorgio Maggiore and the church bell tower. The view was worth the one boat ride and entry price but not the two we ended up paying. Still, all was done within the 75 minutes validity period of our tickets, saving us from purchasing a return ticket.
On our way home we headed to a gelato. The 17:00 gelato is a tradition we usually keep to when visiting Italy, but we’ve been swapping it with Apéro these days. Nevertheless we, were done with our day so we decided to follow tradition. Being recommended by the Routard, we expected a good experience but were disappointed. A dead giveaway of a bad gelato place is if they don’t have one serving spatula for each gelato container. The second giveaway of a bad gelato is if they use ice cream scoops instead of spatulas. This one had both. Being recommended, we did not check before ordering and regretted it.
To make up for the bad experience, Karine wanted to stop by a pasticceria (bakery) for some form of sweet pastry or cookies and a little extra more to keep us fuelled during tomorrow’s train ride. Turns out the selected place was complicated and required too much conversation to figure out what each pastry was and which would not kill me. Discouraged, Karine crossed the street to a tourist shop and spent $80 on chocolate. These stores are designed to part you with your money and that they did. The cookies and chocolate were even mostly good.
We ended the day at another small restaurant with a small menu made of local…ish ingredients: 📍La Bitta. What we were served was fine, our server had never met a pair of Canadians and widely underestimated the amount of food we can eat. She flatly refused to take our order of 6 dishes and limited us to 4. Everything was good but we were disappointed. We stopped at the 📍Grom a gelateria chain, for a quite acceptable revenge gelato before heading home to pack our bags for our next destination.