Carnevale a Venezia!

My most recent trip (when I starting writing this blog post, at least) was to Venice, or Venezia, on the last Saturday of Carnevale, and it proved to be the most exciting day of my semester so far. I'm not even going to try to upload all or even most of my photos in this blog post, so I will redirect you to my Picasa album for the full visual experience: http://picasaweb.google.com/HoganRI/CarnevaleAVenezia. The pics go into chronological order, from the train ride there in the morning to the ride back at night.

Carnevale, or the Carnival of Venice, is an annual festival in Venice that starts two weeks before Ash Wednesday and ends on Fat Tuesday (aka Mardi Gras). The name is derived from carne + vale and literally means "good-bye meat" since it occurs right before Lent. The Carnevale of Venice as a festival dates back as far as 1296 AD, and by the 1600s it was already a tourist attraction. Today Carnevale brings hundreds of thousands of visitors to Venice each year. Below, a crowded walkway and bridge along the Grand Canal:


Masks are and have always been one of the defining features of Carnevale. Venetian artisans craft the masks out of paper-mache and paint them by hand, and there are loads of them in shop windows and on the faces of those celebrating Carnevale, like us! (See below.) I went to Venice with Luca, Christina's language partner, Giuseppe, and a bunch of their friends, and we met Christina and Jessica when we got there.


One step above the masqueraders were those who clearly spent huge amounts of time creating a full body costume. Some of the examples are pretty stunning:


The festivities culminated in Piazza San Marco, or St. Mark's Square, which impressed me with a great sense of awe. The elegant, sprawling buildings of Piazza San Marco surround you on all sides and they struck me as the epitome of Italian style. There is no church that matches the intricacy of San Marco's facade, the Ducal Palace manages to be both simple and grandiose at the same time, and the arches of the National Library seem to go on for infinity. San Marco was also covered by the acqua alta while I was there, literally "high water," a periodic flooding of the city created by nearby storm systems. I was fortunate enough to step in the water, and had soaking cold feet for the next 10 hours. Small price to pay!

We explored for the rest of the day, took a water taxi over to the island Murano which is known for their glass blowing, and I stuck around until 11:30 PM so I could see the festivities that took place in the piazza at night! I still advise you to give my album a look, but here are some of the photo highlights: