Planning a trip to Venice and Florence in early April. Can anyone tell me if there is major work going on on any of the monuments requiring scaffolding? Duomo, St. Mark's Basilica, Santa Croce, ect. Thanks.
Contact one of the photographic leaders for Italy at www.phototc.com/ They lead trips to those areas all year. They may know. Have fun, they're great places to photographic.
As of last week: SM Basilica has some scaffolding – no full face shot possible. The façade opposite the Doge’s Palace is draped in a George Clooney ad (Omega, I think).
Atop the winged lion column in the Piazzetta, there are two seagulls but they may have flown off by now.
The signage from a year ago on the Bridge of Sighs is gone so it’s a clean shot. The stage erected a year or so ago in Piazza San Marco is gone, so shots facing away from the Basilica are workable. If you haven’t checked it out, you can tour the museum above the Basilica including out on the front veranda beside the 4 horses – great view of the square and shooting location.
The Frari is clean outside and in – I’ve never known it to be otherwise. Pay to enter and shoot handheld, it’s an amazing space.
If you’re traveling by train, the first church (don’t recall the name) walking northeast from the station (a hundred feet or so from the train station) is one of the highest density-per-square-foot marble sculpting efforts in humankind. I think only open for viewing in the early evenings.
As of last week: SM Basilica has some scaffolding – no full face shot possible. The façade opposite the Doge’s Palace is draped in a George Clooney ad (Omega, I think).
Atop the winged lion column in the Piazzetta, there are two seagulls but they may have flown off by now.
The signage from a year ago on the Bridge of Sighs is gone so it’s a clean shot. The stage erected a year or so ago in Piazza San Marco is gone, so shots facing away from the Basilica are workable. If you haven’t checked it out, you can tour the museum above the Basilica including out on the front veranda beside the 4 horses – great view of the square and shooting location.
The Frari is clean outside and in – I’ve never known it to be otherwise. Pay to enter and shoot handheld, it’s an amazing space.
If you’re traveling by train, the first church (don’t recall the name) walking northeast from the station (a hundred feet or so from the train station) is one of the highest density-per-square-foot marble sculpting efforts in humankind. I think only open for viewing in the early evenings.
I have a business trip to Prague this spring and was thinking about hitting Venice while there. How many days does it take to "do" Venice well? I like to walk the neighborhoods and see the outdoors rather than the museums.
What focal lengths are needed to do well there? For business trips, I normally get by well with my Fuji X100, which has a 23mm lens. Somehow I think that might not cut it in Venice.
23 is a decent length for a lot of what you’ll experience. So much of Venice amounts to tight spaces so for panoramic, get-it-all-in but without too much distortion, 20 to 30 on a crop sensor is pretty workable. I just had a look over one of the cards used last week and my shots were heavy in the 18 to 80mm range – a small handful down to 10mm and a larger number out to 200. There are definitely vistas where you may want the reach of 150mm. For what it’s worth, I carried the 70-300 with me the entire time but was never inclined to use it.
As for time required to see Venice, if possible I’d say two or three days to explore 10% of the city. You can walk from one end of the city to the other in 30 minutes but it’s a very dense web of charm and architectural wonder.
If time and money were no object, I could easily spend two or three weeks there happily experiencing and shooting a remarkable city.
If you’re going to really walk the city, you’ll almost certainly get lost. Even the smartest mice can’t navigate the Venetian maze flawlessly the first time. Keep a map with you and try to have the map function on your phone enabled, and so on.
23 is a decent length for a lot of what you’ll experience. So much of Venice amounts to tight spaces so for panoramic, get-it-all-in but without too much distortion, 20 to 30 on a crop sensor is pretty workable. I just had a look over one of the cards used last week and my shots were heavy in the 18 to 80mm range – a small handful down to 10mm and a larger number out to 200. There are definitely vistas where you may want the reach of 150mm. For what it’s worth, I carried the 70-300 with me the entire time but was never inclined to use it.
As for time required to see Venice, if possible I’d say two or three days to explore 10% of the city. You can walk from one end of the city to the other in 30 minutes but it’s a very dense web of charm and architectural wonder.
If time and money were no object, I could easily spend two or three weeks there happily experiencing and shooting a remarkable city.
If you’re going to really walk the city, you’ll almost certainly get lost. Even the smartest mice can’t navigate the Venetian maze flawlessly the first time. Keep a map with you and try to have the map function on your phone enabled, and so on.
Please let me know if you need any more info. ...Show more →
Thank you very kindly for the reply. I am very tempted to stop by this amazing city. Sounds like my X100 can do the job. I like to travel light on business trips. No worries about getting lost. That is half the fun for me.
One last question, how hard it is for an English only speaker to do something like order food at a restaurant? I eat a vegetarian diet and will have to communicate more than usual perhaps when getting food. Will this be difficult in the smaller, local shops?
Because Venice is such a tourist destination, restaurant and nicer hotel staffs speak more English than in many areas of Italy. Shopkeepers are hit and miss but over the course of a dozen trips there I’ve never had much problem.
Nevertheless, you should probably get your key words translated before the trip and pick up an Italian/English dictionary (dictionary.com says you’re “agg. vegetarian”).
I’ve no doubt you’ll be very happy you decided to make the time to go. It is quite a place.
As your trip gets closer, feel free to PM me if you have any other questions.
rattymouse wrote:
I have a business trip to Prague this spring and was thinking about hitting Venice while there.
Having been to both Prague and Venice, I certainly wouldn't shortchange Prague for Venice. With the possible exception of Florence, Prague is the most magical city outside of the U.S. that I've visited.
StarNut wrote:
Having been to both Prague and Venice, I certainly wouldn't shortchange Prague for Venice. With the possible exception of Florence, Prague is the most magical city outside of the U.S. that I've visited.
JMO
Thanks for your feedback. What do you find magical about Prague?
rattymouse wrote:
Thanks for your feedback. What do you find magical about Prague? Prague is an old city (not much as old as much of Venice, but old), with the heart of the city being authentically unchanged for a very, very long time. It is, by any standards, beautiful, and its history is interesting to me. Its old buildings are in very good condition. We were there during horrible weather in December (a year ago; airports closed, etc.), and it was still absolutely magical to all of us (my wife and me; our three adult children, and my mother). Our impression was perhaps colored by having fairly modest expectations (my wife and I grew up on the 1960s, and thought of Prague as a somewhat colorless, iron-curtain city; shows how much we knew!).
My wife and I visited Venice in the summer, at the end of our first trip to Italy about five years ago. We found Venice to be very disappointing, for a host of reasons (by comparison, we're utterly charmed by all the rest of Italy we've seen):
Venice stank, rather horribly. I can only guess that the canals do double duty as their sewer.
It was very expensive, and the food was, at best, mediocre, in a country where the food everywhere else is fabulous, and prices quite reasonable.
The city is depressing; it's badly in decline, rapidly becoming deserted of actual residents. Most of the old buildings are in a horrible state of disrepair, and many are abandoned.
Imagine Williamsburg, Virginia crumbling and stinky; that's my takeaway from Venice.
I know that many find Venice romantic and interesting; I will return to Prague long before I ever return to Venice.
rioni wrote:
Star, you should try Venice in the off season (Winter/Early Spring). It's a whole different experience.
I have been told that the stench is predictably bad in the warm weather, and not a big deal mostly when it's not so warm.
But lack of stench won't mask the sad, distressing fact that Venice is a dying, decaying city. It's possible I'll go again some day, but there's so much of this world (and our country) that I haven't seen, or would rather see again, that revisiting Venice is very low on the priority list, to me.
