Andy asked the question, “ What does one do on repeat visits, especially when you are there for several days?”. I’m really not sure, and we do seem to enjoy ourselves. We have stayed in Venice now eight times, totalling about eleven months. Our first visit was for six nights, the next was for two months. Venice really tugged at our heart strings when we left after that first visit, and we are hooked.
On that first visit, six days in December 2006, we did most of the big ticket sights, Basilica, Ducal Palace, Accademia gallery, Rialto, Murano. So we saw a lot, but didn’t really see Venice. So the next trip was much more relaxed, it was two years later, we were much better informed, we had read a bunch of fiction and non-fiction about Venice, and we were on for exploration. We discovered small galleries, workshops, crazy sights, visited supermarkets and butchers, re-visited the Accademia and Ca’ Rezzonico and walked all over the place. When you have the time to stop and look for a while, everything changes. So you watch the fire brigade pumping out a sunken boat, or guys pouring concrete, pulling up pavement, delivering a piano.
The other thing of course is that Venice is not static, it does not exist in a 500 or 1000 year old time warp. Exhibitions change, places get demolished or built. And so we have some favourite places that we would visit each time. The Tri Oci gallery on Giudecca, which bis about photography. The Palazzo Fortuny, where interesting art is displayed amongst the furnishings that made the place home to clan Fortuny. Maybe the Hospital Library, where we saw a display of dental implant technology (pretty gory, that).
Sometimes it is just a picnic on Certosa.
So Venice now is a bit like a holiday home. If somebody has a cottage on a lake and spends weeks there over summer, nobody asks “what does one do on repeat visits?”. They just do the lake thing. And we just do the Venice thing, like it is a cottage by a lake. Except the cottage is a thousand years old, and the lake is the Venetian lagoon.