Mick again.

The body clock seems to be closer to adjustment as it was all of 5 am - and still dark and quiet except for the gentle sound of the odd marine diesel - when I woke today.

Big plans. We had located a group called La Bussola - The Compass- which provides free walking tours of Venice every day. Full of confidence we put ourselves down for both the morning and the afternoon three hour tours. Very Gilligan's Island, no?

En route to the pickup point we made our way to the collection point for our rubbish. Every day for unsorted rubbish, with alternating days for paper and tin/glass. The rubbish boat is moored every morning a five minute walk away right on the grand canal. Our scraps got a better view than the guests in the hotel just behind the boat!

We walked to Campo Santo Stefano where we were met by our guide, Luigi. He is from Bari, and his main work is as a researcher in cultural heritage at the University in Padova. I guess with his PhD he is well qualified for this type of guiding. We were a group of 12 - a family of 6 which claimed to be Australian but in which only the father had an Aussie accent, a group of 4 Scots, one from Dundee, and us.

Our walk took us from our current Sestiere- San Marco- across to Dorsoduro, where we learned how Venice began, how the land was reclaimed, how each settlement began with a church, a Campo and a well, and the effects of plague and fire over the years. We stood awe stricken in front of the magnificent church of Santa Maria della Salute (Our Lady of Health), which was built around 1630 as a votive offering after over 50,000 had died in the plague. Someone calculated that over 1.2 million pilings would have needed to be sunk in the clay to support this massive structure.

We walked along the waterfront across from La Giudecca and learned about acqua alta - high water- and its effects. We heard about Venetian food and drink, and paused to sample some -a quick coffee and cischetto in a little wine bar opposite a gondola yard after which it was named - Cantine del Vino gia Schiavi. This helped to thaw us out a little- it was extremely cold but our guide so engaging and knowledgeable that we all pressed on.

Seven degrees isn't too bad until you do a bit of standing around in windy campi. A couple of times our thoughts drifted towards an extra layer of clothing. At the end of the tour, after making a donation to Luigi which would be split between him and La Bussola, we were certainly ready to get into the warmth at Campo Santa Margarita (Venetian spelling) in Al Bocon DiVino. Replaced the burned up calories with deep fried mozzarella in carrozza, Fiori di zucchini and some baccala (a newly acquired taste - smoked cod) on a small piece of bread. Delicious.

Then it was back to Santo Stefano for tour two - which would focus on the area around San Marco and the Sestiere called Castello- the area where more of the real Venetians live these days (at least those who can still afford it!). We were lucky that Luigi was our guide again. This was to be his second last tour before going to Budapest for a short term research attachment.

This time we learned about the evolution of the Venetian system of government, the architecture, the rise and fall of Venice, the interfering ways of Napoleon, the Piazza San Marco itself, the magnificent Basilica ( with a very short visit) and then a couple of features of the Castello area. One was the spiral staircase of the Palazzo of the family called the Contarini del Bovolo- the Contarini of the snail, so called because of their spiral staircase. Luigi asked us to guess its height and I thought it must higher than the length of a pool so suggested 50/ 70 metres. It is in fact 26 metres- clever design with arches becoming smaller as they went up. An early form of PR. We stopped outside a magnificent mask makers and learned about the how and the why, the role of the masks in both Carnevale and plague, and then the world famous Aqua Alta bookshop where many of the books are stored in boats of different types (including a gondola), bathtubs, basins- anything that might be expected to float in one of the unusually high tides- although I suspect they would not. Books that get too much damp have been built into a staircase! At this point my cough was getting worse in the cold evening air and we were both pretty tired and cold so we bailed out of the tour after another donation. I think we only missed the wrap up. We can't speak highly enough of these two tours - both for their content and for the fact that they exercised a critical perspective on the mass tourism going on all around.

Anne here:
A word on the plague- the famous doctor masks were worn by doctors during the plague and the beak was filled with flowers and herbs to ward off the illness. Needless to say it didn't work. The doctors wandered the streets to check which bodies were alive and they did this by cutting them with a blade at the end of a stick. If they were alive they bled. This turned out to be a great way of further spreading the plague.

Navigating back home included the usual moments of uncertainty and the odd wrong turn. I don't know how Mick does it-I follow along. Plans to do the shopping were abandoned due to tiredness after our 12 km walk, and we basically got home and crashed.