We got out at a decent time today. Stopping for coffee at a very quiet Bar Cupido and making our way to the hospital and Giovanni e Paolo on the Fondamenta dei Mendicanti, the sun was just beginning to emerge from the cloud cover. I enjoyed watching the light change on the bricks of the squero across the canal:

Le Stanze della Fotografia/The rooms of Photography is a wonderful place to spend the morning. We had our first opportunity to use our new vap passes, riding from San Zaccaria to San Giorgio. The show, as always, was in two parts. Downstairs featured Horst P. Horst, a fashion and nature photographer of great renown. It was interesting to me to really sense the difference in quality of the old fashioned dark room prints from today’s digital work. The show was very extensive and included a documentary about Horst. There were many Vogue cover shots on display in large format.

And the museum had some fun with it:

There were also beautiful still life shots, mostly of flowers and portraits of artists and fashion world friends from the 1940’s.

Upstairs was a very different show–the work of Ahmet Ertuğ, fine art photographer, about our age, based in Istanbul. The photos of famous theaters and churches, were very large, around 6′ by 5′ and full of saturated color. Quote from the museum: “Ahmet Ertug photographs architectural cultural heritage sites with extreme precision and structural detail in his signature style.” It was amazing that he could achieve such sharpness in such a large format. We had fun noticing some of the places we had been to including the theater in Mantova, the duomo in Florence, the Duomo in Siena, La Fenice in Venice, Scrovegni in Padova, and the chapel in Assisi:

The woman at the ticket counter seemed to remember us (Ken says she helped us and talked with us last visit) and she came upstairs. We had a lovely conversation about the art and life and finally our bastard asshole president. She is worried about the war boosting their cost of living. Of course!

Satiated with art, we made our way back to the apartment. On the vap was this guy with a cat on his shoulder:

We had, not quite the last, of the leftovers from Elisa’s food for a peaceful lunch and a protracted rest time.

We had a date to meet our old friend Nan for dinner at Osteria Santa Fosca. Both the reunion and the food were great! We started with a bottle of sparkling wine from the Pavia area and some mussels and clams. Ken ordered fresh tagliatelle with duck sauce while Nan and I shared beautifully plated artichoke ravioli with scampi and a simple branzino with potatoes and vegetables. And more wine. Everything was so fresh and delicious. As we were leaving they offered us homemade limoncello. It was really a great meal.

We enjoyed our walk home in the nearly empty streets. I would call this a perfect day in Venice, with the exception of the pervasive wafting stink of Trump.