The repellent did not seem to help; we awoke sticky and bitten to various degrees. Breakfast was included in the price of the hotel; it was the usual bad coffee and mediocre bread, but generous and pleasant otherwise. Then we packed our valuables, left most of the luggage in a back room, and walked out into the morning.
To satisfy A's desire for art, we had planned a trip to the Frari, but the Feast of the Assumption, which had closed most shops, took over the church for most of the day. So we made an unscheduled trip to the Scuola Grande de San Rocco nearby. Z impressed us right away by telling the stories of the first two canvases, not only an Annunciation but a Flight into Egypt. The kids were stellar when faced with the huge hall of Tintorettos, and we examined most of the wall paintings and some of the ceiling panels in detail.
We started meandering slowly towards our apartment, which we'd get at 1 PM. Walking through Campo San Polo and up parallel to the Canal Grande, it got progressively more touristy as we approached the Rialto. The food markets were closed, but the kitsch stalls were open and the bridge and its approaches quite crowded. It was an old familiar story, one I discovered within a few hours of arriving in Venice totally unprepared in 82; as soon as one deviates from the marked routes to San Marco, the Rialto, Ferrovia or Piazzale Roma, traffic thins out considerably. There are chokepoints, like the Rialto Bridge itself, but it is worth using a map instead of relying on the signs.
We spun out the last hour eating sandwiches at the shaded tables of a snack bar in Campo San Zanipolo, almost within sight of the windows of the apartment. It was situated right across from the ambulance-boat entrance of the hospital that now occupies the Scuola Grande de San Marco, on the third floor under a mansard roof. The couple who wore finishing up the cleaning spoke no English, but we had enough Italian to communicate, and detailed written instructions were on the table.
We had a large living room, dining room under old timber beams, two bedrooms squeezed into the lower parts of the roof, a kitchen and an alcove in the lower parts on the other side, and a bathroom. Walking down one flight of stairs took us to an entrance hallway from which it was three flights down to the street, a narrow one terminating at a canal just beyond our door. Out the bedroom and living-room windows, one could see the Ponte del Cavallo crossing into the Campo SS. Giovanni et Paolo, and beyond that, along the sight-line of the canal, the Campanile in Piazza San Marco and the very tips of the onion domes of the Basilica.
While N convinced Z to nap, I walked to the Standa supermarket on Strada Nova, past many African traders who had set up displays of counterfeit leather goods in front of the closed shops. Despite the fact that the apartment was reasonably well equipped with the leavings of previous tenants, I was overambitious - six 1.5 litre bottles of water, penne and tortellini, pesto and passata (strained tomatoes), canned cannellini beans and lentils, grapefruit and blood orange juice, breadsticks and Melba toast, gorgonzola and grana padano. Having forgotten to bring a daypack, I couldn't walk more than 200 metres before giving my hands a rest, and I was soaked in sweat by the time I made it back. Z's nap was short and the apartment was starting to heat up, so we went to retrieve our luggage.
The Fondamente Nuove was a short walk north of the apartment, and there we caught a #52 vaporetto heading around Cannaregio to the western stretch of the Canal Grande. The kids stood at the back, delighting in the spray from the wake. We picked up our luggage, bid "a presto" to the friendly hotel proprietor, and retraced our steps with ease, only slightly more awkward than before.
It was past five when we regained the apartment, so I started cooking a meal of tortellini in tomato sauce (at the request of the kids), cannellini beans with oil and pepper, and arugula salad. I had some nondescript bottled Veneto Cabernet with the meal. The kids ate quite heartily, but we had starved them most of the day.
For our evening passegiata, we finally headed for Piazza San Marco. By going through Campo Santa Maria Formosa and then slightly west, we managed to avoid the tourist crush until almost in the square. We arrived in time to witness the silly spectacle of a full-dress army troop lowering the flags in front of the Basilica while chanting loudly. I tried to ignore it as best I could. They marched out followed by most of the crowd. We walked to the sea, back past the Campanile, and then meandered along listening to cafe orchestras (Mozart at the Lavana, tango at Quadri, and, improbably enough, Zamfir-style pan pipes at Florian).
With the Piazza mostly emptied of tourists and pigeons, it is possible to appreciate it. It is not the best piazza in Italy -- Siena's central campo is the one I would choose -- but it is marvellously asymmetric even though surrounded by largely rectilinear buildings. Sansovino, a Florentine who left a considerable mark on the city, found a way to concentrate attention on the Basilica while not diminishing the power of the rest of the space, and this function survives centuries later, even though the audience has changed considerably. Someday I will visit it in the off-season, and wander through alone at dawn.
Night had fallen, but the kids wanted a treat, and they deserved one. But not just any treat would do; we marched then some distance west to Campo San Stefano and bought them gelato at Paolin, the best gelateria in Venice. We had various combinations of pesca, nocciola, fragola, kiwi, ananas, and limone, consumed while sitting on the step of the old well head in the campo.
A long sweltering walk home through mostly empty streets, and we put two very tired tots to bed well after ten.