Visit Venice

A day trip from Venice to Florence by train

Adam enjoyed his train journey. There was much discussion of favourite movies, monsters and foods to pass the time.

Venice or Florence? A dilemma that has plagued travellers since the days of the Grand Tour. But now you can have both, because there are superfast trains between the two cities. And because our Venetian holiday homes are situated in the part of Venice closest to the railway station, it’s an easy hop.

Seven years ago, it would take more than three hours to get to Florence from Venezia Santa Lucia. Today, the journey can be done in a fraction over two hours on some of the most comfortable trains I have ever travelled on. So a day trip from Venice is entirely possible, as you will see. This blog post will help you if you want to plan a similar day trip, and also gives some tips as to how to minimise queueing time in Florence, which can otherwise be a considerable drain on artistic enjoyment!

My travelling companion was Adam, aged 13, visiting Venice with friends over the Christmas/New Year break. He has a talent for drawing – and I thought it would be a good experience for him to see the city that is the holy of holies for Renaissance art. So, equipped with a rucksack, a sketchbook and a Dorling Kindersley Guide, we set off from Casa Battello at about 0800 to buy our tickets for the 0827 train.

Beautiful reflections in the River Arno. But which is the Room With A View?

This is part of the slick “Frecciaargento” suite of high speed trains, and the first surprise, relative to the UK, is the price. It was 86 euros return, with no advance booking, for a 165-mile journey. Eat that, Virgin Trains! This was only slightly dampened by the fact that Adam had recently exceeded the magic age up to which children go half price, which is 12.

The trains are very spacious. Video monitors spaced down the cabin show you your position on Google Maps, and tell you the weather forecast for the next stop. Much to my surprise Adam declined the offer of a trip to the buffet car. More egregiously, he declined some of the wonderful Christmas clementines we had bought in the street markets of Cannaregio. But he would make up for that feeble appetite later.

The luminous Saint Peter in the Brancacci Chapel. Worth the trip alone!

Arriving at 1033, it was wonderful to see Florence on a bright, crisp winter day. The River Arno was glinting with sunlight, reflecting colours not intense but still strong hints of fourteenth-century glories. We headed straight for the Brancacci Chapel at Santa Maria del Carmine, and to my great delight we managed to get in to see the Masaccio frescoes not only without queueing, but with almost nobody else crowding out our view. To my mind these are some of the most exceptional glories of Florence. The photo here can’t capture the subtle and distinctive colour combinations, but it does at least hint at the cool reflective calm and dignity that pervades the fresco cycle. Adam also pronounced it “pretty cool”: high praise indeed, and (inadvertently?) precise.

The best hot chocolate in Italy? This expert took some convincing, and eventually came down in favour of Padua!

After this it was time to head for the tourist centre of the city, and sup at the legendary Caffe Rivoire, home of hot chocolates so thick and creamy that they taste like breakfast, lunch and dinner in a cup. Adam was very impressed with the setting and the idea of the hot chocolate, but after much deliberation concluded that the hot chocolate in the Caffe Pedrocchi in Padua a couple of days earlier took the trophy. Veneto 1, Florence 0!

This was mere fortification for an afternoon of serious art – first the Uffizi Gallery, and then the Accademia. I had found using the telephone number to book in advance completely impossible – it was always engaged (the Uffizi reservations number is +39 55 294883 – you may be able to do better than I did) – and the online reservation system seemed to be broken, on my Mac laptop at least. So in the end I used the TickItaly service – pricey, but they did indeed turn round the ticket bookings in the space of half a day, and so I got in with guaranteed tickets and minimal queueing.

The Duomo from the ground ...

Rather like those who have indulged in a very rich hot chocolate, an hour or two in the Uffizi may lead you to the same conclusions as Walter Landor about the extreme sweetness of Shakespeare’s sonnets: “like raspberry jam without cream, without crust, without bread.” The wall to wall Botticellis are extremely beautiful, but intensely indulgent. Adam became quite fascinated by whether the artists could paint feet with appropriate skill. Some of Botticelli’s feet are a bit cursory; other artists were pronounced to have taken more trouble.

After the Uffizi, and a very well-received pizza at the inexpensive and very conveniently located Ristorante Orcagna (it is two minutes away on the Piazza dei Signori) it was time to climb the Duomo. This was great fun but could easily have been a disappointment because the queue probably would have taken us more than an hour to traverse. Fortunately, a young woman approached us with an offer of “fast-track tickets”. For an extra few euros we were taken to the front of the queue. (It sounds like a scam, but it is a completely legitimate part of the operation and certainly made our day easy and quick.) The views from the top of the Duomo are truly magnificent on a crisp winter’s day – you see a crazy paving of russet rooftops reaching into misty oblivion, and then the bowl of hills surrounding the city shimmers into view. If you can deal with the 315 or so steps, it is an excellent activity for a young person – it added a completely new angle on Florence, and one that certainly appealed to Adam.

... and the magnificent view 315 steps later

The final artistic indulgence of the day was the Accademia Gallery, mainly to focus on the miracle that is Michelangelo’s David. Every bit as amazing as I remembered it, and rather pointless to describe – you simply have to see it in its vast setting. But there are plenty of other delights in the gallery, not least the many late medieval and early Renaissance paintings. Adam noticed something that I had never noticed before – many of the nativity Christs in the paintings have him apparently crushing a robin in his infant fist. On later investigation, I discovered that this is a proleptic symbol of the crucifixion and/or a symbol of the “winged soul” (and the Christ is cradling rather than crushing); I can’t imagine how I managed to study art for so many years and let this cipher completely pass me by! Without Adam’s eye, it would have stayed just as invisible.

By this point we were both exhausted, and I was pleased I hadn’t gone for the later train home in my plan for the day. There is an 1800 which gets back to Venice at 2003, which was ideal under the circumstances. With all Italian high-speed trains, you must plan in advance which one you are travelling on, as booked seats are always required. However, it had been a good plan. We wandered gradually through the Christmas-decorated streets of the city to arrive back at the station in good time, and were back in Venice well before bedtime.

In conclusion, then: Florence for the day is easy from Venice; not outrageously expensive; and with a bit of advance planning, you can spend under 25 minutes during the whole day queueing. In my view, it’s never too young to start appreciating this amazing city – and I am certain that Adam concurs.

If you’ve enjoyed this blog post and are contemplating a visit to Venice, why not take a look at our three wonderful holiday homes for rental on the main part of our site?

Guest blogger Andy Todd writes about Venice, lions, and norsemen

We get an interesting and distinguished clientele at our properties in Venice, and one of the most distinguished historians is Andy Todd. Here he writes on request about the the lions and vandals of Venice.

The Piraeus Lion at the Arsenale

Venice is full of lions, most of them symbolic of the city’s patron saint Mark the Evangelist, and watching out for them is a popular tourist activity in Venice, at least in our family, with websites and whole books devoted to the pastime of lion-spotting. Our children, now frequent visitors to Venice, have always been taken with the big cuddly red marble one in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini next to the basilica of San Marco, and I have a soft spot for the thirteenth-century animal who sulks with a miserable expression on its face and tail between its legs on the first floor loggia of the Ca d’Oro. But my all-time personal favourites are the four lions that stand guard at the entrance to the naval dockyard in the Campo Arsenale, and in particular the largest of this rather disparate pride, who sits up on its haunches to the left of the gates, with front legs braced in an attitude of alert watchfulness. I first came to know of it over twenty years ago, while studying the Norse component of my strange degree in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic.

Carved in white marble by a Greek sculptor, probably in the second century AD, it used to live in Piraeus, the ancient harbour of Athens, where it served as some kind of fountain, to judge from the hollow throat and the traces of a now lost water pipe running down its back. It was a famous Athenian landmark for Italian visitors, who dubbed Piraues ‘Porto Leone’. There it stayed for another millennium and a half, until 1687, when Athens was besieged by the Venetian military commander Francesco Morosini during the Seventh Ottoman-Venetian War. Among Morosini’s achievements in that campaign were the reduction to ruins of the Parthenon, which was being used as an ammunition dump by the Turks, after a direct hit on the building by his artillery (‘a lucky shot’, in Morosini’s words). Morosini also personally supervised the looting of many important Greek sculptures: Athena’s horses were accidentally smashed to pieces in the process of removal from the Parthenon, but he successfully made off with the Piraeus lion, which he had presumably earmarked for display back home as a symbol of his city’s patron saint. The Venetians rewarded their commander by electing him Doge the following year.

One of the reasons I like this lion is that it makes me feel better about the British Museum’s ownership of the Elgin Marbles. Lord Elgin’s acquisition of the Parthenon Marbles was probably the ‘greatest theft in history’, but it’s good to remember that the Venetians were doing this kind of thing well before us. In fact Venice is crammed full of incriminating evidence of their cultural vandalism, from the relics of their patron saint himself, thieved from Alexandria in the ninth century, to the mesmerising Horses of St Mark, stolen from the Hippodrome of Constantinople to adorn the basilica of San Marco, and now in the cathedral museum. A Classics professor I know still refuses to go to Venice out of solidarity with the Byzantines for the sacking and looting of Constantinople in 1204.

But the main reason for my fascination with the Piraeus Lion is the Norse connection. Carved into both shoulders and flanks is some Viking graffiti, recognised as such in the eighteenth century by the Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad. Erosion and pollution make them difficult to spot today, unless you know where they are, but if you look hard enough you can make out a series of characters scrolling around in the shape of a lindworm, a snakelike wingless dragon from Norse mythology. The characters are runes, which were used for inscriptions in Scandinavian and other Germanic languages before their adoption of the Latin alphabet, and which will be known to consumers of Tolkien. Unfortunately, the text is so eroded that it evades definitive translation, though it seems to be some kind of memorial to a Swedish warrior who won fame and treasure on his Viking adventures. Probably he served in the Varangian Guard, an elite force of Scandinavian mercenaries who fought for the Byzantine Emperor in the eleventh century, and he was most likely sent to Athens to suppress a local rebellion there. Whoever he was, his runic memorial is important: along with the Norse artefacts unearthed in the 1960s by archaeologists in Newfoundland, it serves as evidence and a reminder of just how wide-ranging the Vikings were. The Renaissance was a phenomenal period of travel and exploration, and the Venetians were in the vanguard, but five centuries before Columbus the Vikings were already making their presence felt from Constantinople to Canada.

When in Venice (which is often, usually at the fantastic Casa Tre Archi) I always make a point of paying my respects to the Piraeus lion, and it normally gives me pause for thoughts like this. On the most recent occasion, during the unusually high tides in December, I stood in front of it in my wellies, musing that it seemed a testament to cultural vandalism and the transience of civilisations and empires: Athenian, Norse, Byzantine, Venetian. Seeing it up to its ankles in acqua alta and pock marked from pollution, I couldn’t help wondering who the real vandals are, and whether this much travelled and much abused animal would finally end its days as the victim of our own environmental vandalism – still loyally guarding the gates of the Arsenal, but now at the bottom of the sea in a twenty-first-century Atlantis, the ancient underwater city of Venice. The Vikings’ Anglo-Saxon cousins had a word for this kind of meditation on lost civilisations: dustceawung; or ‘contemplation of the dust’. Thankfully they were a lot better at it than me, and in any case it only lasted a few seconds, as I was summoned to the excellent pizzeria on the other side of the square for lunch with the children.

Monthly Archives: January 2012

A day trip from Venice to Florence by train

Guest blogger Andy Todd writes about Venice, lions, and norsemen