Venice - Our Landlady

Today, we are on a train from Venice to Milan. Early this morning we were packing up when our Landlady called around to say goodbye. We had already learned some of her history... she was born in the house in which we stayed... she was a cooking teacher... who knew all the good restaurants in Venice... and took 30 minutes to map them all onto our map... she teaches music... she has heart problems and has been told to slow her activity rate. We had met her husband, daughter, and brother-in-law... she was generous in sharing her personal details. We liked her a lot.

Today, she had promised to show us the renovation she was undertaking to the second floor of the building. We had spare time and Joye is interested in building renovations... so we were happy to accept her invitation. We had little understanding of the dimensions of the building. At street level, a bank branch operates... some 20 metres of frontage. The stairwell had us intrigued... wide marble steps... not in keeping with the modest apartments we had seen on the third floor. Anna (our Landlady) opened the second floor door to reveal a building site. It took us a few moments to see the large size of the site because it seemed out of proportion with the size of the other floors. The first thing to catch the eye was the floor... the same tile work we had seen on the floor of the Dorge Palace... Anna pointed to the ceiling... where there was faint markings of frescos. She said that her family did not know of the frescoes until workmen were doing preparatory work for the current renovations... she was born under the ceiling... her mother had been born under the ceiling... and no one knew. They paid the cost of a restorer to painstakingly chip away the ceiling plaster to reveal the original work. It cost her a fortune! She doesn't know the early history of the house... after the renovation is complete, she will hirer a researcher to document its history. Like all restorations, each new step revealed more unexpected problems. Work has stopped because water started leaking in from a party wall. The feature room (with the frescoe) was 100 square metres. an enormous size for Venice.

For our room, we had paid a daily tarrif a little over $100... an amount that had the Chancellor of the Trip Exchequer redoing her spreadsheets... but we were pleased that our payments were funding in part a restoration effort that holds out such promise.