Venezia, Italia: Carnevale celebrations, a Murano glass workshop and ALL the cicchetti and spritz in Venice, Italy!

Ciao amici! Hello from Italy!

My sister (Kelly) and I are about halfway through our two-week trip around Italy. We just wrapped up the first part of our trip — a few days in Venice — which was way cooler than I could have ever hoped.

I’ve wanted to visit Venice pretty much forever. A pedestrian-friendly floating city guided by waterways instead of roads, the smell of salt and the sea wafting around every meandering alleyway? Sign me up!

Kelly and I flew into Venice from the States on Monday afternoon. I was able to fly from Phoenix to Detroit to meet up with her, and then the two of us carried on from Detroit to an Amsterdam layover and then to Marco Polo in Venice.

We landed and took the Alilaguna ferry to the Zattere stop, which was very close to our hostel (Casa Accademia) located in the Dorsoduro neighborhood.

Am I too old for hostels? No.

A quick note: We opted to stay at Casa Accademia and I would really suggest it if you’re traveling with a companion and looking for a clean, quiet place out of the heart of the city. We booked a private room which came with towels and a hair dryer in our private bathroom, a kettle and instant coffee packets, a wardrobe, extra bedding, and the best-smelling shower soap. While the hostel did have a few shared spaces including a library and breakfast room, there wasn’t a bar, so there wasn’t too much of a party vibe/ community feel if that’s what you’re looking for. However, it was absolutely perfect for my sister and I to spend two nights.

We packed so much into our two days in Venice. It truly helps that Venice itself is tiny and very easy to get around given that there are no cars, which means it takes very little time to travel on foot.

After we unloaded our luggage, took a quick nap, showered and changed, we immediately headed out for some food.

We picked Alle Zattere simply because it was close and we were both so hungry after our flights. We sat down and ordered two glasses of wine, which was met with an immediate “a bottle is better, no?” from our server.

So… a bottle it was.

After dinner, we started exploring. We walked around Dorsoduro a bit, then headed north to the more touristy San Marco area.

Then, already being a bottle of wine in, we started bar hopping. Naturally.

We went to Rosticceria Gislon for baccalà cappuccina and wine…

Then we went to Chat qui Rit for cheese and wine…

We also grabbed gelato at Suso.

We also made it a point to buy masks at one of the many stores we stopped into, because the following day was the last day of Carnevale in Venice and celebrations were in full swing.

We woke up a little late the next day (jet lag) and made it out of our hostel by about 11 a.m. to get the touristy stuff out of the way.

We crossed the Ponte dell’Accademia and grabbed breakfast.

After breakfast, we ventured across canal after canal.

I absolutely could not get enough of the Carnevale celebrations. As we passed through each public square, small stages had been erected and spaces set aside for sketches and shows and performances.

After getting side-tracked by several of these performances (and admiring all the costumes and masks!) we finally arrived at our first stop: Piazza San Marco, and the accompanying Basilica di San Marco.

The San Marco Plaza was so lively and fun. I know I mentioned it at the beginning of this post, but I truly, truly love that Venice is a pedestrian-only island with plenty of open plazas, lined with restaurants and patio seating, and filled with stunning architecture and public art. It’s incredible to see people just casually strolling, relaxing, dawdling and existing in public spaces that cater to human bodies instead of vehicles.

So much positive, billboard-free third space. I love it. Take notes, U.S.A.!

After St. Mark’s Square, it was onward to Ponte di Rialto – the famed Rialto Bridge.

At Kelly’s insistence, we stopped for Aperol Spritz, snacks and people-watching at Hotel Rialto’s canal-side restaurant, Ristorante Rialto Sul Canallgrande.

Then it was onto the bridge for the obligatory photos…

…and then back to strolling aimlessly around Venice.

I really didn’t like the Rialto Bridge too much, to be honest. It was bustling and busy, which did make for great people-watching, but did also make it a bit overwhelming.

The Grand Canal is also cool, but there are so many other picturesque canals littered around Venice outside of the San Marco and San Polo neighborhoods.

Aside from meandering, we spent our afternoon snacking and drinking our way around the island.

We stopped at an unassuming little corner eatery called Bar Spritz for some cicchetti (one topped with a hearty tuna spread, one topped with soft, airy cod, and one topped with melty brie and steamed, sauced broccoli) and continued walking.

We eventually decided to stop and grab dinner at Ristorante San Silvestro, where I had tagliolini al nero di seppia – squid ink pasta.

After the sun set, we began to make our way back to our hostel, stopping every so often to take in the views.

Then we took a slight detour that led us to…

…more Carnevale celebrations!

We’d seen posters advertising some of the day’s events during an earlier walk, and decided to walk back to San Marco Plaza to join in.

We were greeted with live music, costumes, singing and dancing.

We ended up getting roped into some Italian line dancing, which was an absolute blast.

The instructions were given almost entirely in Italian, but every so often you would hear “Right! Destra! Derecho! Left! Sinistra! Izquierda!”

Most of the crowd caught on fairly quickly, but there was certainly a lot of jostling, bumping… and laughing.

After enjoying a few songs and trying our hand at three different line dances, Kelly and I dipped out of the piazza and went back to wandering the streets until we found a smaller plaza lined in open patio wine bars.

We enjoyed a few more glasses of Chianti at two more bars before finally stumbling back to our hostel to get some rest.

We woke up the next morning to pack our things, put them in our hostel’s storage room, and head out for our last day in Venice.

We started right away with our journey to Murano for a glass workshop we’d booked.

We hopped on the vaporetto close to our hostel, stopped at Fondamente Nove for a quick pastry run, and hopped back onto our boat.

From there, we completed our journey to the island of Murano, where we had a few moments to grab some more coffee and linger around the island before our workshop.

We’d had a conversation the day before where we discussed whether we should do the Venice thing and take the gondola ride.

I mean, you typically wanna do the thing in the place where you’re supposed to do it, right?

But, at the same time, a 30-minute gondola ride is like 80 euros. And while it seems cool, and fun, and also a bit romantic (which might have made it a more appealing option had I been traveling with Ryan instead of my little sister),we decided to figure out what else we could do with 80 euros.

We settled on a glass workshop on Murano.

This was probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever had a chance to do, and if you end up in Venice, I highly recommend it.

We booked a workshop with Original Murano Glass (OMG), for about 80 euros a person.

We watched a demonstration that included glass blowing and modeling to start, and then from there, we were escorted upstairs to the workshop area.

Matteo showed Kelly and I how to use all the tools at first, and then guided us as we made our own glass projects from scratch.

Glass working is one of those things that looks so easy when the masters do it, but you know that it’s actually really hard, and then when you try it, you’re surprised at how, yes — it’s challenging of course — but also, it’s not the most difficult thing in the world, and with a little more training and practice, it would be possible to improve.

This little taste of glass modeling really did make me want to pursue this as a hobby, no lie!

We collected molten glass from a furnace onto a blowpipe, rolled that glass to the end of the blowpipe to prepare it for modeling, added color to it, heated it to integrate the color into it, and used a variety of tools to shape our glass.

The two of us created several glass flowers using a few different techniques.

This was such a fun experience. Glass working is somehow both very hands-on and very hands-off at the same time, which made it really challenging. Your first instinct is, of course, to touch the mushy glass in order to mold it like it’s clay, but since it’s, yunno, 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit… you cannot.

So, you have to use the unwieldy and cumbersome tools until you master them as an extension of your own fingertips.

This experience definitely gave me a whole new appreciation for glass modeling and glass blowing. Such an incredible amount of precision and skill.

After our glass workshop, we took a vaporetto back to Fondamente Nove, and decided to explore the Cannaregio neighborhood for a bit.

While Venice is definitely all sidewalks and canals, the northern neighborhood of Cannaregio did feel a bit different than Dorsoduro. The streets felt wider and more open, and there seemed to be fewer plazas and public gathering places.

We walked around for quite a bit. We walked up and down Strada Nuova, had a pizza and a few drinks at a few places, did a bit of shopping, and then began slowly making our way back to our hostel to pick up our luggage.

We did our own mini cicchetti-and-spritz bar crawl as we worked our way from Cannaregio back to Dorsoduro via foot.

Bacaro ae Bricoe, Cantine del Vino già Schiavi and Osteria Al Squero (the first in Cannaregio, the second two in Dorsoduro) were three of the highlights.

And that was about it! We grabbed our luggage from our hostel, hopped onto the vaporetto, and made our way to the train station for an overnight train to our next destination: Roma!

Ciao!