字幕表 動画を再生する 英語字幕をプリント This video is an excerpt from a much longer Italy Travel Talk. To view other topics, or to watch my Italy Talk in its entirety, visit ricksteves.com, or check out my Rick Steves YouTube channel. Enjoy. Hi, I'm Rick Steves and I want to share with you my take on one of the greatest cities you can visit anywhere in Europe, and that is Venice, and when you think about Venice you also have to think about the Veneto, that is the region around Venice, which has some beautiful towns. So we're gonna look at Venice, we're gonna take a side trip to Padova, Verona, and then a little bit out of the Veneto, towards the South, but an obvious side trip from Venice, and that is called Ravenna. Thanks for joining us, and we'll start with Venice. Now Venice is the best preserved big city in Europe. It is just beautifully preserved in the middle of its lagoon in northern Italy, and it's a town that goes way, way back. Remember, Venice started out as a refugee camp, really. After the fall of Rome, peace-loving people on the mainland were overrun by all the barbarians going back and forth, having their little villages burned and trampled. Finally, they got together and said, "this is going to be miserable but let's move out in the lagoon, and hope the barbarians don't like water." So they abandoned their farms, they literally deforested that part of Italy, to pound tree trunks into the mud to support their little town, and they made a village, a fishing village instead of a farming village, out in the lagoon, and gradually that morphed into a trading center, and they were great traders, and when they reach their pinnacle, they had a trading empire that stretched all the way to the Holy Land, and they were the economic powerhouse in Europe. It was-their dollar was the dollar. And when you go today, you'll find that the Venice of a thousand years ago survives remarkably well. It was able to control a lot, not because only was a great trader but it was also quite an impressive military power. Venice had the first really mass-produced military sort of complex called the Arsenal. And at the Arsenal, and you can see it today when you walk out there, it's a10 minute walk from the main square, you'll find the place where they could mass-produce their warships. in a very early form of mass production with an assembly line, they could put together an entire warship in a couple of days, and outfit it in one more day. The story is, whenever Venice had an adversary, a potential military adversary, they'd invite him down, and they'd say, "let's go to the arsenal and we'll show you how we make our ships." And they would build the ship in, like, two days, and those potential adversaries would go home and say, "let's just not mess with Venice". I mean it is such a powerhouse. When you look at Venice today it's the shape of a fish, and it's perfectly preserved. There's a law that prohibits anybody from changing any of these buildings, I believe there's a couple of modern buildings in the town, the only one you're likely to see is the train station. When you look at that fish-shaped island, you can see, if it is a fish, the great intestine would be the Grand Canal, right. And up until a century ago it was an island, but then it was connected with the causeway. The causeway goes to the mainland and it brings the highway and several train lines, so you've got Venice now connected with the rest of Italy, and the rest of Europe. You got a big train station, and you got a big parking lot right there near the mouth of that fish. From there you get on your boat, and you wind through the great intestine and you dump out at Piazza San Marco. That's where the Doge's Palace would be, and that's where Basilica San Marco is. The trick for us is to break out of that middle zone between the train station and Piazza San Marco, and explore to the far reaches, and that's where you find the magic Venice without all the crowds. Here you see a schematic diagram of the city with the different neighborhoods and I'll remind you, you got the train station. It takes about an hour to walk from the train station across town to St. Mark's, where the political and religious center is. It's a delightful walk, halfway between is the Rialto Bridge. And between the Rialto Bridge and St. Mark's, that is the main shopping thoroughfare. And most of the tourists spend most of their time just in a shopping trance, walking back and forth with all the other tourists, with all the fancy displays, just marveling at the crowds and the high prices. It doesn't occur to them to get out and walk to the tail of the fish, or walk to far reaches of that beautiful island. This is where the Grand Canal dumps out, and this is the end of the Grand Canal, looking right from the top of the bell tower. This is where you arrive, in Venice this is the train station, and that's the building from Mussolini's time, that's a fascist architecture. In front of the train station you'll find the boat dock. That's called a vaporetto. You get around Venice by boat. They don't have city buses because there's no cars or buses. And what you do is think of the boat, the vaporetto as a floating city bus. It has numbers, it has stops, and the only difference is, if you get off between stops you can drown. you hop on the boat, and you wind your way down the Grand Canal, under the Rialto Bridge, all the way to St. Mark's Square. And this is it, just a parade of beautiful palaces, and mansions, and merchant's villas. I've worked for thirty years to take groups around Venice, I love tour guiding in Venice, and we've created an app that has guided walks through the very most important stops in Italy and the rest of Europe. it's Rick Steves Audio Europe, it's absolutely free, and I want to really stress it here, because when you go to Venice, you're gonna want a guide. And you can hire a guide, it's quite expensive, you can read a book, or if you have a mobile device, simply download Rick Steves Audio Europe, and you go to "tick tick tick," whatever you want to pick, on your computer, you can listen to it on your mobile device, you can listen to it offline. Stick me in your ear, get on that slow boat on the train station, and I narrate every little way-all the way across town to the Doge's Palace. It's a lot of fun, and it works really, really good. The main square, St. Mark's Square, it's the only place that gets to be called a square in the town. It's facing the Basilica San Marco and the bell tower, the "campanile." This is one of the greatest pieces of real estate in Europe. This is a romantic painting from a couple centuries ago, but if you stood in the same spot and looked at it today, it hasn't changed very much. And it's got the same kind of romance, there's something about it that I never get tired of. When you're in Venice you want to get caught up in the romantic of Venice, you want to be on that square in the evening when the dueling orchestras are playing. You hear people complain about "oh it's $25 for a glass of wine or a beer at the famous café on the St. Mark's Square." Well no, its not $25 for a beer, it's $25 for a table at the most expensive piece of real estate in Europe, listening to live orchestra, surrounded by the wonders of Venice, and it comes with a drink. Come on, don't complain. If you want a beer, go four blocks away and step up to the bar and get a beer for the same price as anywhere else, you know, but this is one of the great experiences of Europe. Here you are, looking at Basilica San Marco, wow. Now I want to remind you, Venice started out, as I mentioned, as a refugee camp. It was really important, ultimately, politically and religiously, or politically and economically, but of no great important religiously because they didn't go back to biblical times, it was a relative upstart town, and they had no bones. You had to have relics to be important in those days, and Venice had all sorts of money, all sorts of power, but an inferiority complex when it came to religious importance. Now I don't know exactly how they knew the stuff but I think there was, like, newsletters going around or, something but the bones of St. Mark were available in Egypt. St. Mark's bones. Venice sent a crew down to Egypt to, what they call, "rescue the bones of St. Mark," from the Muslims, you know, and they brought it back to Christendom. And they planted Mark under the altar of St. Mark's Basilica, and suddenly, St. Peter and the Dragon are out, and St. Mark and Winged Lion are in, and Venice is now on the pilgrimage trail, and it's a complete town. Here we have a thousand year old mosaic telling the story under the door of st. Mark's Basilica, and if you look closely, you can see Mark on that great day, being brought in after that voyage across the Mediterranean from Egypt, and finding his ultimate resting spot there in Venice, under the altar of St. Mark's Basilica. And it is a gilded, lavish rich, thousand year old treasure chest today. Well worth checking out, you gotta check out the interior of Venice, St. Mark's. And all over Venice, in fact, all over Venice's Empire, you will find lions with wings, 'cause that was the symbol of St. Mark, St. Mark's Winged Lion. This is the political and religious center of Venice right here, you can see the Doge's Palace, that was, you know, the political powerhouse, the Capitol building, and you've got the bell tower which you can still climb to this day, and behind that you've got St. Mark's Basilica. When we look at it today, it's the same thing. Venice is remarkably well preserved. Now this Doge's Palace is worth touring, and when you go inside you'll find lavish rooms, and you'll find all sorts of history, and when you go out back you've got the Bridge of Sighs which you can walk over in order to get to the old prison, just like Casanova did. And all those other people who, according to legend, would be sentenced in the Doge's Palace, take one last look at their beautiful, beloved Venice, sigh, and then rot in those prison cells with all the rats and everything, on the other side of the canal. Venice has so many gorgeous corners, and it's so fun for us to check it out, but I wanna remind you, it's human nature for all of us tourists to stay right where all the people, and the glitter, and the glass, and the trinkets, and the glasses, okay. Break away from that. Break away from that, because Venice is much more than tacky tourist shops, Venice is a chance to get out and explore a town of 70,000 people. Venice is a small town today, that entertains 10 or 12 million people a year. But the core town is a parallel existence. The local people know their Venice, and they've got kind of blinders, and they can almost live oblivious to the crush of tourists that come and go every day. If you're up early, if you're out late, if you're in the far fringes of that island community, you do feel the pulse of the community of Venice. One great thing about Venice is, wonderful art. If you think about art in Europe, remember you gotta have money to have art. In southern Italy, there was not a lot of money, and there's not a lot of art today. The money was in Venice, the money was in Florence, and that's where your art is five hundred years later. I like art in situ, rather than in museums. In situ, where was originally commissioned to be, and Venice has one of the greatest examples of in situ art, and that is the Church of the Frari, the Church of the Brothers. This is the exterior, not a very impressive exterior, but if you step inside, you got masterpieces by Giorgione, by Titian, and by a handful of other great masters of the Venetian Renaissance. To see one great painting in situ by a great master, to me, is just a delight. To go to a church where you have eight paintings, by eight different masters, all where they're originally intended to be, is flat-out amazing. I like it so much that one of the actual tours on the Rick Steves Audio Europe list is of the Frari, just so I could walk you through that and appreciate that. If you like Venetian art, remember there is a gallery, it's sort of like the Uffizi, or like the Vatican, and in Venice it's called the Accademia. And there you've got a, just a whole lot of very sumptuous Venetian art. The Renaissance started in Florence. It was brought down to Rome by the Pope. In 1521 when Raphael died, the Renaissance carries on in Venice, funded by the rich merchant class. In Venice it became the art of wealthy people. And it was art that made wealthy people feel good about their wealth. You can imagine, if somebody's filthy rich, they want to have an artist that makes them feel cultured, and high-class, not crass and materialistic, and I think you get that kind of agenda in the art of Venice. A key for me, as a tour guide, when I have a group in Venice, is to get my people walking. Now, a lot of Americans are nervous about getting lost in Venice. Don't worry about getting lost in Venice, you're gonna get lost in Venice, alright, there's almost no street names, you don't know where the heck- what street you're on or anything like that. Wander to your heart's content, and remind yourself, "I'm on an island and I cant get off without knowing it," okay. You're on the island of Venice, it's not that big, and you just can't get irrevocably lost. One very nice trick is, any business, any little hotel, any restaurant, and they are everywhere, has a card, and on the back of that card is a map that says, "you are here." Anywhere you go in Venice, they love to give up their cards, you know that. Pick that up, and that's where you are and they want to help you get to that restaurant, but it's also gonna help you get the heck out of that restaurant, and it shows you where the big landmarks are nearby, so you got that sort of, "I am here" aid. Also remember, when you're walking around, and I used to do this to my groups, I'd walk all over, my groups would think we're hopelessly lost, and I would actually know where we are, because I would just look above the crowds. If you look above the crowds, you see signs pointing to the nearest landmark. You navigate by landmarks. In this case, you can get to st. Mark's by going left or right. I love to wander to the edge of Venice. Look at this, there's no tourist in sight, it's just a pastel wonderland, and this is all yours any day of the year, even in the most crowded day of the year, you could come to this spot and see no tourists. Beautiful, pastel, sleepy, dreamy, romantic Venice. If you can get a guided tour of Venice it's a great idea. On the ships, on the boat, on the back lanes, there's lots of good guides in Venice, there's good books, and of course we cover that in our app. This is the Bridge of Sighs, and to go under the Bridge of Sighs in a gondola with your favorite travel partner is a beautiful thing. Remember, when you go to Venice, you can get a gondola ride. Now it's kind of a tourist trap these days, it costs about $100 for 45 minutes in a gondola. You can divide the cost and the romance by up to six people. Six people in a gondola, okay, it's not quite as romantic as you and your partner but it's very inexpensive, and it's a beautiful, beautiful moment. I think you gotta budget it. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing, and we do with our groups, I like to do when I'm there. I will tell you, you're stuck on a boat with a gondolier, and some gondoliers are just ruffians, and others are charmers. They're all hustling for your business. Talk to a bunch of them, it's fun, they're all trying to sell their services. Find one who you like, that you feel good about, and then hire him, he can take you around. Nothing's quite like a beautiful evening on a gondola with a good travel partner. Now if you don't have enough money to get a gondola, you can go on a traghetto. These are gondolas that are public ferry gondolas, that go across the Grand Canal where there's no bridge. The Grand Canal's a long canal, and it's only got, I think, four bridges the whole way, so what you want to do is look on the map, and any good map will show you where the traghettos are. This just costs a couple bucks and then, you kind of stand, like George Washington crossing the Delaware, and you feel very local when you're crossing the canal with a bunch of locals going to the market on a traghetto. Enjoy the vaporetti. The vaporettos are these city bus boats. I like to sit in the front of the boat and just joyride. It's a beautiful experience, and you can get around, and you can go to the far reaches of the lagoon. Now, when you're exploring the lagoon, remember, you've got a bunch of famous islands in this Venetian Lagoon. Murano is famous for glass, Venice had this wonderful glass tradition. You can go to Murano and see all the glass works, and they welcome the tourists, and they give you a show, and the show is always followed by a hard sales pitch. I find the sales pitch almost comedic. I enjoyed the sales pitch as much as the glass blowing job show, but remember they're all into selling glass, not making you happy. And I would remind you also, if you have limited time, to remember that every one of the major glassblowing works on the island of Murano has a branch right on the main square, next to st. Mark's Basilica, and you can save yourself a lot of messing around by just following a tour group into one of those places. They don't care, it's always free, they don't wanna give a glassblowing demonstration to a single person, but if you can tail along with the group, sit down, enjoy, they'll make you a vase, or a glass horse, or something like that, and you get the sales pitch. It's right there on the main square, and it's a lot of fun. Farther out in the lagoon you find a place called Burano, and Burano is famous not for glass, but for lace. Beautiful lace on Burano, and for me it's just a pastel wonderland, it's a great place for poets, and photographers to wander around just marvel at the beauty of the village and of the lagoon. Venice was born, actually, in Torcello. The oldest part of Venice is a place that, today, is pretty much depopulated. Malaria swept through and killed everybody, and today there's just the oldest church in Venice still standing. But Torcello is an evocative place to check out. When you look at the lagoon around Torcello, there you see the kind of mucky terrain that is where the first Venetians pounded those stumps in to support their first little houses. I like to have a romantic canal-side dinner, but you can imagine any restaurant that has beautiful canal-side seating is gonna be touristy. The fact is, any restaurant in Venice is touristy. You can't survive as a restaurant in Venice without being touristy, and that's just a given. Its not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just the way it is. Some of them are a good value, others are a rip off, so I spent a lot of time and a lot of energy scouring Venice for good restaurants, I cover them in my guidebook, and there are some beautiful places where you can eat in Venice. My favorite place to eat in Venice is a mobile feast, visiting a bunch of little bars, eating ugly things on toothpicks, and washing them down with local wine. That's called "cicchetti." Cicchetti is a local tradition, like Spain has tapas, Venice has cicchetti. Now I like this photograph because it gets me all excited. The suns going down, all the cruisers are back on their ship, all the tourist groups are back home, and it's just me, and Venetians. And I'm out and about, and I'm going to bars. I'm going to colorful bars, where all the local ruffians are hanging out, and I'm eating those beautiful ugly things on toothpicks, and I'm learning a lot about the cuisine, and not spending a lot of money, and I'm making lifetime memories. When you get high tide, and a wind, and a certain barometric pressure, all in a perfect storm, what you get is a flooded Venice. The lowest part of Venice is St. Mark's Square where we all hang out anyways, and that's the first place to flood. You can be sitting in those famous cafes, with the orchestra, and suddenly-wait a minute-there's water here. And then you put your feet up on the next chair, and the water gets higher and higher, and the orchestra keeps playing. It's just a lot of fun to be in Venice when the flood happens. The floods are happening more, and more it's not unusual to see a flood. The downside of the flood is, during the day they set up these elevated walkways, and everybody has to walk on these elevated sidewalks, and that makes it even more congested than normal, and you can't get anywhere, it just stops everything, it makes it very slow going, unless your local with hip boots and then you pull those on you can slosh right across the square without bothering, but it's very interesting time. And if you do get a food, I would highly recommend you get out and have some fun in it, because it's beautiful to be out during a flood, especially at night. I have so many friends that run hotels in Venice, and their families have been running these hotels for generations, and it's just a beautiful dimension of the city. When I get to Venice, I get an old, old hotel, and I take off my shoes, and I stand barefoot on the "pavimento veneziano." That's the ancient kinda linoleum that is designed with a bunch of marble chips and everything, so it can flex. As this building settles, the floor won't crack, it'll just flex, and you see the waves in the floor as that city continues to settle. But for me it's a very tactile welcome to Venice, to stand barefoot on the "pavimento veneziano." Now, Venice is so great, that almost nobody thinks about Padua. Padova, Padua, English and Italian ways to say the same town. Padova is just about a half an hour away from Venice, and if there was no Venice, Padua would be a major stop, but almost nobody goes there because of the greatness of Venice. Again, right next to Venice, it's a town with beautiful arcades, beautiful cobbled lanes, a wonderful time warp atmosphere, a great market, and lots of pilgrims, because pilgrims go to Padova to see the Basilica of St. Anthony. St. Anthony is a beloved saint, and when you go there you'll find a lot of pilgrim action, and I would recommend going to the Basilica of st. Anthony and kind of respect and follow the whole route of the pilgrims, because they're gonna stop at a number of places inside and use these relics to help them worship. Padova's also famous because it has a venerable university. It's got one of the oldest and greatest universities in Europe, and what's fun about the university in Padova is, people don't all graduate on the same weekend in the spring or early summer. They're graduating all year long in a steady trickle. Whenever you do your dissertation and meet with the professor you can graduate, and then you find people, it's a great day for the family, everybody is dressed up, grandma and grandpa are there, you're wearing your laurel wreath, and you're all fine and everything. And then once you've graduated, you dress down, your friends hijack you, you all get drunk, and they have this kind of roast in public. And it's a very rude, and crude, and kind of silly, and alcoholic sort of event, and people are gathering around, and you are now a doctor, you know. And your friends are reminding you, you may be a doctor, but you're just still one of us, you know, you're just still a normal person. And they sing this very catchy song I just can't stop singing it when I'm in Padova, I forget the Italian words but in English it's, "you're a doctor, you're a doctor, but you're still just an asshole, you're a doctor, you're a doctor, but you're still just an asshole." And then there's a ruder part that I won't sing. But to be there, and to celebrate with those kids in the street, and see all that craziness, and of that wonderful reminder that you may have letters before your name now, but keep your feet on the ground, it's a beautiful thing, and it's been going on for centuries. You'll get that when you go to Padova. Another highlight of Padova is the Scrovegni Chapel. and I just love the High Middle Ages, Gothic and Giotto. And the greatest Giotto art is this chapel. Completely frescoed, by a whole series of wonderful scenes from the Bible by Giotto. This is a very precious and fragile masterpiece, and what they do in a precious and fragile scene like this is, they only let a few people in at a time, and they actually have to dehumidify in a special box first. So you sit, and you dehumidify, and they open the door, and you can go in and enjoy it, and then you're out of there. And you only have so much time to see that, but it's well worth the trouble. We filmed it, you can see it on our TV show, but don't miss the Scrovegni chapel when you're there in Padova, because Giotto was the greatest painter of the Gothic age. About an hour away is Verona. And Verona is famous among most travelers and tourists because of Romeo and Juliet, which was a gimmick, a complete goofy thing dreamed up by a tour guide just in the last century, and it's quite effective because it brings a lot of tourist town. But Verona is worth a stop for far more important reasons. It's Roman city, it was the great Roman city before crossing the Alps, and you'll find this is a Roman bridge two thousand years old. When you go to Florence[Verona] you'll find Romeo and Juliet's balcony which is just completely fictitious. It's fun to be there because you've got a whole flood of tourists coming and going, but what you'll also find is, you'll find an amazing Roman arena, and a wonderful "get out in the streets and stroll" kind of ambiance in Verona. Two hours south of Venice, you get to a town called Ravenna. Ravenna is a charming town, it's got a beautiful, bike-friendly sort of atmosphere, it's the most bike-friendly town I've been to in Italy, but it is famous for its mosaics. Ravenna is important because it was a Western outpost of the Byzantine Empire. Rome, you know, was in the city of Rome, and then around 200 or 300 AD Rome fell in the West, but the Emperor moved to the east, and he took the Roman Empire basically to Constantinople, present day Istanbul, named Constantinople after Emperor Constantine, and it became the Eastern Roman Empire, which survived the west by centuries, and eventually morphed into Byzantine Empire. During the Byzantine time, it was the pinnacle of civilization. For centuries, Europeans in the depth of the Dark Ages, back when they were just running in the mud, looked to Constantinople for civilization, and spiritual and cultural leadership. It was stability, it was the pinnacle of Western Civilization. And the western outpost of the Byzantine Empire was Ravenna. And in Ravenna it you've got sumptuous Byzantine mosaics. Now if you're really a connoisseur of mosaics, you should go to Ravenna because they are the best, but if you take all the time it takes to go from Venice to Ravenna to see the mosaics, and dedicate it into appreciating the beautiful mosaics already in Venice, that frankly is a more practical use of your time. There are wonderful mosaics in Venice that under-appreciated, or there are the best mosaics in Ravenna. These are in churches that are five hundred years old. These are churches that really are ancient Roman, as much as medieval. This is the cusp. In this church you can see mosaics of Jesus, who's the beardless Good Shepherd, and that's the ancient Roman portrayal of Jesus, no beard, and you can see Jesus with the classic beard that we think of that he has, which is the medieval portrayal. Right here, it's the cusp of the Middle Ages and the ancient world. When you think of North Italy, you gotta think of Milano, the best of the no-nonsense, powerhouse economies in Italy, urban center. You gotta think of the beautiful lakes, and the best lake is Lake Como. You can think of the best stretch of the Mediterranean coastline, in my estimate, the Cinque Terre. You can also think of the Dolomites, that is the mountain resorts, and what we've just been talking about now, probably the highlight of that part of Italy, Venice, and the side trips from Venice, Padova, Verona and Ravenna. "Grazie." If you've enjoyed this video, you'll find lots more at ricksteves.com. and on my Rick Steves YouTube channel. Happy travels, and thanks for joining us.
B1 中級 英 イタリアヴェネツィアとヴェネト (Italy: Venice & the Veneto) 687 22 Ntiana に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日 シェア シェア 保存 報告 動画の中の単語