St Mark's and the Doge's Palace

Our first tourist activity was a 'secret places' tour of the Doge's Palace. The Doge was the ruler of Venice and lived and worked out of the palace. Our secret tour was with a cranky old women who was very knowledgeable and very strict. Stay with the group, don't touch anything, don't lean against the doors or windows and 'no jokes'. Little did she realise she was the biggest joke of all. Still, an interesting and informative tour.

The ground floor and the top floor held prisoners and this is one of the cells. When the prison wasn't crowded, this would hold up to 4 people, but when crowded, it would hold 10.

This is one of the large halls where documents were processed. Imagine this filled with about 20 desks of men copying documents by hand. They were all stored in the cupboards around the room. This room held all the most secret documents of the Venetian governments like treaties, contracts and land and property deeds. They still have all this paper, but I doubt there's much you can do with it now. Too fragile to even scan it for online storage, I would imagine.

You can't really see this very well, but she took us up into the attic area and showed us the massive support beams that run along the ceiling of one of the great halls you'll see below in a later photo.

This cell belonged to Casanova - yep, he was real and incarcerated right here for seducing other men's wives. He was sentences to 5 years in prison, but escaped after 1.5 with the help of a metal bar stashed in a plate of pasta and a fellow prisoner.

One of the more ornate rooms of the palace and used by the Doge. You can see two cabinets in the back corners of the room. There are four of these in each corner and one leads to the prison cells. The room next to this is where they would hold torture sessions of the prisoners.

This is one of the great halls of the Palace and the one whose beams were in the photograph above. Very ornate walls and ceilings.

And within the same area is St Mark's Basilica - a beautiful church with a line at least a mile long. We decided to skip going inside, but here are a few pics of the courtyard and basilica.