venice city of st. marc


The one most prominent structure in all of Venice is the very lofty Campanile di San Marco.  To quote a presenter in a documentary I watched on YouTube in anticipation of the trip, it is like a 'giant exclamation mark'.  Located in Piazza San Marco, it is the bell tower of Basilica Cattedrale Patriarcale di San Marco [St. Mark's Basilica]


Yes 'Mark' as in the author of the Gospel of Mark in the Bible.  It is said that the Venetian merchants of old stole the relics of St. Mark from Alexandria over a thousand years ago and brought it to Venice.  The original basilica was built to house the relic, as well as all the other loot such as the four horses of Alexandra the Great.  Turns out the merchants got rich from not only trade, but theft.  Fast forward to 2014 - Cities of London, New York, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo..  It appears nothing has changed.



I was mind-blown by the magnificence of the horses as I stood before them in absolute silence for about 15 minutes.  In that period of time, I was the only tourist in the room with them.  For a moment, I could imagine what Alexandra would have seen when these horses were first presented to him that long ago. Even in the days of Mark 2,000 years ago  these horses were already antiques of a thousand years!


Alas! no photos are allowed in sacred places in Venice, including the Basilica.  [Yes of course many tourists took photos anyway in typical disregard for authority and respect for sanctity].


It is ever so difficult to take photos in the Piazza as it is jam packed with tourists almost all the time. Apparently there is a window between 3am and 5am when you can get a clear shot, but I missed the window by 2 hours in the morning when already the queues were longer than at an Apple store on a new iPhone day.  From the top of the Campanile though, you can view and take pictures the entirety of Venice.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

olympus om-1

Image
It was World Photography Day the other day.  I picked the Olympus OM-1 as my camera for the day  mainly because I had recently acquired it. I had also been reading a bit about some photographers of note, such as Jane Brown , that used the OM-1. I was immediately impressed with the size of the thing - so small. I later learnt that it was indeed Olympus' intention to make an SLR smaller than all the existing ones with the giant prisms.  Sound familiar? That is almost exactly what is happening today with the Olympus OMD series. To quote the oracle in Battlestar Gallactica "A ll of this has happened before, and it will happen again ". My copy came with the beautiful Zuiko 50mm f1.8 MC (marcro) lens. I am familair with the Zuiko quality, but when the photos came out, I was blown away. In fact, I commented somewhere that Olympus should have named it the "Olympus OMG!". That's how good it is. The above photo of the minibus was taken in relative
Read more

How to choose your first 35mm film camera

Image
If you're a seasoned digital photographer and you use a ' real ' camera with settings and all that, then you already have all the information you need about picking a film camera. Unless you're looking for something completely different from what you already know, you can stop reading now. Just go buy a film camera, go out and shoot. You'll be fine - you already know how to use a film camera. It's the same beast, except the image is being recorded on a piece of film instead of a digital sensor. Now, for the rest of us beginners, noobs, padawans, young grasshoppers, e.t.c., here are some insights; I use affiliate links in this article from Amazon, KEH and Apple and may be compensated if you purchase via a link. I have not been sponsored by anyone. This article is based solely on my experience as camera enthusiast. Enjoy. What is 35mm Film? "Film", or photographic film refers to a thin sheet of transparent plastic coated with a photo
Read more

boots 500AF - part 1

Image
Much displeased am I to report that my nostalgia project isn’t going as smoothly as I expected. Why is it that in a mostly plastic camera, one of the only metallic parts turned out to be the least durable? The source of my said displeasure is a thin little strip of metal. Thus the story goes. Camera number 3 finally. I was excited about this one, as it was my first ‘good’ camera. Branded ‘Boots 500AF’, it has a 34mm f4.3 autofocus (hence the ‘AF’) lens. Come to think of it, both the 34mm (as opposed to 35mm) and f4.3 (rather than f4) are quite obscure values for a film point and shoot. I have no way of telling, but I assume the ‘500’ in the name denotes the maximum shutter speed of 1/500 the camera can achieve, but that’s pure speculation on my part. It has an auto flash, and the lens does a faux zoom action when turned on. Very cool indeed. I read somewhere that it was a rebranding of some Japanese camera, but again, I have found no evidence of this. Oh how
Read more