Still not feeling very well, but we planned one last visit to a Basilica, specifically the Santa Maria della Salute! Good news – this Basilica is Free and you can take photos as long as you do not use a flash! Wonderful, Im giving them a 10 out of 10! I would like to know more about who decides the charges as well as whether photos can be taken in Italy. Hmmmm….
More about Santa Maria della Salute… in English “Saint Mary of Health, commonly known simply as the Salute, I think I needed to visit to hopefully gain some good health!
Here is the “backstory” from Wikipedia …. Beginning in the summer of 1630, a wave of the plague assaulted Venice, and until 1631 killed nearly a third of the population. In the city, 46,000 people died whilst in the lagoons the number was far higher, some 94,000.[1] Repeated displays of the sacrament, as well as prayers and processions to churches dedicated to San Rocco and San Lorenzo Giustiniani had failed to stem the epidemic. Echoing the architectural response to a prior assault of the plague (1575–76), when Palladio was asked to design the Redentore church, the Venetian Senate on October 22, 1630, decreed that a new church would be built.[1] It was not to be dedicated to a mere “plague” or patron saint, but to the Virgin Mary, who for many reasons was thought to be a protector of the Republic.[2]
It was also decided that the Senate would visit the church each year. On November 21 the Feast of the Presentation of the Virgin, known as the Festa della Madonna della Salute, the city’s officials parade from San Marco to the Salute for a service in gratitude for deliverance from the plague is celebrated. This involved crossing the Grand Canal on a specially constructed pontoon bridge and is still a major event in Venice.
As usual here are a few of my photos from this, last trip in Venice!!
A few more excellent photos from the internet:
Hello Alex! How are you doing? Glad to see you are following my blog. 🙂 Maybe I should call it a journal, because I am doing it more to journal my experience so I can remember in the future rather than for some journalistic – gaining an audience type goal. 😉 However, I do have some views on my blog because I link it to social media – it helps me get a bit of traffic.
YES – WordPress is clunky, but I find that once it’s up and running, maintaining it and adding new info is very easy. Where as in a traditional HTML site, when you add a page – you need to relink to the whole site to make sure it is consistent. Anyway – it certainly could be an interesting challenge for you. 🙂
Oh… We need to work on a book project soon! 😉
Glad to see you’re not dead yet. I’m still not sure what you get out of this “blogging” thing. I tried it and it was really boring. No one reads what I write except you. And you don’t even understand any of it!
I’ve been thinking about switching my website to a manually coded HTML one, so I can at least get some HTML/CSS practice out of the whole thing. And of course write my own PHP code. I really don’t appreciate all the clunky bloat in WordPress. And the poor flexibility — you can’t even change the domain name without breaking your website. That’s stupid and totally avoidable.