Ciao Italia!: Venice Carnevale

This weekend we went to Venice for the famous Carnevale. It originally started in 1162 when the Republic of Venice defeated Ulrico and since then its been a tradition to celebrate their victory. A huge part of carnivale is dressing up and wearing masks. Italians began to wear the masks so everyone could celebrate and not know which class people were in.

We went on this trip through our school and left early saturday morning. We got there around 10 and had to take a ferry to get to the island of Venice. We started out on Santa Marco which is the center of the city celebration. We all had no clue how crowded it was actually going to be. The city center was literally stuffed with people. We then began our tour with our group, but it was so crowded and so loud that mostly everyone left the tour and explored Venice on our own. They recommended for us to get lost, and thats exactly what we did. We saw so many elaborate costumes, and the people wearing them took it so seriously. They would walk around and pose for pictures, act like they were really important and just walk away. The drink of the carnival is the bellini and we enjoyed a lot of those with the fellow Italians. We stayed on the island all day even though our hotel was off the island. We stayed for the night time celebration which was basically thousands of Italians dancing to the YMCA, fill me up buttercup, and respect on repeat.

Today we understood the ferry system a little better and got to Venice much quicker (no cars are allowed on all of Venice). Once there it seemed like the crowds had multiplied over night. Me, Tiff and 4 of our other friends were trying to walk to our glass blowing tour but the streets were completely packed. we stood at a standstill for about 15 minutes around over a thousand people with no clue what to do. The police were blocking us off from Santo Marco (the main Carnevale Plaza) because it was over capacity. We then started getting pushed into the police officers from the massive crowd behind us. The police officers were holding us back and making us into an American sandwhich. We started freaking out that we were about to be trampled so we ended up having to push under the policemen. Once past the blockade we were still stuck in a crowd and freaking out that a riot was about to break out, so we pushed our way into a jewelry store. We ended up staying in the jewelry store for an hour and a half before the crowd would move. The owner wanted to kick us and the other people out that were trying to wait in the store so we all ended up buying things so we could stay in there. It was an a super scary experience, but once the crowd somewhat cleared our guide came and met us and took us to lunch. Because of the crowd fiasco we never got to see the famous Venetian glass because we decided a gondola ride was more important in our limited time. Gondola rides are actually super expensive 80 euros during the day, and 100 and up at night. We split it among the 6 of us so it wasn't bad, it just sucked that it was raining. The man rowing the gondola told us that he sees proposals at least once every 2 weeks.

Since Carnivale is a two week long celebration that is now celebrated throughout Italy, we will experience round 2 next weekend in Roma!