Venezia: Day Five

To be fair we spent most of this day outside of Venezia on a set of side trips. We got up really early and headed out to Brion Cemetary, which is a large complex designed by Carlos Scarpa. This was pretty interesting, although I'm sure I would have liked it more if I were more into Modern Art and the futurist movement of the early 1900's. Also I would probably have noticed more of the details had I already completed the Arch History III course under which Scarpa is covered extensively.

Regardless the cemetary was pretty cool. After that we headed to Vicenza, which was a really really cool town. I had been looking forward to going to Vicenza because this is where Brandon studied abroad when he was doing Architecture at Texas Tech. It was also really interesting to see a whole collection of Palladian buildings that we studied in depth in Arch History II.

The Vicenza Town hall, originally a medieval building with a renassance loggia built over the surface

We grabbed lunch at a little cafe, which was pretty interesting, then walked around town for a while where we saw another Palladian Palazzo that was aborted when it was still under construction as the family building it went bankrupt.

This was supposed to be 5x wider

After checking this out Alexis and I went down to the Olympic Theater in Vicenza which was designed by Palladio but not finished until after his death. The theater was really incredible, and I especially enjoyed the sound and light show they put on to demonstrate its visual and acoustical clarity. The experience of being in this theater has definitely affected my ideas about things I want to see built in my life.

The theater is built on false perspective, it's actually half the depth it appears to be

After checking out the theater we hopped on the bus and went out to the Villa Rotunda, another Palladian building we studied in class. It was pretty interesting.

I was having more fun than the glare in my eyes would indicate


I love snow!

So after checking out all the stuff in Vicenza we were officially dismissed for Spring Break. The bus took us back to the Mestre train station, then Jason, Jon, Brett and I went into Venezia for a while to hang out in the area of the train station. Early the next morning we had to catch a flight out of tiny little Treviso airport, and we never were able to arrange a place to stay the night that would allow us to get to the airport at 6am for our check-in, so after hanging out in Venezia for a bit we went on to Treviso where we spent the night in the Airport. This was a bad mistake... but I'll elaborate on the next post. We left Venezia about 9:00 at night, thus concluding our school trip and starting spring break, which is where I'll pick up with more information in the next post!