Venice Day 4: Il Papiro

Mum wanted to purchase a couple more notebooks from the wonderful shop Il Papiro, so after breakfast we headed over there on the vaporetto, followed by a gentle amble through the back streets peering into shop windows on the way.  Assailed by delicious smells of leather wafting out from the handbag shops, mingled with fish osterias with the daily catch on ice temptingly displayed outside the restaurants.  Also managed to purchase more of Mum's favourite dark chocolate from a sweet shop that this time a year ago had already sold out.  She bought six bars to keep her going!

Here is Mum in the sumptuous heaven of paper and ink that is Il Papiro, where beautiful marbled paper notebooks mingle with writing paper, decorative boxes, quills and nibs, and it is easy to lose track of time.

The wind has been very fresh today, the Lagoon extra choppy and the vaporetto landings bouncing up and down more than I have ever experienced before.  One of those days when it is hard to know what to wear as it's warm in the sun but chilly in the shade....

Walking back to the apartment up the back calle, we passed several naval men in uniform from the Arsenale where they are all based (another reason why we like staying in this area so much!), having not seen any on the first or second days.  To save ourselves embarrassment in public we refer to them as 'fettuccine', a term coined by a very dear friend of ours who has also been to Venice with us - this means that we can alert one another with, for example "fettuccine on the bridge at 3 o'clock", and no one passing by would be any the wiser ;)

After lunch, I headed out to get the vaporetto to San Silvestro, with the idea of just wandering about the back streets with my camera wherever the fancy took me, while Mum had a rest before going out to paint locally a pretty little courtyard that we had admired earlier.  I really like walking about Venice without a map, just going left or right depending on what looks interesting from a photographic point of view, and it really is quite hard to get lost here.  Found myself thwarted on several turns with people either standing right in the way of the photograph I wanted to take, or the opposite when I actually wanted somebody to walk by nobody came, but my mood here is generally too good for me to get really grumpy so I just waited, whilst mentally drumming my fingers on an invisible table in front of me.  I wasn't able to get a couple of photographs that I wanted because of people in the way or moving before I could press the shatter, but equally I got some really nice photographs of people too, so I guess it's all balances out.

It got quite chilly towards the end of the day so I reluctantly returned to the apartment sooner than I otherwise would have done, but it simply wasn't warm enough to sit outside reading my book and having a drink, as the breeze was up and the sky was cloudy.  Mum and I still went down to Bar Arsenale for a pre-supper drink, but it was not warm and we didn't linger.

Extract from Mum's diary today.