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April 1999

Veneto - Padua

David Aaronson
2005-09-23 23:43:31

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is the Orto Botanical Gardens. Purportedly the oldest botanical gardens in Europe, it is by far the most extensive we've ever visited. The gardens are divided into over 20 sections, most of them devoted to a single family of plants. In many cases each variety of every plant in a family is displayed. This can actually get tedious after you've seen all 237 varieties of sage but it is impressive. This photo is of the front gates with the spires of the Basilica del Santo in the background

These flowers were found in the alpine rock garden section. We lost the map to the gardens shortly after our return, and unfortunately we had written down the flowers we had photographed on the map. Over a year later the map reappeared, but now we're not completely certain of the order. As best we can tell, this is a species of Iberis.

Here we have another lovely flowering thing that we think is a species of Mimosa. We do recall that it was extremely rare for one of these to flower, whatever it might be.

This circular fence in the foreground of this picture surrounds one of the four major plant groups. It doesn't really matter which one, unless you're a botanist,in which case you should already know just by looking at it. If you are a botanist, please email us and tell us what it is.

Yes, this is also the background of the page, more or less. One of the flowers here (either the red or the lavender) are anemones. The other are aubrieta. We might mention that these names are also in Italian only, so other than spices and particularly common flowers, we probably don't know what we're talking about in English anyway.

Here we have an extreme close-up of ... some purplish flowers. These are either pulmonaria or myostros. It could be a quiz in fact, but it would be a very very difficult quiz for the average reader. Also, we don't have the answers. Pretty though, aren't they?

After we left the gardens, we drove out of Padua and proceeded on to Marghera, across the water from Venice. We stayed in Marghera at the Hotel Roma, which we recommend very highly as a cheap place to stay while visiting Venice. Furthermore they were very friendly and helpful (and gave us free food). That said, we will also mention that Marghera is a city made up almost entirely of rotaries. Driving there is almost like being on one of those spinning tea-cup rides at an amusement park. We took a bus from the hotel to Venice proper which is far cheaper than actually trying to park in Venice. It was dark and raining lightly when we arrived in Venice, but it really doesn't matter. Seeing the maze of alleys, canals and bridges for the first time completely overrides any objection to being vaguely damp. We also found an open gelato store and picked up some mint and chocolate to add to our collection. After what seemed like hours, we found our way to St. Mark's square (pictures coming on the next couple pages) which was dark and deserted, and in retrospect was rather nicer that way. We found a ludicrously over-priced restaurant to eat at before taking a vaporetto (water-bus) back down the Grand Canal and returning to Marghera. We now realize that all restaurants in Venice are ludicrously over-priced, but we would discover how to avoid this by the time we left. (That's a meager attempt at a hook to make sure you anxiously read the next page now to discover the answer).