As I mentioned in my previous posts we were able to see lots of things that people maybe miss in Venice, including some of the lesser known museums.

Our museum pass included the gorgeous Palazzo Mocenigo, which houses The Study Centre for the History of Textiles, as you can imagine a prime location for me! The palace itself was beautiful with some wonderful paintings of scenes from Venetian life with such a focus on costume.

However, the most amazing thing was the small room with 18th century embroidered waistcoats. We just came round a corner to see all of this splendour!

These are just incredible, especially when you consider the hours that each must have taken to embroider.

They also had a small display of kimonos, proving again that culture spreads so rapidly through fashion. These were in a section about casual wear around the house.

We also visited Casa Goldoni, which is the house of one of the most famous 19th century playwrights, Carlo Goldoni. This was a small museum but very interesting, including this sack back dress, particularly the lace on the dress which referenced back to our previous museum visit at Burano. Goldoni wrote about fashion in some of his plays which makes him a great source for textile historians and he was referenced in the Burano Lace Museum’s interpretation.

It was also great to see inside what is a fairly typical Venetian house with its internal ground floor courtyard and stairs leading to the living area.

As well as Burano we visited the island of Murano, which is famous for glass making. The museum there was excellent, with fascinating displays of how they make the millefiori glass, using tiny tubes of individual colours. Again there was very good use of video in the museum’s interpretation.

There was also an art exhibition, by Simon Berger, called Shattering Beauty. I am not usually a fan of modern art but this was absolutely stunning, not only in the technique used of carefully breaking glass to create faces, but also in the inspiration for the technique, which came when he saw a shattered windscreen from a car accident. I loved the way he had thought about the images and the use of the cubes and reflection, so you got to see yourself at the same time.

Other wanders included a trip to the Arsenale, which takes up a large proportion of the island. This was the old shipyard, which is still in operation today as a naval base.

Many of the paintings that we saw earlier in the week featured this area, and the incredible amount of ship building that was done here, which made Venice such an important naval power. This is a painting done by one of my favourite artists, Canaletto, that I found on Wikipedia, which shows you how it would have looked in 1793.

Although you can’t go inside, you can wander all around the walls and appreciate the scale of the place. This map from All About Learn, dated 1797, is wonderful for its detail of all of the vessels being built there.

On our last day we took the number 1 vaporetto out to its final stop, the island of Lido. We had seen this from across the bay all week, and I really wanted to go and visit.

It has a completely different feel to the other islands of Venice, there are long sandy beaches and lots of gorgeous hotels and houses on wide streets. We loved it and would encourage you to go if you can to see a different side of the city.

Our final visit was to the very famous, and much visited, St Peter’s Basilica. It is a truly remarkable building, the scale of the gold mosaics and architecture just incomparable.

The floors also fascinated me, their sheer complexity and attention to detail was stunning, so much inspiration as well for textile creation!

Venice, you were wonderful, thank you. I probably will not go back, just because there are about a million other cities I need to visit, but you are beautiful and unique, and I hope that going forward tourism does not have too a severe impact on your future.

I shall be back in a few days hopefully, with an update on what I have been doing here. It has been a very busy, but lovely week, temperatures are around 30 degrees so there have been plenty of visits to the pool in and amongst my textile endeavours. Until then have fun, take care, stay safe and thanks for visiting.