The “Carnevale di Venezia”, as it’s referred to in Venice, is a frenzy of masked merrymaking that’s especially dear to the Marco Polo Designs “family”. Venice’s Mardigras celebration fills the 2 weeks before Lent with every imaginable festivity. During this time, the city swells with about 3 million visitors. The spectacular and ubiquitous traditional masks
Today was a bit sad for us— we saw our good friends Brian and Geraldine off on the water-taxi to the Venice airport, for their return trip to Ireland. We enjoyed a glorious trip to Florence together, followed by a weeks of enjoyable meals and outings together, between our work sessions. We can’t complain! We noticed something a
This was a fun-filled weekend for us. On Saturday, we went to the island of Lido with our friends Brian and Geraldine. Lido is a loooong island just south of Venice, and it serves as the locals’ refuge from the summer heat and humidity of Venice. After a short vaporetto (water-bus) ride to Lido, and
Though it’s hard for us to believe, our Spring 2011 design trip to Murano is nearly half over. Our current Venice activities are in full swing. We’ve multiple trips to visit our artisan friends on the island of Murano, as well as in Venice. We’ve even had the pleasure of sharing 2 home-cooked lunches with
Last time I talked about the B&B Venezia where we stay. Today I want to talk about a favorite subject of mine – food! Because we come twice a year for business and stay for 2 weeks at a time, we do try to stretch our food budget. So we don’t eat in the fancy
Today was a day to broaden our horizons: we escaped Venice, to see a couple of nearby places on the mainland. We visited Vicenza, an ancient city with roman roots, and Padova (or Padua, in US lingo). We met briefly with Eliza, one of our valued precious-metals findings suppliers (Vicenza is the precious-metals capital of
In 16 years of traveling to Venice, Jane has stayed in all sorts of places, from the good to the bad to the ugly, according to her reports. A few years ago she had the good fortune of meeting a very lovely couple, Paolo and Manuela, who have two small apartments adjacent to theirs that
Buon giorno! This is Penny, finally taking a turn at writing from Venice. While Claude’s writing has been more focused on the new bead designs, I am going to write more about our experiences in Venice itself – a bit more of a travelogue, as we have had friends and followers who have asked about
Today has been a bit quiet, as we wait to receive some of our sample perle (beads) on Monday. We visited one of our two primary partners and suppliers on Murano, to pick up some samples from them. We were VERY pleased with what we got – very much what we had envisioned. Our Spring
We had a busy and productive day today. We spent the day with two of our beadmakers, one on Murano and the other in the city of Mestre at the opposite end of the causeway that links the island of Venice with the mainland. On our Vaporetto ride to Murano, we saw workers changing a
