Opening Doors in Venice
a visit to La Serenissima, The Most Serene Republic
May 21-26, 2024
The tour is currently filled. Please contact me to be placed on the waiting list: info@marypadgett.com
for artists, art appreciators, and lovers of Italy
Together with my dear friend, Renaissance art historian and private tour guide Paola Vojnovic, I invite you for a uniquely personal visit to Venice!
We’ve created a six day visit to Venice to introduce you to the city we both love. We have organized each day with tours and site visits along with free time for artists to paint. I will take the painters to some favorite painting spots and Paola will guide non-painters on to other activities.
Our planned tours and visits:
We will take you on private tours, guided by experts, to the ornate and historic Ducal Palace and the Basilica of San Marco to see its spectacular mosaics. We’ll tour the Torre dell’ Oroligio in Piazza San Marco and visit the State Archive of Venice to see rare books and treasures up-close. We will have a private tour of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. We’ll go to the Giardini to see the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale.
Paola will give us expert commentary in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari where there are stunning works by Bellini, Titian, Veneziano, and Donatello. She’ll take us to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco to show us more than fifty of Tintoretto’s paintings that line its walls.
We will be introduced to local Venetians: to gondola makers at the Squero San Trovaso, the city’s oldest gondola workshop; to a variety of artisans who weave silk, blow glass, and craft masks; and to the craftspeople at Orsoni, Venice’s only working glass furnace fabricating smalti and gold leaf mosaics.
On foot we’ll visit the Jewish ghetto, the Rialto Market and the panoramic terrace in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. We’ll explore Venice’s canals in a gondola. Aboard a private boat we’ll go out onto the lagoon with an oceanographer to learn about its ecology and the impact of environmental threats on Venice. We’ll visit the island of Torcello to see its extraordinary Byzantine mosaics before enjoying a Venetian lunch there. We’ll make a stop on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo where the Venetians first invented the quarantine system and then end our lagoon day in colorful Burano.
Meals included in the tour will offer a experience uniquely Venetian, both in flavors and in locations with our welcome dinner hosted in a private 15th century palazzo on the Grand Canal!
About us: Paola and I first met in 2007 when together we led a college student tour to Venice. By then we both were in love with the city. My first visit was as a school girl in 1967; Paola first arrived in 2000 to work at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. After multiple visits and experiences since, we both can share with you our passions and connections to Venice, La Serenissima, The Most Serene Republic. This tour is unique to us and because of who we are. We love Venice and want to share it with you!