Walking around Venice, there are certainly many modern things, but overall, the city feels old. Really old.

This random building that we passed this afternoon just blew me away, imagining all the layers of history:

In fact, in one photography gallery, I noticed that the walls were covered in salt. Inside! Apparently, that’s really common in Venice. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised because the city is built on the water, but it’s still kind of mind boggling to me!

A favorite part of my day was visiting a brand new Leonardo DaVinci Museum. Apparently, there are two Leonardo DaVinci museums in Venice. We had passed by another one on our first night, and tried to go back today, only to realize that we were at this newer one. Who could have guessed that there would be two museums in one small city dedicated to one person? After visiting the new museum, I decided that DaVinci was amazing enough to deserve many more than two museums! Leonardo DaVinci died in 1519, but he had visions of many modern day inventions before they were created! His sketches show that his ideas were well ahead of his time (of course, in addition to being a famous artist). He had designs for bridges, catapults, bikes, submarines, machine guns, tanks, cities, and more. 

Among other things, he designed this super cool spiral windmill, which I’d love to see in today’s world!

It was really fun playing with his “machines” which the museum re-created from his drawings.

For instance, before photography existed, he invented this tool to help artists break down images for sketching them in pieces. I tried modeling behind the screen:

I took a bunch of video so that you could see DaVinci’s machines in action:

Venice is a city like no other I have ever visited, and I’m trying to imagine what it might have been like when DaVinci lived here. Maybe not too different! There’s lots of hustle and bustle, but I haven’t seen a car since we arrived. 

To celebrate our last night here, we got A LOT of gelato after dinner. I don’t think we should probably leave every city with this kind of sweet goodbye, but tonight was pretty yummy.