Life in Venice/The Bridge of Sighs

If you are in love and you want to make this love last forever, take your beloved and fly immediately to Venice. As soon as you land there, wait for sunset and go take a gondola with your beloved and ask the Gondolier to take you to the Ponte dei Sospiri, or The Bridge of Sighs, make sure you kiss right under the bridge before the sun sinks into the horizon… Now you can feel safe, for your love will last forever… Venice is a city for lovers, no wonder that it is in Venice and under one of its most famous bridges where you can make your love eternal, or so says the legend. This magical Bridge was built in the year 1600 to connect the local prison to the interrogating rooms in the Doge's palace. It is from this bridge that the convicts sentenced to imprisonment will see the last view of the beautiful city from a narrow stone window. When Lord Byron, the great English poet visited Venice in the 19th century, he watched the bridge and he imagined that the convicts would see Venice for the last time and sigh mourning their lost freedom, and since then it has been called the bridge of sighs or Ponte dei Sospiri in Italian. Walking around the magnificent Doge's palace, a real example of Baroque architecture with all its grotesque and exaggerated decorations, adorned with famous colossal Roman statues and roaming across its huge rooms, with their walls and ceilings crowded with Baroque paintings you suddenly enter a plain hall which is devoid of any decorations, and who would decorate the room where convicts are interrogated, judged and sentenced. Then you enter the stone bridge, you will see it is totally closed, more like a tunnel and you can only see the outer world from very narrow small window and then it leads you into the prison and its cold scary cells. The contrast between the exaggerated decorations that characterizes the Baroque palace and the plain ugly emptiness of the stone walled prison attracts all kinds of feelings, and being claustrophobic by nature, I was literally running to get out of this horrible place, to breathe some fresh air and see the sky again. It is true that we do not know the value of things until they are gone, just being able to walk in the streets, inhaling the air and seeing the sky is a blessing… To be continued...