Saturday: Gondolas, free time! and Scuola di San Rocco

It's 11:20 on Saturday night and we've all just gotten back from singing our first concert. To say it was spectacular would be an understatement! Not only were the kids exceptionally good, and not only were we fortunate enough to be singing inside a magnificent room covered with 16th century art - the Scuola di San Rocco -- but we also sang for a particularly enthusiastic audience of close to two hundred or more Italians.

But our day began long before that with a gondola ride. After we walked through Piazza San Marco, we made our way to one of the many gondola stations scattered around the city. The ride lasted about 35 minutes and took the kids through some of the more remote canals and byways of old Venice. 

Mr. Smith and Mrs. Silberfein each hopped into a gondola along with several of the kids. But I did not take the ride… after all, someone had to take the pictures from the canal's edge for this blog, right? (Just kidding. I took the opportunity to have a cafe with my friends Carlo & Luigi since I'd missed breakfast and hadn't yet had my morning coffee. Oversleeping happens easily when your body clock is off kilter and you're up till midnight hoping the hotel's WiFi would move a little faster!)

Anyway… after the gondola ride we all went back to San Marco where Colin (our guide) explained to all of us that we would be free for the next 4 hours so that the kids could shop, walk, and enjoy what turned out to be a day with a cloudless blue sky above, a 50+ degree temperature, and a city swarming with people all happy to be enjoying this magnificent city. Mr. Smith, Mrs. Silberfein, John Evans, and I walked through the Basilica di San Marco together, marveling at this thousand-year old icon of world history. Mr. Smith and I had a quick lunch together and then also went our separate ways. I wandered over to the Scuola San Rocco to have a look at where we'd be singing later on and was flabbergasted at the extraordinary artwork that would surround us later on in the evening.

At around 4:00, we left for the Scuola. Arriving there about 45 minutes later we warmed up - literally!… there was no heat in the building and we were essentially surrounded by many thousands of tons of cold stone and marble. But what exquisite marble & stone it was! Tintoretto was everywhere, the walls and the ceilings were covered, and the kids, like me, marveled at it all when they first laid eyes on it!

We rehearsed the full program and then moved on to a different venue: dinner! Which was of course, delicious. Ziti pancetta and a beef entree. But we were running late, and had to go quickly back to the concert site.

At 9:03 PM sharp we started our program and the kids impressed their audience to no end. we took five bows as the audience continued to applaud and then stand! The entire concert was videotaped and will be edited and finalized some time after we return. (That upload would keep me awake till dawn if I tried to do it now!!!)

Our curfew tonight is midnight, and all the kids were talking about on the way back was having gelato. We're all here right now, close to the hotel tonight on the island of Lido, and it seems, as I'm finishing this entry, it's almost curfew already!

Oh, and by the way, Matt Moody told me to say "Hi" to Eric and Jan, and Andrew wants to give a "shout-out" to his mom & dad.

Until tomorrow!

Ciao