San Lazzaro

Once a day at 3:10pm there is a boat that leaves from the San Marco area and goes to the little island of San Lazzaro. It is named after the Armenian monastery that encompasses it. The problem with being told "San Marco" is that it's a huge port. There are so many docking stations that one could easily spend upwards of 20 minutes running from one to the next in search of the only boat that goes to San Lazzaro. We barely made it onto the boat, but the running around was worth it just to feel the warm wind in your hair and simultaneously begin to sing the theme to Titanic. (The other passengers were not impressed).

Since there is only one boat per day, there is only one tour per day and it begins at 3:25 exactly. There were 2 guides, one of whom was to speak in both English and French and therefore had around 25 people gathered around him, the other was to speak in Italian with only about 7 people around her. Guess which one we chose. From what I understood, it began as a leper colony in the 1100's (I'll let you know if my skin starts falling off) and was then given to a group of Armenian monks who restored a church and expanded the island. It has become a museum for Armenian culture because the monks were obviously also scholars and published around 4,000 manuscripts and house an entire library of over 100,000 books. They also have rooms and rooms of glass shelves which house various wordly treasures that the monks collected and/or were donated to them, such as ivory pipes, swords, ornate metal crosses, and belts, china, and (my favorite) a mummy!

Lord Byron also randomly studied Armenian there for a year sometime in the early 19th century. So there is even a plaque for him:

At the end of the tour we were lead back to the entrance 5 minutes before the next vaporetto was to go back to San Marco (actually the stop is San Zaccaria #20, if you want to get technical and not run all over the fondamenta). Naturally that was plenty of time to stop in the shop and buy some of their famous rose petal jam. (For the price, there better be some gold in that jam as well). We made the boat just in time and this cutie was rowing toward us: