Venice day 5, a walk around the outside of the Museo Storico Navale
Alan very much wanted to have a look at the naval museum in Venice and so we walked there from our apartment in the San Marco district. It was a very chilly but bright day and I look my infrared camera for an outing, to ring the changes a little. The museum lies in the Arsenale, the old dock area of Venice to the east of San Marco. There is still a military base here, situated at the rear of the museum. The Arsenale was establishes in the 12th century and was expanded in the 14th to 16th centuries. It then employed a huge workforce who could build a Venetian galley in 24 hours. The rampant lions guarding the gateway were pillaged from Piraeus in Greece. The upright lion which has runic inscriptions carved into it may date from the 10th century and came from Sweden. By the 17th century the shipyard was falling into decline and Napoleon finished off the job by destroying the docks. I adjusted the infrared images as I imported them, to look as they did on the back of the camera....