Birthday celebrations continued today with the 'Secret Itineraries' tour of the Doge's palace. This was something Dan booked and gave me the tickets for whilst we were at dinner yesterday. We got to walk past the long queue of people waiting for tickets and straight in to the ticket office – and exchanged our booking reference for some stickers (yay!) and our tickets into the museum, with strict instructions to be at the meeting point at 10:45. Our guide, Elena, then got us kitted up with listening devices and then took us up to the main floors of the palace after first having explained that we were going to be up in the roof of the palace, into the secret parts of the building.
We couldn't take pictures up there (or, I guess, or it wouldn't be a secret itinerary!) but we were taken up into the roof space where there were rooms there occupied at one time by the chancellor. There was a secret courtroom, torture chambers, prison cells (where Cassanova stayed for 18 months) and an entire room built (by the Venetian shipbuilders, the Arsenalotti) to look like the inside of a ship, which was a 'copy room' where 10 copies of each document signed by the chancellor was blindly copied out by illiterate copyists – hence the content was unknown to them!
Fab – a winner Dan!
The pic shows the wall of the inside of the palace...the rooms were above the 3rd floor windows, see the round porthole 'eyes' at the top, that is where these rooms were – noone knew.
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