Hey Epic Human,
When we approach Venice, my husband gets sick. I’m not joking! Normally he is healthy as a horse, but twice now—just as we approach Venice—he’s come down with a bug. And you know how this works: if one of us gets it, both of us gets it. It’s the law.
Luckily it didn’t ruin our day in Venice, although other challenges threatened to—including a stern lecture by a police officer accompanied by a warning ticket for our luggage blocking our view, and tickets Robin pre-purchased for the wrong date.
We had two sites to get through, so we got right to it!
The Doge’s Palace was sumptuous and extraordinary—the frescoes and artwork transported me to high fashion Renaissance-era Carnivale Venice—and the ginormous ballrooms made me giddy. I had to buy a book so I could study up later.
Next we dashed to Saint Mark’s Basilica where we encountered our ticket debacle. That wasn’t fun. It was sheer luck this happened in September. The throng of tourists had diminished to the point where we simply bought new tickets on the spot and waltzed right in. (Robin hopes to get a refund for those wrong date tickets later.)
I felt a bit weary after touring the Doge’s Palace and unable to even take in the extraordinary beauty of this sacred structure. WOW!
The basilica was consecrated in 1094, so it is gloriously ancient. The interior of the domes, the vaults, and the upper walls are covered with golden mosaics depicting saints, prophets, and biblical scenes, and represent 800 years of various artistic styles. The entire church seems to be one continuous gold glittering Byzantine mosaic. (It is tough competition for the Ravenna mosaics only a few miles away, which I was lucky to see last time.)
The chancel is enclosed by a Gothic altar screen dated 1394. It is surmounted by a bronze and silver crucifix, flanked by statues of the Virgin and Saint Mark, together with the twelve Apostles.
This sanctuary dazzled me. We paid the extra fee to see the the Pala d’Oro, a masterpiece of Byzantine enamels on gilded silver. Dating from 1105, this is the world’s only intact example of large size Gothic goldsmith’s art. The altarpiece stands nearly ten feet wide by six and one-half feet tall.
It is made of gold and silver, 187 enamel plaques, and 1,927 gems. These include 526 pearls, 330 garnets, 320 emeralds, 255 sapphires, 183 amethysts, 175 agates, 75 rubies, 34 topazes, 16 carnelians, and 13 jaspers.
The entire basilica was a marvelous treat. But unlike the Doge’s Palace, they sold no postcards or guide books that I could see. (I probably should have checked the museum, but we were too tired to climb the stairs and I didn’t think about it at the time—I’m so used to being shunted right into the gift shop at the end of a tour. I’ll guess I’ll just have to go back… or find one somewhere else.)
After all this strenuous sightseeing, we headed back to our car so we could leave Venice before nightfall. We scooted out of town and headed for Austria, aiming for our hotel halfway to Vienna, our next destination. We arrived around midnight and collapsed into bed. I began feeling poorly.
Robin arose the next morning and tried to rouse me for breakfast. I was comatose. He fussed and fretted, and I was too far out of it to care. Finally Robin grasped how ill I felt. (He had his ghastly bout with the illness while on board our ferry, so he remembered how bad it was.)
He attempted to extend our hotel reservation by a day, but they had no rooms to rent—new guests were arriving shortly. My body was in the bed, but I was floating off in another dimension.
One of the hotel employees knew of an AirBnB nearby where we could stay one night. Robin accepted the offer. He packed us up, drove the 4 minutes there, and my body moved from one bed to another with barely a blink.
I slept straight through for nearly 20 hours. (Robin crashed too—he was also still sick.) We would have slept longer, but the owner had guests coming. Robin packed us up again and headed for our hotel outside Vienna. When I awakened in that hotel the next morning, I regained consciousness at last. I was still coughing and congested, but the fever had broken. And with that, we geared up to go gawk at Vienna.
Vienna was not our most glamorous visit. We were both cranky and nobody had planned anything in advance. We argued over where to go, what to see, whether to do a bus tour or not. We couldn’t find suitable parking with our luggage overhead and drove out to the sticks where we found a Park ’n Ride. Then we summoned an Uber to downtown. We caught a tram by the opera house and tried to do the Rick Steves’ Ringstrasse tour, but the audio was mis-timed and the tram stops didn’t line up.
We finally threw in the towel and disembarked at the River Danube
From there we walked to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, which Robin claimed was worth seeing. Perhaps it was, but in my weakened state I wasn’t thrilled (and normally I love Romanesque churches).
By now it was late in the day, and Robin complained about the next leg of our trip taking 3 hours. We tripped over a juice bar and ordered fresh pomegranate juice—about the only thing we agreed on all day. We caught another Uber back to the Park ’n Ride and retrieved our car. Then it was off to Prague!
That night we enjoyed a blissful night’s sleep in an airport Marriott compliments of Robin, who found some old hotel points lying around and used them for a 2-night stay. Prague was a major center of the occult and the dark arts in the 16th century, and given my studies of depth psychology, this was right up my alley. However, Prague was surely a low waterline for us.
Robin was tired and grouchy—and I was tired and grouchy. His hearing was poor due to congestion, and my voice was weak and scratchy. Because we wore masks to protect others it made our breathing labored and vision fuzzy. Both of us had to pee all the time (in a crowded area with limited paid toilet facilities). His social skills were eroding and I became irritated with shouting and repeating everything I said at least twice. We were like snapping turtles. In 1946 “The Bickersons” was a comedy sketch radio series that aired featuring a married couple who spent nearly all their time together in relentless verbal sparring, and I thought we were surely auditioning for its remake! Kill me now!
Prague was not our finest moment. We booked onto 2 guided museum tours with guides we couldn’t understand with their thick Czech accents. (To our ears, both guides sounded like Robin Williams babbling foreign gibberish as his “Mork” character.)
Despite all the misery we endured, four highlights are worth sharing here:
We visited one of the oldest buildings in Prague (probably built earlier than 1412) that appears to have housed an alchemy lab and has now been turned into a little museum—the Speculum Alchemiae (“The Mirror of Alchimy”). It was so named after a short alchemical manual that dates from 1541. You may read it in olde English here.
A written description from 1579 describes a mysterious stinking fire goats-drawn carriage running around the house’s exterior. (Yes!)
A record dated from 1591 notes the sales of “miraculous medicinal ointments and potions” in the house that might well correlate with alchemical tinctures.
Secret rooms hidden in the basement of this house, the story goes, were discovered during Prague’s catastrophic flood of 2002, the worst flood ever recorded in the city’s history. Part of the street collapsed, opening up a hole into some sealed away, forgotten underground rooms which extended from under the house. The building is part of the Jewish quarter, and it barely survived both the “French Fire” of 1689 and the destruction of much of the Jewish ghetto in the early 20th century.
This was not simply a matter of opening a forgotten door and finding a complete workshop, however. One discovery led to another. The flooding opened up a hole in the street, revealing these underground rooms. These were full of mud, which had to be painstakingly cleared away. Out of the mud a picture slowly emerged of the work that was once done here.
Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II famously brought his court to Prague, where he invited the greatest astrologers, alchemists, and scientific instrument makers of his time.
Among them were the English alchemists/magicians Edward Kelley and John Dee. The museum proposes that this house was Rudolph II’s own alchemical laboratory, and imply that many famous alchemists, including Edward Kelley, would have worked there. Since the Catholic church disapproved of alchemy, this explains why the laboratory was hidden underground. Much of this sounds like rather far-fetched speculation built on rather flimsy evidence, although the tunnels themselves are real and the dates are plausible.
We next visited a tower where Edward Kelley once practiced alchemy, quite possibly with John Dee himself.
We climbed up 60 steps of one of the oldest wooden staircases in Prague, designed by Edward Kelley himself in the 16th century, where we then entered the remains of his ancient laboratory. He lived here during the final three years of his life. The first room of this “laboratory” is decorated to simulate a warehouse and library, and they claim it was a waiting room for anyone who wished to enter. The second room is a mock-up of the laboratory itself, packed with dusty implements and alembics.
Both alchemy museums were hokey beyond belief, but contained just enough factual truth in them to be worth the visit.
We next walked across Prague’s famous Charles Bridge, which is phenomenal, and becomes more so as one moves across it. Its Gothic sculptures have sacred significance, and the vistas are large and lovely on both sides.
The bridge aligns with the rising and setting of the sun—the alchemical power equated with vitality and transformation. King Charles IV consulted royal astrologists and numerologists to find the best time for the bridge’s construction, and the result is delectable.
And then—eeeeekkk!! I finally got to see the famous astronomical clock and take a selfie with it.
The Prague astronomical clock is a medieval astronomical clock first installed in 1410, making it the third-oldest astronomical clock in the world and the oldest clock still in operation.
The clock mechanism has three main components: the astronomical dial, representing the position of the sun and moon in the sky, and displaying various astronomical details. Statues of various Catholic saints stand on either side of the clock, and “The Walk of the Apostles” is an hourly show of moving Apostle figures. A skeleton representing Death strikes the time and sets the clock in motion every hour.
Four figures flanking the clock represent four things that were despised at the time of the clock’s making. First is vanity, represented by a figure admiring himself in a mirror. Next, a miser holding a bag of gold represents greed or usury. Finally, there is a Turkish figure representing lust and earthly pleasures. Alongside him stands Death, a skeleton that strikes the time. On the hour, the skeleton rings the bell, and immediately all the other figures shake their heads side to side, signifying their unreadiness to “go.”
Thereupon, the left and right windows above the astronomical clock slide aside to reveal the Twelve Apostles parading their various attributes past the portals.
I opted not to video my viewing, but you can watch the action closeup on YouTube below.
As with Venice and Vienna, I’d love to return to all these sites someday when we have more time on our hands to relax and enjoy things at a leisurely pace. In the meantime, we head for France today with 2-1/2 days of driving to get to our next house-sit.
Speaking of alchemy, I have just been notified that my speaking proposal was accepted by the London Arts-Based Research Centre to present on the topic of “Transformation through Alchemical Depth Typology” at their upcoming alchemy conference being held on November 4th and 5th. This topic is near and dear to my heart, and I'm excited to share what I know. If you would like to submit a proposal and/or attend this hybrid (live and virtual) event, use the following link:
Alchemy Conference
With any luck, I will see you there!
ciao for now,
-Dr. Vicky Jo