Marmot poo may be blue, but pigeon poo is white.

At this point, I think it is safe to say that we were getting pretty jaded with Italian palaces and museums. We get it: you're ostentatiously wealthy and you have a kickass set of builders. We zipped through the Correr Museum and moved onto St. Mark's Basilica, where our cyncism was put to the test.

As if a final show of one-up-manship (the act of building a church to St. Mark was itself an insufficient slight to the Pope and their St. Peter), the interior of St. Mark's is made up of golden mosaics that take the breath away.

The fines for picnicking in the square in front of the Church take your breath away too: 50 euros. There's a bit of a pigeon problem, you see. The fine for feeding the pigeons anything but the Venice-sanctioned birdfeed (nutritious, and complete with avian birth control) is the rather odd figure of 517 euros. Of course, several tourists had bought entire loaves of bread to surreptitiously feed to the pigeons. At first, we thought, 'silly tourists, they will be fined!' But then we remembered that wonderful phrase, 'non capisce Italiano.'