Gertrude Herdle Letter Venice Italy 8-16-1921

              Hotel d'Italie
Rio San Moisé
Venice, Italy
August 16, 1921

My dear Family,

Things are getting serious.  Do you realize that about one month from to-day we shall be in home waters, with this great adventure all over and past?  Somehow, I hadn't thought about that part of it except that it meant seeing you.  Won't it be queer to sleep in the same bed more than four nights- and to inhabit dresser drawers!  I shall have to ^be^ sprinting across the Canadian frontier every little while if I want to feel at home.  The idea of occupying just one country seems almost ridiculous.

But it is true, as Ed Longstrith used to say it was when I was in an ecstasy of anticipation, the one enjoys a trip to Europe- the right kind of one, as ours surely has been- much more in retrospect than in the actual experiencing.  I am going to have a background fill of definite images for so many things now, which will make everything in life richer and more directly connected with me.  And I do know a lot more!

There remain to be told these two last days in Venice, which have been busy but very happy ones.  I feel that we have seen Venice thoroughly now- which means not only its canals and the Piazza, but the Venetian School of Painting, which you find by pilgrimaging in a gondola from one church wall to another.

Yesterday morning we took a traghetto to San Tom� on the Grand Canal and afterward walked to I Frari, one of the largest and most beautiful churches in Venice - and the most repaying, for above the High Altar is Titian's masterpiece, the "Assumption of the Virgin" and in the Sacristy are Bellini's greatest altarpiece and the whole series of Tiepolo's "Passion and Crucifixion".  We were fortunately