never see a piece of red glass again it will still be too soon. Of course we did the Piazza San Marco which really is a place. A square so big that they have open air restaurants on both sides each of which has its band but they do not interfere with each other. Sunday night the city orchestra put on a symphony concert in the middle of the square but it was a "stand up" affair as there are no chairs. I crept in under the scaffolding comprising the band stand and sat on the double bases box. Much better! In the day time pigeons by the millions and the sellers of pigeon food have a field day. We got our fill of the paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese the three most famous Venician painters. The guide said if we didn't remember anything else we should remember their names. Guess I'll have to send him this issue to prove that I did. It was kind of amusing that at the entrance to some of the cathedrals they had a man whose tricky job it was to decide whether the necklines of the women were too low or the hemlines too high and to see that they had some sort of scarf or something to cover their shoulders with. Sundresses were not the order of the day for cathedral sightseers. I assure you I was very modest and got in easily. As you have probably read in Look and elsewhere the City of Venice is in a bad way with decay, settling, and erosion of famous buildings and statues by air pollution. On top of that the canals are an open sewer since all refuse and toilets empty into them. The fact that the tide changes twice a day is supposed to take care of things, but judging by some of the aroma it doesn't. Although the city makes its living off the tourists, largely American, the waiters and others who deal with them often haven't even bothered to learn a few words of English. The peo- ple can't even read maps of their own city so if you're lost with a map its the same as being lost without one except that if you walk long enough you come to one of the main canals. All in all Venice is a place to see once because we've all heard about it, but there is no reason for going there twice-unless you have a thing for red glass that is.

July 14. Took a gondola ride from hotel to airport bus terminal and out to the airport to fly to Vienna. Got there in early afternoon and just walked around the city. A big relief after France and Italy. City is open, clean, wide streets with street cars, big stores and shops— could be most anywhere in America except for the signs-in German of course. Mein deutch ist nicht so gut, aber ich kann meine selbst verstehen machen. And if there are any germanic purists among the readers who find something wrong with that they are probably right. But in spite of various grammatical shortcomings I got along fine and find it a pleasure to use a foreign language to SAY something useful in distinction to the stupid stories one had to read in German

56