OK, so for a second, this blog will go into slight travel writing over here, but I am going to guess that a lot of the blog’s readers have never been to the place I am about to describe, so I hope this is useful to everyone.

John Ringling, as his name would indicate, was one of the Ringling brothers who was the founder of the American circus. There were seven Ringling brothers and they were all involved with the circus. John Ringling made an insane amount of money in the circus and he knew how to spend it.

Mr Ringling and his wife Mabel did a lot of traveling to Europe and fell in love with Venice. As frequent visitors to this blog know, that isn’t exactly hard to do. However, Mr Ringling was filthy stinking rich, so unlike me, he could actually do something about it.

Now there is the Ringling museum which features the usual assortment of impressionist painting and art things I have seen many times before. Impressionism is my least favorite period of in art, so I skipped over those paintings. However, the museum featured a few things I had not seen before at your usual museum. For example:

They look a bit like Italian art some of these, don’t they? Well, they are smaller photos I took from Ringling’s circus vehicles.

Not that Ringling wasn’t fascinated by Italian art. I was going to post these up here and say that I went to Florence, but then I thought no one would be believe me. Well, these two, it could very well be Florence:

But then these couple, they don’t exactly look like Florence. That is, it isn’t full of people and it is almost always sunny:

Mind you, this was part of Mr Ringling’s property. Notice I didn’t say house. I said property.

Like all ballers, Mr Ringling had to have a really nice ride. He died in 1936, so he obviously couldn’t have a private plane. But as a lot of other ballers in his day, he had his own train car to criss cross America with his circus. And who wouldn’t want to ride in a train like this one, even now:

One could get tired of this level of luxury, so one has to go home to some place. Ringling got to go home to this dump:

OK I was totally kidding. Like I said, Mr Ringling loved Venice so that he built himself his own little replica of the houses on the Grand Canal. Well, big replica. The inside isn’t too shabby either:

The view from the outside wasn’t too bad either:

Well, you can go to Venice or you can go see Mr Ringling, the showman. Once the showman, always the showman.