You are walking down a 10×10 stone corridor…
We came in to Italy via beautiful olive and wine country with the snowy Alps walling off the horizon. The golds and greens with red tiled roofs were all so perfect, nothing in the distance looked real. We got off the train and took a vaporetto (taxi boat) into Venice.
The nicest thing about Venice is that there are no cars. The city is entirely medieval. Because there’s no extra space like in a landed city there’s no modern belt. The streets and bridges wind around the hundreds of islands in a tight labyrinth. The stone walls are punctuated with little virgin Mary grottoes and doors with knobs in the center. The narrow corridors hem you in and prevent you from seeing where you’re going. Our path often ended a narrow alley with stairs descending into a canal. Like Prague, it can make you forget what century you’re living in.
Venice has a lot of finely crafted glass work. I’ve never seen glass twisted into such nice things. But the city is largely a museum of another age. The big highlight for us, was finally being introduced to Italian food culture:
Italians start off their morning by cruising by a little stand up bar. They walk in, slug down two shots of espresso and walk out. Maybe they munch a small pastry on their feet. Being a large Americano, I preferred the “tradesman’s breakfast” which is a little heartier. The price of everything on the menu more than doubles if you take a seat.
Pulling and serving cappuccino is a complicated, laborious process and the Italians drink a *lot* of cafe. The barristi are so fast and precise they can pull cafe for ten customers at once. The cappuccino in Venice was so good it made me want to fall down.
Lunch is a longer meal. Sometimes its a stand up panino covered in lovely herbs and vegetables drizzled in olive oil between focaccia. Another common lunch is just a bowl of nuts and a bowl of olives. These are both wonderful choices if you somehow manage not to go into the hundreds of pizzerias. Wash it down with a glass or two of vino and you’re ready for siesta. Then back to work at 3…or whenever.
Supper begins about 7 or 8 in the evening. Before that you’d swing by a wine bar for a fifty cent glass of aperitif. You hang out, chat and maybe find some dining companions. We mostly drank wine for aperitif, but one night we tried “Spritz”, a Venetian concoction. It has a mild orange, nutty flavor and is quite good. Supper itself is ordered and served in 3 small courses. Appertivo, Primi Pattati, and Segundo Pattati. Desert and digestifs are also served, but (we were told) are imported French customs.
Venice invented tiramisu, and there its made incomparably. We started to cry when ours was almost over. We found that good gelati whips up in its container like a baked Alaska.
In The States I find it ridiculously easy to choose a wine that’s just not drinkable. In Italy, the cheap wine at the grocer is very good. It really made us regret not trying the wine in France.
We felt much more inspired to take snapshots here.
Having breezed through the canals, we jumped on a train for the west coast to see what we could see…