So I haven’t written much recently… I’ve been pretty busy this summer giving intensive courses and the weather was so bad I didn’t mind too much. However I’ve got a month off so I decided to go to Venice for a while and do some work on my book. That hasn’t worked either as the person I have come with doesn’t have the ability to walk into a museum alone so I have to go everywhere. Still, there’s a lot to see here if you don’t mind the appalling manners of the tourists. I kind of sympathise with the Venetians – it must be quite a frustrating life coming out of your own house and being swept away by a group of foreigners. But Venetians are a noble race of people and wonderfully tolerant.
I knew it was going to be special when I stepped off the airplane and even before going through to luggage collection smelled the invisible yet overpowering aroma of mother’s cooking. That for me was a special moment – just getting off the plane and the “Welcome to Italy” sign had been replaced with the smell of home cooking.
I have many Italian students and I could never understand why they were so naïve about food. Many of them have barely tried food from outside Italy, let alone great cuisines like Chinese, Indian and northern European. So I wanted to find out why. This was another reason for my trip here, to see why Italians are such gastro-snobs. Yet having spent eight days here, I have come to appreciate that they might have a point. It is of course no reason to avoid other cuisines, and I still find it such a shame to be so parochial in your food tastes, but you can actually understand why.
When you see the food in the shops, when you see the perfection of the presentation of the meal on the plate before you, it really puts some other places to shame. And furthermore, they hardly import. All the fruit is Mediterranean, all the meat is local, and all the vegetables are from neighbouring regions. And therefore the milk tastes not of thickened water but of milk, the fish tastes not of ammonia but of fish, the red peppers taste of red peppers, not of preservative. The meat is the same size when you take it out of the pan as when it was dropped in there, the wine fills your nostrils as much as it wets your mouth, and even the bread has a flavour and consistency to it superior to our stiff and hole-ridden baguettes. Over all, everything tastes like it should. For that reason I can’t understand why we have allowed our food standards to deteriorate simply for cheapness and rapidity of sale.
http://www.goslitski.net/template.cfm?action=gastronomy
So what are the essential tips for Venice?
Firstly, don’t be hypnotised by the Venice Card they sell first-time visitors over the Net for about 100 euro. Work out where you’re going to go and entry prices and compare it to what reductions or free entries you might get with the card. The first rule of a holiday is: never plan!
Secondly, obey local habits and try to integrate – you’ll be treated like a local then: walk on the right hand side of the narrow streets and alleys, learn some Italian, wear decent clothes, don’t stand on the bridges ogling your map, and don’t drop litter.
Thirdly, remember this is Italy. I can’t count the amount of people I saw buying fast food but to me that would be an insult. Would you go to Belgium and drink Heineken? No. Well in Italy you would do well to try as much of the local produce as you can. But don’t follow guide book suggestions as they’re mostly paid by the establishments to advertise. We came across a group of French schoolchildren who were hanging round the embankment at the Fondamenta Nova, chatting and running about. It was evident their teachers had let them loose for the evening to explore the city and they had just decided to encamp themselves on the promenade. But it got worse. The owner of the trattoria where we were said they had been there all day. Imagine going to a city like Venice and only sitting on the bank chatting to the same people who you can see every day of the year...? And then four of them said they were going off to look for a McDonald's. I choked on an olive.
On this note though I would like to point out one particular Trattoria called Al Vecio Portal, close to San Zaccaria. The garden out back is serene and gets nice and dark at night, but let’s move away from the cliché stuff and concentrate on the menu. It’s not a very big menu, but that’s because they do it with love. Any menu which has more than three pages of food is offering too much to be of any quality. The fish is the greatest thing on the menu and the waiter fillets it in front of you. I watched him doing it in the garden at ten at night on Friday. Now that’d turn a lot of women on: imagine being able to say you can de-bone a fish in the dark… A couple of other things on the menu to point out are the rustic starter and the fragola: a creamy fruit dish which will just precipitate those “desires” one gets after dinner in a place like Venice.
My favourite part of Venice are the less touristy areas around the Arsenale and Cannaregio. There are some wonderful places to sit day or night and get away from the tourists, who insist on conglomerating in the area between the Rialto Bridge and St Mark’s Square. I would like to point you in the direction of the Church of Madonna dell'Orto, and close by is the church of Sant'Alvise, which both have more history that entire Belgian towns. Tintoretto is buried in one of the churches - I won't tell you which, because I'd hope you'd visit both, but when you look around that particular church, it makes you wonder about the dedication and discipline of the artists of that time.
A couple of days ago I visited the Doge’s Palace, expecting a collection of dusty old relics and some paintings. That’s what was there, but a thousand times more glorious. The most overwhelming sensations of my life took place in the Notre Dame in Paris, St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Rouen Cathedral and the Thistle Chapel in Edinburgh, but I got the mini-shakes in the Sala del Maggio Consiglio in the Doge’s Palace. It is enormous. One of the biggest rooms in the world, it is 54 metres long and about 25 metres wide. You could hold a cricket match in there. And the works of art on the walls were breathtaking. As for the rest of the palace, be careful of the vampires in curators’ outfits circling round you, whose only job it seems, is to stop you from taking photos, so that we spend more money in their shop. Well I can tell you no bespectacled curator is going to stop me from taking home a photo of a Tintoretto masterpiece. I held my camera round my neck and took photos from chest height. Luckily my sense of orientation is passable, so I got some pretty good ones in there. If you do intend going to the Doge’s Palace, get your tickets in advance or you can wait a good hour to get in. A Venice Pass is handy in this instance.
One thing about Venice is the parochial feel you get from living in a city on an island. OK, there are lots of tourists but they go away after a few days, never to return. The side streets and squares where local people live are full of life at certain times of the day, then suddenly they’re sweeping up – usually about three in the afternoon – ready for siesta. This place is simply so internationally known and yet it is just like any other city where people live on top of each other. The kids play football against the walls of the squares, the parents sit peacefully sipping latte macchiato knowing someone is not going to get away from the scene so quickly with their children, and the streets are positively thick with the smell of nonna’s cooking.
I took a trip to Murano, an island not far from Venice and went round the shops looking at the various glass objects for sale. It is a nice island for visiting but forget buying anything more than earrings or a small vase unless you’ve emptied the contents of your savings account. Not far from there is the island of San Michele, where Venice’s dead are interred. Some very interesting people are buried there too – Sir Ashley Clarke, British Ambassador to Italy in the fifties and sixties and founder of the Venice In Peril fund, Ezra Pound, Igor Stravinsky and Joseph Brodsky. San Michele’s cemetery is divided up into denominations, and the Protestant part (called "accattolico" - acatholic - by the cemetery staff) is the most neglected. A shame really, as the people in there are the most interesting, and it’s probably the most visited section.
In any case, Venice is really worth a visit if you like good food, architecture, walking, art, boats, clothes, jewellery and photography. I have taken more than a thousand photos here and I’m sure some of them will be found in my upcoming exhibition in the autumn and on my website. I'm off to Prague on Monday but I will be back on Wednesday and then I promise to write more often.
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