Although I have stumbled around various quarters of the world from Fiji to Botswana, I have not really flexed my desire to travel to closer European destinations. Italy was somewhere I had never been until the weekend, I believe I may have brushed across the border on a pair of skis when I was not quite as big as I am now, but I can barely remember it. And so it came to pass that Clare and I hopped onto a plane out of the dreaded Gatwick South terminal, with all it’s England shirts, velour tracksuits and other disappointing additions to British fashion, and after the stunning vistas of the Alps from 30,000 feet, arrived at Marco Polo airport at 9am on a Friday morning.
The first surprise was finding out we had to go on a 1hr 20minute white-knuckle boat ride to get to Venice. I mean, I know it’s a series of islands in a lagoon but I thought it was a bit closer…what a shag! I wonder how many poor bastards have to do that commute every day?
The buildings around Venice look like a they have had a makeover from a team of top Hollywood set designers, either that or when the tourists go to sleep the Venetians come out with hammer and chisel and begin tinkering away, exposing various patches of brickwork and splashing different coloured dye on certain buildings- it cannot be this authentic surely?
Before visiting Venice I had to do a little reading to find out what this place was all about. I had heard that a combination of rising sea levels, volume of tourists and weight of buildings is steadily compressing the mud flats on which Venice sits, meaning city is slowly sinking at a rate of 7cm/100 years, however some reports claim it has sunk 24cm in the last century! So I was glad to be visiting the place before it is swallowed up by the surrounding Lagoon, it already floods about 40 times a year, to the point where people have begun to wakeboard there (you must see this video for yourself!).
We arrived at our lodgings, an amazing little boutique hotel called Ca’ dei Dogi, dumped the bags and headed out into the town. It is clear as soon as you walk through St.Marks Square or across the Rialto Bridge, that the Venice of today is one big tourist trap. Men in white jackets and bow ties lurk outside restaurants desperately trying to usher you inside using a menu, avoid these places like the plague, they will serve overpriced pap that they will claim is authentic Italian cuisine. Not.
The gondola is the first thing that springs to mind when thinking about Venice, were we tempted as a loved up couple? No. The price wasn’t right, would you get a taxi to the end of your road for 25 quid? Probably not. Gondolas aside, I have to say I was quite surprised (and felt extremely safe) to see Buzz Lightyear had also chosen to take a mini break in Venice.
The great thing about Venice is that it constantly makes you feel you are in one enormous labyrinth. One minute you can be on a tightly packed street shoulder to shoulder, the next you can be in a deserted square or some dodgy looking back alley that looks home to jack the ripper. At any given moment you can find yourself at a dead end faced with a small canal. It is quite often that these small streets offer the best in food and drink: look for the locals outside.
I thoroughly enjoyed drifting through this giant maze in search of the bacoro’s (wine bars) were they would throw a glass of wine in your hand and point you to their menu of cicheti (small plates of antipasti). It was pleasant to find that if we tried our best broken Italian, the Venetians (despite blatantly knowing our grasp of the Italian Language was poor and that we were English) would speak back to us in their native tongue. Nothing annoys me more when you make an effort to speak in a foreign language and they reply to you in English.
The best of the bacari was without a doubt Enoiteca Mascareta run by the Mauro, a sort of youthful Italian version of Einstein with a bigger nose. The place was fairly small and had posters of depicting different Venetian themes, one wall was dedicated to row after row of all sorts of bottles. The bar stretched out into the room and the gentle comforting hum of Italian wafted around the room in much the same way as the smell from the kitchen did. This is what Italians do: they eat, they drink and they talk- a lot.
The barman was awesome, he would constantly bring over new bottles of vino rosso and pour us each a glass and one for himself, raise his glass to good health and neck it. By our second evening we had developed a good rappor and I noticed some Brits in the corner from our hotel looking a bit disappointed they were not on the same level of banter. How could I forget, on that same evening in walked a Northern couple, Obviously in Venice for the Romanticism of the place, they certainly didn’t look like culture vultures and there conversation confirmed it.
“It’s just a fookin’ wine bar, ah don’t want fookin’ wine!” said the male.
“Well ask for a beer then loov,” said the female.
“Ah want a fookin’ pint.”
I would love to carry on the conversation, but other than coarse language and a total disdain of anything that wasn’t remotely like home, it didn’t get much more intelligent than that.
A classic Venetian cicheti is sardines marinated in white wine vinegar and onion, but I was fairly unimpressed, it looked and tasted a bit like school food. With the Adriatic surrounding it, it is no surprise that fish is big in Venice. Cuttlefish, Prawns, Octopus, squid and anchovies are all very popular and are on virtually every menu in the city. With all this fish flying about it would have been a cardinal sin not to try and find the source: The Pescharia.
On Saturday morning we wandered through the Rialto Market, which had some of the most cheerful looking vegetables I have ever seen. Bold vibrant colours were everywhere you looked, the tomatoes looked as if they had been air brushed and there were more greens than you could poke a stick at. All the food was reasonable priced by the looks of things; big trays of water held freshly prepared artichoke hearts and fur-clad ‘mamas’ dictated their shopping list to the animated store holders. I knew the fish market was close- I could smell it.
The Pescharia easily puts Billingsgate to shame. Not because of the volume of ocean produce on offer, but because of the feel of the place- the hand gestures, the Neo-gothic fish hall and the fishy displays. The day was quite chilly and I was impressed by the burley Venetian Fishmongers ability to fillet fish with their bare hands in such cold conditions whilst still maintaining a cheerful attitude to their work. As Clare so eloquently put it “I would hate to be married to one of them…they must always smell of fish”, well it is a good thing she isn’t.
A long weekend is all you really need to see Venice. As much as I enjoy soaking up culture, wine and food, I think any longer and I would have started to get a little bored. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip- it is always great to visit somewhere new, but I do wonder how Venice copes with such a vast amount of tourists every year that only contribute to sinking their glorious city, it turns out that it is a bit of a catch-22, because I doubt Venice could survive without the tourists.
To give you one bit of advice from this recently de-flowered Italian traveller- go there before it sinks!
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