Thursday May 23rd was our first full day in Venice. My goal was to see some of each of the sestieri (neighborhoods or districts) of Castello, Dorsoduro, and San Marco. The main city of Venice has six sestieri: those three plus San Polo, Santa Croce, and Cannaregio (where we were staying and where last night's memorable dinner was). Cannaregio, Castello, and San Marco are on the east of the Grand Canal, and the other three are west of it, and they are connected by the traghetti, the vaporetti, and a very few bridges. San Marco and San Polo are where most of the tourist action is, and they are connected by the Rialto, the grandest bridge in Venice. I had consulted the cruise ship schedules and I knew that on this day and the next there were no big cruise ships in town so the streets would be much less crowded then when the ships are in port.
There is also Giudeca, the long beach of the Lido, and the outlying islands, primarily Murano and Burano. Over the course of our stay we would hit some of these, as well.
My first target was the huge Mercato di Rialto, a farmers market combined with a fishermens market that sprawls over several city blocks along the canal and reaching in to San Polo. I set out early to get there as it opened. Lorna and Melissa wanted more time to get ready, and they were looking forward to a walk through the residential neighborhoods of Santa Croce and San Polo, but Owen and Brigitte planned to join me fairly early.
I took the vaporetto to the Mercato stop. Along the way I got to see a lot of the quotidian work that keeps this fabulous city going. I felt like I was in a children's book: here's a garbage boat carrying out the trash, there's a supply boat bringing in dish soap and paper towels and frozen orange juice for the hotels, overtaking us a water taxi is taking a fellow in a suit to an important meeting, and behind us is another vaporetto full of bored commuters on their way to day jobs staffing hotels, restaurants, museums, and shops. Here comes a local resident in his own boat going about his business before all the tourists wake up.
One of the things that interested me most was how goods get delivered to businesses that are not on the canals. There are no motor vehicles inside the city, and no streets suitable for them. The bridges over the little side canals are steep so boats an pass beneath them, and they have steps to get up one side and down the other. I saw a few deliverymen with long carts that were specialized for this unusual environment. They were just wide enough to fit through the narrowest of alleys, and they were equipped with two pneumatic load-bearing wheels around the center of gravity of a loaded cart, and at the front they had extensions with smaller wheels. When they got to a bridge, the front wheels enabled them to climb the steps, one by one to the top, by taking the weight of the cart on an upper step while the deliveryman pushed the cart's big wheels onto the closer step. Going down the stairs on the other side of the bridge, the deliveryman would rock the cart back and let the big wheels drop gently down each step.
When I reached the Mercato, it was just opening up. I saw crates and boxes and sacks of fruits and vegetables and shellfish and finfish from the mainland and the other islands being offloaded from boats for sale at the biggest open market in the area. I love seeing all the produce and seafood that we never see at home. Here you see scampi, which we know as langoustines or langostinos, a particular type of large shrimp with claws that are ubiquitous in Venice. In the US, people think of scampi as a dish of jumbo shrimp cooked in butter and garlic, but in Italy scampi is just the species of crustacean, to be prepared in any number of delicious ways. Italians have many more shrimp and lobsters than we do; Norway lobsters are like ours, spiny lobsters without claws, the ugly and rare cicala di mare that you will meet in a few pages, these scampi, plus southern deep-water red shrimp, and the purple shrimp of Gallipoli, mantis shrimp, pink shrimp, medium-sized gray mazzancolle shrimp, and tiny gray schie shrimp. Shrimp are called gamberoni, gamberi, or gamberini depending on their size, from large to small. Crayfish are not represented in traditional Italian cuisine despite the large number of mountain streams that probably support them.
After a while Owen and Brigitte joined me. We did not get octopus at I Compari Pulperia a Venezia (we had two years ago and really enjoyed it) because we were too early, but we did examine the produce and fish. The fish market is under a pavilion, but it's not enclosed so there's a problem with seagull pirates grabbing their share of the goods, and it's not uncommon to see a fishmonger waving a stick and cursing at his avian adversary. They also had a far wider range of clams than we ever see, including little ones no bigger than your fingertip that appear in many Venetian dishes.
On the produce side, we saw a wide range of many things, onions to artichokes, that are available in greater variety than we see at home, and the sellers are usually happy to explain how to cook one type or another.
Orto di Venezia is a winemaker on the island of Sant'Erasmo, in the lagoon that produces a white wine suited to the area. A few years ago, a group of Venetian restaurateurs (including last night's Trattoria Vittoria) founded the Osti in Orto project, growing organic produce on a private farm by the vineyard. The partnership is not unlike those we see in New England, especially in Maine and Vermont, with completely different products.
Then Brigitte went exploring on her own and Own and I hopped the vaporetto across to Ca d’Oro and went exploring Castello en route to the Museo Storico Navale di Venezia. It’s a strange museum, very old-school, but I loved the shells on the top floor.
If you come to Venice by sea from the Adriatic, the Castello sestiero is the first part of the city that you reach, and you are greeted by the Arsenale and the city fortifications that date back to the days of the Venetian Republic, when Venice ruled the Adriatic and as far as Cyprus. The area is less military now, and when we were there it was dominated by the current Biennale di Venezia, the "Olympics of Art", held here every two years to celebrate the visual arts of every country that participates. That area was pretty crowded and we still had to catch up with Lorna and Melissa, so after the naval museum we headed into San Marco along the waterfront.
Owen and I walked to Ristorante Carpaccio, lured by the offer of the little gray schie from the lagoon, but it was no longer on the menu. He had a Caprese and I had the classic Sarde al Saor, then Brigitte joined us and we walked along the lagoon and the yachts as far as the magnificent Doge's Palace and the Piazza San Marco. There Owen and Brigitte left for a nap at their hotel and I got an espresso and a chair in the Piazza San Marco to wait for Lorna and Melissa, who were very close. We planned to see the Basilica di San Marco while the crowds were still much lighter than when the cruise ships are in port. You can see from the photo what a light May crowd looks like in the Piazza San Marco and imagine when it gets crowded!
The Basilica is ancient and most of its art predates the great Venetian painters of the Renaissance. There were virtually no paintings, but there are many mosaics and gorgeous stone work everywhere, some made from local red marble and white stone from around the coast at Trieste, and also imported black, blue, green and other polished stones carried at great expense from distant places. The architecture and art are more Byzantine than anything else we saw in Venice, and that style included the conspicuous consumption with which the seat of the Republic showed its wealth to visitors from client states and rivals.
We had a mediocre snack with pigeons at the Gran Caffe Chioggia across the piazza from the Palazzo Ducale. The place is unexceptional except for its exceptional location and its extraordinary stability: some moths after our return we saw it in a few scenes in the 1955 movie Summertime with Katherine Hepburn, and it looked just the same almost 70 years later!
Then we took a vaporetto across the end of the Grand Canal to see the 17th century basilica of Santa Maria Della Salute. Salute is health; the church was built with great fanfare to thank God for the passing of a terrible wave of plague. It includes paintings by Titian and Tintoretto that I wanted to see, in addition to the baroque architecture and the famous dome, which was a new thing in Venice in 1630. It's a beautiful structure, an iconic fixture of the Venetian skyline painted by masters ever since its construction, but now its facade is under renovation and it is obscured by what amounts to an enormous billboard for a nearby art exhibition.
From there we walked to the Peggy Guggenheim collection, and while they explored the depleted (paintings-only) collection, I had a Shakerato and a Bicerin, two popular Italian coffee drinks.
We finally caught up with Owen and Brigitte at the Accademia Venezia, the biggest art museum in Venice, dedicated to Venetian artists with particularly excellent works by Veronese and Tiepolo, along with Bellini, Titian, and Tintoretto. I was particularly enchanted by this young lute player, a detail from a much larger canvas by Titian.
Most art museums have works by artists from all periods and all regions, but this one is just works by Venetian masters - but there's enough of that to fill a large museum without even including the hundreds of works that are still on the walls of the Doges Palace and the many churches throughout the city. Some of those, like the stonework and the mosaics in Saint Mark's, can't be moved, but others like the scores of Tintoretto works at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco could be moved, but it would ruin an otherwise spectacular setting. So there was much more to see here, and I will dig deeper into Venetian Renaissance art in a couple of pages.
After exploring the Accademia, we crossed the Accademia bridge back to San Marco and had a chilly outdoor dinner at Beccafico Guna. It had been a very long day, as you know having read this far! So we needed substantial refreshment.
We drank Valpolicella Superiore and Ribolla Gialla, both from Veneto but not from Venice. Owen and I had the salt-baked sea bass, Melissa and we had Pasta alla Norma (a classic Sicilian dish of pasta with eggplant and ricotta salata), and Lorna and Brigitte had cubes of swordfish with calamaretti short pasta. Lorna finished with vanilla gelato and, having spent freely, we were all treated to limoncello on the house!
After dinner we saw a Vivaldi concert at Chiesa di San Vidal (just like we had two years earlier in 2022). The Chiesa di San Vidal is no longer active as a church, but it's a beautiful venue in a great location so now it serves as a performance space for the Interpreti Veneziani, a chamber music group that specializes in the music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries. The seating is folding chairs where the pews used to be, and the acoustics are somewhat improved by some anachronistic sound-deadening foam wrapped around the ancient columns, but all in all it's tastefully done and it makes for a very pleasant evening. Along the walls are displays of period instruments, such as these centuries-old lutes, and there are more in use by the performers, plus a harpsichord on the stage that I think never moves. At least, I know that I would not want to be responsible for moving a heavy musical instrument that may be older than the United States!
After the show we parted ways for the evening, with Owen and Bridget walking the short distance to their hotel and the rest of us sailing on the night vaporetto under the Rialto and back to the Ferrovia (train station) stop and a brief walk to the Hotel Principe, where we slept like dead men.