The Death in Venice cocktail crafted by the Hotel Excelsior’s Tony Micelotta and Robin Saikia, author of the Venice Lido: A Blue Guide Travel Monograph, proves to be a hit, the hotel’s best-selling cocktail in 2012. See the recipe here »
An extract from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, whose hero dies of eating an over-ripe strawberry on the Lido beach, is one of the many included in the Blue Guide Literary Companion Venice.
by Charles Freeman
My wife, Lydia, and I were recently in and around Venice, coming in and out one day by bus from Dolo on the Brenta canal and staying two nights in the city itself.
Since March Ist there has been a new ticketing system, IMOB, run by ACTV. In Venice itself, it is quite straightforward as you can buy a plastic card for the number of days travelling on the vaporetti that you want. You touch your card on a screen as you enter the vaporetto station and some stations have barriers through which you pass your card to open the barrier. However, there is nothing on the card itself to show its duration, or how long you have got left.
But then it gets more complicated. If you are taking a bus outside the city, you can also buy an IMOB card, for instance, at one of the tabacchi along the route. They prime it with the fare for the journey you want to make and then you ‘spend’ it on a screen on the bus. The trouble is that the card is identical to the one you also get in Venice. We bought cards for all the inland journeys we knew we were making in the same tabacchi and ended up with six identical IMOB cards between us.
I thought I had a system for sorting them into separate slots in my wallet so I cannot really explain how I binned our still-valid Venice vaporetto tickets and preserved our spent bus tickets. You have been warned.
Brave the IMOB Actv website at your peril–you will be even more confused by the system.
Much though we love Venice and appreciate that Venice only became Venice because of the rapacious commercial instincts of its people over past centuries, we still get annoyed by restaurants that lure you in with relatively cheap piatti, only to find extra service charges, large cover charges, charges of over 5 euros for a mediocre glass of wine, and, in one case, an espresso costing 5 euro, almost as much as a plate of pasta.
But perhaps the blackest of bêtes noires this time was the new museum ticket. Suppose you want to visit the Museo Correr, one of Venice’s most pleasant museums, and then pass on to the wonderful Biblioteca Marciana. The only way you can now do this is to buy a full ticket costing over 16 euros, which includes the Doge’s Palace–whether you want to visit that or not. The ticket gives you only one entry to each of five museums, so you would have to buy another 16 euro ticket if you wanted to visit the Biblioteca Marciana a second time.
Still, let’s be more positive. I had never been to the museum of Byzantine icons (Museo dei Dipinti Sacri Bizantini) next to San Giorgio dei Greci, the sumptuously decorated church of the Greek Orthodox community. I was overcome by a wonderful icon of the Noli Me Tangere scene, dated c. 1500. It was worth the 4 euro entrance in itself and there are other things to treasure.
Then we wanted to find somewhere off the beaten track to eat. Why not try the Giudecca? If you get off at the Le Zitelle stop, you can look in on Palladio’s Il Redentore, the church Venice built as a thanksgiving for relief from the terrible plague of 1577. The interior is so much more welcoming and harmonious than the cavernous San Giorgio, Palladio’s earlier commission. And then we sat down for dinner at I Figli delle Stelle, right on the waterfront and, far from the crowds, watched the sun set over Venice. There is something so satisfying about a restaurant that does not try to be pretentious but where they understand food and the time in which you want to enjoy it without harassment. Not difficult in many parts of Italy, thank goodness, but harder in Venice. I Figli specialise in regional dishes, have a good selection of local wines and the 100 euros for two, though not cheap, fairly reflects the quality of what they offer.
We were happily soothed by the experience.
N.B. Palazzo Fortuny is now fully and well restored but it only opens when they have a special exhibition on.
In April, around the perimeter walls of the star-shaped fortress-city of Palmanova in northern Italy, you can expect to see people out in force, armed with plastic bags, some even with scissors, searching the grassy banks for a certain plant. What is it?
The answer is “sclupit”, as it is called in Friulano. In Italian it is known asstridolo. In English it is the bladder campion (Selene cucubalus). The young leaves are gathered in spring and used to lend a subtle, slightly aromatic flavour to risottos, omelettes and pasta dishes.
The Union of Friuli Venezia Giulia cooks (Unione Cuochi Friuli Venezia Giulia) recommends a delicious seasonal recipe of ravioli filled with sclupit, ricotta and montasio cheese and served in a butter and asparagus sauce.
The picture here shows a sprig of sclupit resting on the editor’s annotated copy of Blue Guide Northern Italy .
For a full glossary and miscellany of Italian food, with over 2,500 Italian food terms translated (and pronunciation given), see the handy pocket-format Blue Guide Italy Food Companion. Don’t leave your hotel without it!
The ruins of the Roman colony of Aquileia, once the fourth largest Roman city in Italy, lie under and around the peaceful modern town and its splendid Early Christian basilica church. Where the amphitheatre once stood, citizens now hoe their vegetable patches and tend their sweet peas. It is all incredibly atmospheric. The town also boasts one of the finest archaeological museums in the country, full of exceptionally interesting artefacts, not least some exquisite pieces made of the Baltic amber for which Aquileia was once a key trading centre. It is easy to spend a full day and more here. The tree-lined walk along the quayside of the old Roman river port is not to be missed. Nor is the Sepolcreto, a quiet enclosure containing five family tombs of the 1st–2nd centuries. After seeing the museum, stop off for a glass of local Malvasia wine in the Attila Scourge of God (Attila Flagellum Dei) wine bar on the opposite side of the street. If you need somewhere to say, the simple, no-frills, friendly Aquila Nera is recommended. It is extremely good value and they offer a good dinner.
I began this quirky, genre-defying book one sunny May morning and by the time I had got halfway through it, I was really enjoying myself. I had had no idea what to expect but was prepared for either a fatuous trawl through Rome’s “eateries” or for rapturous gushing about dining all’italiana being so much more “vibrant” than the drab way we do it at home. Al Dente is neither. And as I read on, I found myself making a mental list of things to check out next time I am in Rome. The ice cream place near Termini station, the statue of St Catherine of Siena, the Villa Farnesina (apparently Raphael’s frescoes are surrounded by borders of lewd fruit; I had never noticed. But now that I come to check, I do see something tumescent above the head of Hermes…). Maybe I won’t go to the trattoria with the Che Guevara poster, where the owner hates the bourgeoisie and imposes a necktie ban. Hatred and prohibition sit uneasily on this good-natured book.
At least, I thought it was good-natured. It purports to be about food and Rome, and yes, it is about those things, but not only, and sometimes only tangentially. It is about history, about film (Fellini and Antonioni), about art (Raphael, Caravaggio), about religion, about human relationships. Winner’s previous books have been about football and I expected the tone of Al Dente to be blokey. It isn’t. It’s amusing without being ho-ho. And Winner writes exceptionally well, with a wonderful, unpretentious, effective use of language. I enjoyed the image of ancient Rome as a horse carcase slowly being eaten by a buzzard. But it was at about this point that the book started to go wrong.
It wasn’t just the strange and rather surreal encounter in Caffè Greco with the elderly Frenchman calling himself Marie-Henry [sic] Beyle. Were we supposed to interpret him as the ghost of Stendhal? It wasn’t clear. No, it was the buzzard: a Christian buzzard. Aha. Soon enough it becomes apparent that Winner has a bone of his own to pick clean. First we learn that Michelangelo studied the kabbalah and came from “tolerant, more secular Florence” and then that Dante’s best friend was a Jewish poet, as if we need to claim these two great souls as righteous gentiles before getting started. But hang on. Savonarola outlawed Florentine-Jewish money-lending in 1495, when Michelangelo was twenty. How tolerant is that and how secular was Savonarola? And is Blech and Doliner’s theory about a subversive message encrypted in the Old Testament figures of the Sistine ceiling pseudo-science or an avenue for fruitful new research? Or both? Winner doesn’t help us to decide. It begins to feel perilously as though a good idea is being stretched too thin over too few pegs. We need more support before we can tread confidently on this kind of ground.
And what happened to the food angle? Or for that matter to the beauty promised in the subhead? They got lost. The sudden descent into Jewish-Christian polemic turns what was elegant, idiosyncratic fusion cuisine into a kind of unwholesome stodge, over-boiled and half-baked at the same time. What’s the point of it all? Winner suddenly sees everything in terms of black and white and the nuances of all those Fellini films he loves so much are lost. Which is a pity, because nuanced history is always more interesting.
But let’s return to the positive. On the back dust jacket there is a short blurb offering up the work to the reading public and modestly hoping that it gives them “something to chew on”. It certainly does. And when the indigestion passes I’ll be left with the feeling that I took something away, something useful: an insight into human attitudes as well as insider knowledge of where to find the best tiramisù on the planet. Both of them very valuable things.
Reviewed by Annabel Barber, contributing author of Blue Guide Rome (10th edition) and compiler of Blue Guide Literary Companion Rome .
