Death in Venice - without Dirk Bogarde

There is any amount of advice about Venice, but the most useful is to get lost - literally.  It is great to just wander the tiny alleys and byways, come to a dead end at a canal, retrace your steps and find you recognise nothing.  But there is a charming square and , inevitably, a church.  There is also always a café  or bar and we revive ourselves with the restorative powers of a Campari and soda.  It is a bit of a surprise to find that which we thought gentle aperitif, packs 25 ABV (alcohol by volume). This makes us like it even more.

Campari and bruschetta

We have an apartment for a week.  A few minutes off the tourist hell that is Piazzo San Marco, our one bedroom bolthole sits on a minor canal that must be part of the gondola highway.  A constant stream of long sleek boats passes under our window, pushed along by a stripe-shirted gondolier.  There is often an accordion accompanied singer belting out Volare or That's Amore (never anything by Beyoncé  or Justin Bieber).  It is all part of why you come to Venice, but you can almost smell the cheese.

While it is great eating out and trying new things, it is also nice to have the apartment and be able to go to the market and check out the ingredients and buy some things to cook. A microwave, two electric elements and a complete lack of condiments (even salt and pepper) create no limitations for me!  We get up early - Italian early, 8:30 - and take a trip to the Rialto markets, right by the famous Rialto bridge.  Even at this hour the fruit and veg sellers are still setting up and the fishmongers are in the final stages of layout and pricing.  We purchase some fresh prawns which are so pink we initially think they are already cooked - they aren't.  They have very sweet flesh and we decide they must be fresh water farmed, though we aren't sure.  I wrap a nice piece of salmon in fresh prosciutto - having reduced the deli woman to laughter as I mime the word for slices - and the h-g gently cooks it in a pan. We have fresh fennel and asparagus with it and it is delicious.  The tomatoes we buy are at the behest of the patient vege stall holder who tells me they are the best for salads - as you can see in the photo they are an unusual shape and have quite distinct ribs.Buffalo mozzarella and the most delicious tomatoes make a great Caprese salad for lunch one day.  

 

Our favourite Venetian dish is Bigoli alla salsa - it is a thicker spaghetti pasta with the most delicious anchovy and onion sauce.  One or other of us order this dish a few times after we first discover it, and on one occasion our restaurateur speaks excellent English and tells me how to make it.  So if you like anchovies put your hand up and I'll make it for you.  

It is our mission to try different dishes (I won't mention the roast chicken we have one night!) and so I order black pasta with cuttlefish sauce. Cuttlefish are not fish but molluscs, very like squid as they have 8 arms and 2 tentacles. They are just behind the octopus in the photo, and as you can see, very inky. The flesh is tender and sweet, but the dish is much richer than I expect.  In the end it is too rich and although I am enjoying it, I can only manage about half. 

The h-g tries some stuffed calamari and raves about it.  It has the tentacles finely diced, shrimp and breadcrumbs in the stuffing, and is slow cooked in a mildly spicy tomato sauce. 

We have a brilliant week in Venice, taking trips to the outer islands of Murano (glass), Burano (lace), and Lido (beach).  My God, we do not know how lucky we are is not a cliche it is a fact.

While the beach stretches for several kilometres, these cabanas are three deep!  How many people does that mean on a hot day?

We do check out a few churches, including San Marco which is such an ecletic blend of styles it defies adequate description.  While the h-g goes to the Maritime museum I go to a terrific Canaletto exhibition.  What I love is that his Venice of the early to mid 1700s is recognisable today.  The detail is perfect and the figures so nicely executed you can see their expressions.  We go together to the Peggy Guggenheim collection, which is all modern art (as C20th) - more Jackson Pollacks than I've ever seen in one place,  Picasso, Kadinsky, Ernst, Klee, Dali. The h-g, who likes paintings to look like what they are supposed to be - struggles with it.  I do too at times, but I think I manage to convince him that art is supposed to challenge you and not necessarily be a photo.

The search for the perfect flat white is a long one, and you can forget trim milk. Mercifully, most cappucinos are more like a flat white and if you can get a double shot, it is nearly there. For the most part we stick to espresso which is always good.  

No, we do not eat these

So, today we travelled to Milan and picked up our little Peugeot and drove up to Bellagio - phew, what a drive.  But I'll tell you about that next time. 

Roman Holiday, without Gregory Peck or Audrey Hepburn

There is a large flat screen to the front of the seat
 and a drinks cabinet to to the side

Warning: an advertisement follows. 


When travelling on Emirates A380 business class, who needs a destination? The journey is all you need.  No, really - it is that good. Comfortable, private, great service, the good times roll.  I should mention the hunter gatherer was actually downstairs in economy.  But before you feel too sorry for him just bear in mind he qualifies for standby tickets for him at 10% of the usual fare, courtesy of his son the Emirates flight attendant. 


Luxe must end, and eventually we arrive in Rome.  We are here because h-g has not been to Italy before and has a vision of wandering around  "the antiquities".  I think he has been watching too much Spartacus, and the vision I have is on endless queues.  A little internet digging reveals I can avoid the horror of hours standing in a line listening to Mindy and Chip from Minnesota jawing on. I simply buy a pass that promises no waiting for entry to popular sites.  Sign me up!  


This proves an inspired move, as the Omnia pass (another ad - I should be paid for this) makes us queue-bypassing champions.  One day we hit the Colosseum, Forum, and Palatine Hill, and on another the Vatican: St Peter's Basilica, the Vatican museum and the Sistine Chapel.  My God, the Sistine Chapel. The line to get in must have stretched 500 metres at least.  I was last there in 1979 and you could walk around, take your time and admire Michelangelo's beautiful ceiling.  Indeed, I remember the guards telling us off for lying on the floor to better see the frescoes.  In 2012 you can barely breathe it is so crowded.  I have been trying to calculate how many people they cram through in a day - one site I read estimates 20,000.  And that is in a room about 40m x 13m.  Anyway, thanks to our pass, the longest line I stand in all day is for the loo.  Meanwhile I figure Mandy and Chip lose about 3 hours of their lives they'll never get back. 



This is all well and good I hear you say, but isn't this supposed to be a food blog?  Well, the h-g thinks all his Christmases have come at once when breakfast Italian style is coffee and pastries.  Then for lunch on the first day he has pizza with prosciutto, which is extraordinarily good, with a lovely thin, crisp base, smear of tomato and thin slices of prosciutto draped after cooking. This is, of course, research.  We aspire to creating pizza bases in this style once we get the pizza oven working on our return home (finally installed the day before we left).

Food highlights so far include Beef Carpaccio topped with arugula (that's rocket to you and me), drizzled with a perfectly balanced olive oil and lemon dressing and topped with thick chunks of parmigiana.  This delight we enjoy at a neighbourhood restaurant with the decor of a 1970s New Zealand style Italian restaurant, complete with a murial (sic) of the Colosseum. No Chianti bottles with candles or gingham tablecloths though.  The Parpadelle con cinghiale - wild boar - is also a winner.  





Our trip through the Jewish ghetto in Rome not only feeds our minds but also our stomachs.  Unfortunately we fail to find the restaurant spoken of by the recently returned ex-pats - I was dead keen to try a highly recommended pasta dish, the name of which translates to "priest strangler".  Recovering Catholics everywhere dream of such a thing!  

Instead we learn that artichokes became a staple food of Jews in the ghetto, though I am still not sure why.  Many restaurants have large bowls of the vegetable displayed and Carciofi alla giudia ( fried artichoke) is one of the most famous dishes of Roman Jewish cuisine. 

And so our Roman holiday draws to and end. It has been a good five days: we did all the things the h-g wanted to do, ate and drank well, and the weather gods smiled, though a little rain book-ended the day today.  A storm is forecast for tomorrow.  We don't mind as we will be on the train to Venice, and rumour has it there's quite a lot of water there anyway, rumour has it there is quite a lot of water there anyway. 

in the distance, the queue for St Peter's Basilica runs from the far left to beyond the edge of the photo