EATING DANTE

I drove straight south from Udine to the A 13, then struck west toward Venice. As I headed west, the land changed in character, becoming steadily flatter and more intensively farmed as I headed for Italy’s most famous city. Around noon, I pulled off the Autostrada at a small village and looked for a restaurant to have lunch. I settled on a restaurant attached to a tourist restaurant. When I walked in, I was immediately heartened to see a group of local workman tucking into lunch. They kidded the waitress and each other and were obviously regulars in the place. I was about halfway to Venice when I decided to get lunch and the closeness of the city on the water was evidenced by the seafood selections that the other guests were eating. One man was eating crabs, and I watched the waitress deliver a plate of pasta topped with muscles and clams to another of the group.

I decided there was time enough to sample seafood when I actually got to Venice, so I ordered a local pasta dish called pappardelle con funghi or noodles with mushrooms. Pappardelle or “gulp down,” pasta is a flat, wide egg noodle beloved of northern Italians. The funghi were portabella mushrooms, sliced thick and dressed with olive oil. The pasta was served al dente, literally, “the tooth,” or slightly chewy, then dressed with olive oil and a little butter and some chopped parsley. The only thing I added was a tablespoon of Parmesan cheese. This was typical of dished I ate in Italy. They came to the table almost perfectly seasoned during cooking. I did not once add salt to a dish and only a few times added pepper.

Typically, I took my cue on adding spices or condiments to dishes from what was on the table. If extra virgin olive oil or balsamic vinegar were on the table, I added them, always just a splash. The Italians love to add at the last minute a tiny bit of what they have dressed the dish with during cooking. So a dish cooked with olive oil might get a final splash of the oil just before serving. It was frequently amazing how this drizzle of raw olive oil added to the overall flavor of the dish. If a recipe calls for parsley or basil during cooking, Italian chefs and waiters loved to add some at the last minute just as the dish was being placed before the diner. The end result was always marvelous.

After lunch, I pulled onto the Autostrada A-4, sort of the Italian equivalent of the German Autobahn but not as wide. I had heard so many hair raising things about Italian drivers that I was really nervous about my first time on this high speed road, but the drivers were all very well behaved. Even the Italian long distance drivers seemed amazingly law abiding, even to the extent of observing the speed limit. The only exception was at the scene of a minor fender bender type accident about halfway from Udine to Venice. I was stopped in a long line of traffic edging its way around the accident when two truckers got out of their rigs and began exchanging what were clearly angry comments. Soon they were exchanging something more substantial that words, like fists. A group of police ran over and broke them up, ushering them both to their trucks.

I recall my mother traveling to Italy in the early 1970s and complaining about how dirty public spaces were. Even a book I read before going to Italy, written in the 1970s, also complained of the same thing, so I was prepared for the highways to be littered even more than they are in the U.S. They weren’t. The A-4 was immaculate, and all the public spaces I’d seen to that point were also scrupulously clean. Even the parking lots at rest areas were free of litter. I guessed that someone must have decided to take responsibility for public spaces after all.

Around three in the afternoon I pulled into a suburb of Venice called Marghera and asked for directions to my hotel. I got my first inkling that the choice of locations wasn’t my most brilliant move in Italy. The hotel was located in a tiny town called – are you ready for this? – Malcontenta, or unhappy. On the way out there, I got my first of why. I was never able to find out the derivation of this name but before I left Venice four days later I was convinced it reflected the inhabitant’s opinion of the town’s location.

The tiny town wasn’t far from the main part of Venice itself, only in fact about a 25 minute drive but it was way the hell and gone on the other side of the city’s industrial section. To get to Malcontenta involved driving over a bridge, past the industrial section and over a set of railroad tracks. The town was tiny, consisting mostly of homes, a few apartment buildings and a few small businesses. To top it all off, the when I got to the hotel there was a sign on the door advising people that it was closed for renovation, and advising people to go to its sister hotel down the street. I drove down the street, pulled into the parking lot at the other hotel and went inside to check it out. To my disappointment, the hotel had no Internet connection, which the other hotel had advertised. I had been willing to pay a little extra for the privilege of not having to travel everyday to send messages.

The room available was also a disappointment. It had no mini-fridge and had only a tiny, very narrow bed. It was like sleeping on someone’s couch. The whole thing really pissed me off but I should have realized that something was wrong when I saw the room rate, 55 Euros per night. In a city as expensive as Venice, I should have realized that the room rate would come with a step down in quality or at least in comfort. Still, the hotel did have what turned out to be a first-rate restaurant with a vast assortment of seafood on the menu including such things as baby octopus, fresh squid and various shell fish I had never even heard of. The Veneto, a vast section of Italy that extends from Venice clear across the peninsula to the mountains, is famous for its appetite for anything that swims, crawls or slithers or otherwise makes its way through the sea. I was determined to try as many of them as possible and nausea could be damned.

I arrived at my hotel late in the afternoon, too tired to go directly into Santa Lucia, so after checking into the hotel, I went through my towel snapping, mosquito killing routine and took a short nap. Later, I had dinner at the hotel restaurant. I wanted something typically Venetian, so I settled on linguine con vongole, or linguine with clams in a white sauce. The tiny clams resembled the ones we call cherrystones and were cooked in white wine with minced garlic and parsley. The linguine was cooked al dente and then dumped into a skillet in which the clams had been cooked. The chef or perhaps the waiter sprinkled a bit of parsley on the dish just before serving it, a nice touch that added a bit of salinity.

The next day I awoke early. The first thing I noticed was that it was, yet again, overcast and rainy. The next thing I noticed was a persistent itching on both legs. Examining them, I saw numerous, red, slightly raised bumps that bore a marked resemblance to mosquito bites. At first, I wondered if my bed could have been infested with bedbugs or some other bloodsucking parasites. It really seemed impossible. After all, this was a three star hotel in the outskirts – okay, the far outskirts of a city – in a major western European nation. Italy wasn’t some knew that mosquitoes have sophisticated sensory organs that enable them to detect warm-blooded creatures with blood to suck. But my legs had been under sheets and a blanket all night. How had the little bastards found them? Regardless, I shut the window, took my shower and spread a dab cortisone cream on each bite.

An hour later, I took my first ride into Venezia Santa Lucia, and the degree to which Malconenta is off the beaten path came home to me. There were two ways to get to the main part of the city from the small town on the far side of Venice. One was to take a ferry across a bay. The other involved taking a bus to a suburb, Venezia Mestre, then taking a train one stop to Santa Lucia. I don’t know the Italian phrase for “east jockstrap nowhere,” but someone must have known it because that is where the town was. I caught the number 11 bus into Mestre – sort of “west jockstrap – and from there, I caught a train to Santa Lucia.

Venice is an island, at least the main and most important part of it, Venezia Santa Lucia, is surrounded by water. Think Manhattan with canals instead of streets and boats instead of taxis and autos. Venezia Santa Lucia has no roads and no cars, trucks, buses or even the motorcycles that are ever present in the rest of Italy. Not even bicycles are to be seen on its pedestrian walkways. Instead, the city relies on a network of canals. The canal grande winds through the city in a sort of backwards S, and other, smaller canals spread out from it. Public boats, that is to say boats that are privately owned, are allowed only on the canal grande. The other, smaller canals are reserved for boats that handle city services, hundreds of them. I saw police boats, boats hauling food and other consumer goods, boats loaded down with laundry, even paramedic boats, complete with flashing blue lights and sirens.

Santa Lucia is connected to the other parts of Venice by a long railroad bridge. Riding into the place on a local train, I passed dozens of fish farms. The lagoons of Venice are some of the most intensively fish farmed places on earth, and their product is worth its weight in gold, for Venetians have a passion for anything that swims, crawls or slithers through the sea.

Local markets I passed in town overflowed with fresh seafood and restaurants often displayed the day’s catch in refrigerated cases placed appetizingly in storefront windows. I saw heaps of prawns, lobsters, sea bass and fish I didn’t recognize, spider crabs and bigger ones that looked a bit like Alaskan king crab packed on ice. Venetians will eat anything from the water bit it had better be fresh.

I wanted to take a water taxi to Venice’s most famous landmark, the Piazza San Marco, so I left the stagione ferrovia (the railroad station) and walked to the ticket outlet for the taxis. It turned out, however, that the boat drivers on San Marco route were on strike. The odd thing about this is that the only boat drivers on strike were the ones whose route went from the train station to San Marco directly. Everybody else was working. Since most of the other routes also stopped at or near San Marco, the purpose of the strike seemed a bit obscure. A helpful ticket seller told me to take another boat and get off at the Rialto Bridge stop and walk a few blocks to Piazza San Marco. It was raining, so I stopped off at a local shop and bought a waterproof hat. Hat in place, I climbed aboard the next Rialto taxi and watched Venice go by.

Water has always been both friend and enemy to the Venetians, going back to 5th and 6th centuries, when people first came there in large numbers to escape raids by barbarians such as Attila, which the failing Roman empire could no longer block. Those first inhabitants of Venice built homes on stilts and learned to fish farm intensively in the lagoons of the shallow waters surrounding the town. Those waters provided food and later entry to goods from all over the known world. It was from Venice that explorer Marco Polo set out for the east and China.

But the waters of the Bay of Venice also brought ea raiders, pirates who plundered the city whenever they could. The people of Venice were forced to make common cause with the remainder of the old Roman Empire in Constantinople and a city to the south of Venice, Ravenna, became the sight of the first Venetian leader anointed by the Roman Emperor in the East. Ultimately, Venice’s sway was to extend across a vast swath of peninsular Italy, all the way to the Swiss and Austrian borders.

One of the downsides of visiting a country like Italy during the off season is that this is when the locals decide to do restoration work on the churches, monuments etc. that make coming to the city worthwhile. Half the buildings in Piazza San Marco were had half their walls covered with a sort of metallic mesh. From behind it came to sounds of hammers and chisels tapping and chipping. The day was dank and dreary, with a low fog and mist that obscured buildings across the piazza, and the shortage of sunlight make photos iffy.

There was, regrettably, no shortage of pigeons or of assholes feeding them. There were literally hundreds of these birds, perching on every surface, preening themselves, feeding, fighting and otherwise making immense pains in the ass of themselves. One old fool sprinkled breadcrumbs over himself stood with arms outstretched while literally dozens of pigeons landed on him and walked up his arms, pecking their little asses off. Others lined up snapping pictures of this idiot. Is it any wonder that everything in the piazza was covered with a fine patina of pigeon shit?

The Piazza San Marco was in the heyday of Venice the seat of government and the cultural and political heart of what was from the 13th to the 15th centuries an independent city-state. For about 400 years, Venice was an economic and trading powerhouse, bringing in all manner of luxuries from virtually every part of the known world. Not bad for a city that began as a refuge for people fleeing barbarian raids after the fall the Roman Empire.

All around the piazza tour groups clustered around their guides, each describing in a different language the glories that had been Venice. As I walked around the piazza, I heard this spiel repeated over and over, in French, Dutch, German, Italian even Chinese and of course English. One young English woman was regaling her tourists with an account of leading Sir Elton John around the piazza while he regaled her with tales of how many bags he needs to carry when he travels.

I picked up tantalizing little bits of information about Venice while eavesdropping on these tourist guides. For example, the city of Venezia Santa Lucia may not by law get any bigger, largely because, being surrounded by water, it has no place to spread to. It made me wonder what was the point of such a law, what with this being an island and all. One particularly fascinating tidbit came from a German guide who was nevertheless lecturing in English. The workmen restoring the area over the main altar of the of St. Mark’s Basilica had to remove inlaid gold leaf put there more than 500 years earlier. In all, they removed 80 pounds of gold. The original builders, he pointed out, applied gold leaf that was six times thinner than ordinary paper is today. Cool, no?

By the time I was done touring Piazza San Marco it was time for lunch. Searching for an out-of-the-way place to eat, I came across a restaurant on a small dead end canal. It was crowded with people speaking Italian, so I figured if they were tourists, they were at least tourists from other parts of Italy. I asked the waiter for something that was typically Venetian. She winked and touched the side of her nose, as if to say “leave this to me,” and disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later he reappeared with a basket of bread and a glass of red wine I hadn’t even asked for. About twenty minutes later, he brought a dish to my table, set it down and with a wave of his hand over the dish said, “echo qua;” there it is. The “it” in question was fegato veneziana, calf’s liver Venetian style.

I hate liver. When I was a kid my mother, convinced that eating this organ meat conveyed all sorts of health benefits, decreed that Thursdays were liver night. In fairness, she tried everything she could think of to make it palatable. She breaded and fried it like chicken, braised it like pot roast, she even tried grilling it. But there was nothing that could disguise that distinctive and disgusting odor of liver. I swear I could smell it cooking when I stepped off the school bus almost a half-mile away.

This Venetian style liver had been cut into small pieces and cooked in a mix of butter, olive oil and onions, with a splash of white wine, and came with brown gravy. It was served with two slices of white polenta. It was truly magnificent and the polenta was delicious, bathed in olive oil and covered with the gravy from the liver.

Later that night, at the hotel, I had my first entirely seafood meal. It started off with an appetizer of baby octopus dressed in olive oil, lemon juice and parsley. I was a bit apprehensive about eating raw octopus and sure enough after eating it I disgraced myself by throwing up all over the table. Just kidding. In fact, it was delicate and delicious, with a saline taste that bespoke ocean but was not salty. The octopus was not at all slimy or chewy, as I had anticipated.

My main course was cuttlefish cooked in a sauce of its own ink and balsamic vinegar, accompanied by two squares of white polenta. The cuttlefish was similar in texture to the octopus; in fact, octopus and cuttlefish are members of the same underwater family of creepy crawlies, and the cuttlefish flesh had a soft texture not unlike al dente pasta. As for the polenta it was, alas, still corn mush. When I was sure my waiter wasn’t watching I slathered some butter on it to give it some flavor. All this accomplished was to make butter-flavored corn mush.

As a special treat at the end of the meal the waiter brought me two sardine fillets. These were not the sardines that come packed in oil in tiny cans. These were full-size sardines that had been filleted, marinated in vinegar and lemon juice then dressed with the most gorgeous extra virgin olive oil. The oil had a greenish tinge and a peppery bite that offset the slightly saline flavor or the fish. Pointing to the sardine fillets, the bread and butter and the olive oil, the waiter told me that this combination was unique to Venice. “Solo in Venezia,” he said.

The next morning I returned to Venice to see some of the other tourist sights, such as the Ponte Vecchio. Around noon, I made a beeline for Venice’s old Jewish quarter, called the ghetto vecchio. Today it is only a shadow of its former self but I went there to taste some food prepared in the style the Italians call “alla guidecca,” Jewish style. Disappointingly, I found only one kosher restaurant and it served nothing alla guidecca. I had to settle for tagilatelle Bolognese, not bad for a disappointment, but not what I was hoping for. My experience of Italian food Jewish style would have to wait until I got to Rome.

The streets of Venice in the Santa Lucia quarter were really more like alleyways and were so narrow that sometimes I had to turn sideways to allow others to pass. At one spot I paced off the width of one and it came up just about 10 feet wide. As I walked around, I encountered small dead ends, frequently occupied by tiny shrines to one saint or another with small offerings of flowers or candles placed in front.

As befit a tourist area, Venice had more than its share of high-end shops and stores and its shopping areas featured stores with some of the most famous commercial names in Italy. But unlike a similar area in a U.S. city, these stores were small and resembled more boutiques than behemoths one might find at an outlet mall back here.

Overall, I had to admit that I didn’t entirely enjoy Venice. It was too touristy and even out of tourist season it was pretty crowded. Finding a restaurant that wasn’t dedicated to feeding tourists “traditional” Italian dishes was difficult, and prices were outrageous. A slice of pizza in Venice cost nearly four Euros; the same slice cost barely half that in Como. And it was in Venice that I first encountered beggars in Italy. One guy I passed on the way from Rialto to Pizza San Marco was kneeling on a pillow, perfectly still arms outstretched like a penitent. The small plastic cup in his hand spoiled the impression.

I returned very late to the hotel that night. The next morning I was up early, checked out of the hotel and headed off to explore more of the Veneto.

The Veneto is the largest political and cultural entity in Italy. Broken into three sub-regions, Venezia Giulia, Venezia Euganea and Venezia Tridentina, it extends west from Venice, which serves as its political and cultural head, all the way to the borders with the region of Lombardy, and the countries of Switzerland and Austria. Early Saturday, October 23, I loaded the car and headed east and north for Vicenza, a medium size city about 100 kilometers from Venice.

The trip was somewhat complicated by the fact that that the A4 was closed so construction crews could replace a bridge and the highway was closed from Venice to around Padua, halfway to Vicenza. I had to take the SS11, a smaller two-lane road that was heavily trafficked, especially with long distance trucks whose drivers, unlike those in the States, seemed almost religiously dedicated to observing the speed limit. It took me nearly three hours to get back on the A4 and get, finally, to Vicenza. Once I found the hotel, checked in and found a place to park the car, I set off to explore the town.

While Vicenza cannot help being influenced in nearly everything by its vastly more powerful and cosmopolitan neighbor to the east, its cuisine is somewhat distinctive, given that it is too far from the sea for fresh seafood to play the same major role it does in Venice. Vicenza lacks even a decent sized lake to provide fish. There is a river that runs through the town but it doesn’t seem to provide much in the way of fish except for local anglers. So Vicenza’s recipes count on dried fish, the most famous of which, baccala all vicentina, I was determined to try.

Fish here is served al forno, baked in an oven, instead of grilled, as is most common in Venice. Dishes in Vicenza are cooked slower and longer, and the cooks here prefer meat to fish, including all sorts of roasted birds. A local favorite is wild birds cooked in clay pots. I saw pigeons for sale in local markets, as were turkeys and other birds. At one macelleria, I saw dozens of birds trussed and ready for sale, as well as a plastic tray with sheep’s brains.

Vicenza was also fresh pasta country, and I saw in the equivalent of an Italian deli mounds of fresh pasta, ready for sale to customers who stopped in on their way home from work. The pasta had a distinctive, yellow color because it is made with egg. The favored “condimento,” for pasta here is a ragu, made with bits of meat rather than a marinara – literally “sailor style,” that is preferred in the south of the country.

I spent the rest of the day walking around Vicenza’s restored old center section. I strolled in the local PAM, Italy’s largest supermarket chain, and into small ma and pa stores in the town to see what people were eating. In Vicenza, there were fresh fish in all the stores, but the selection was pretty small. I also noticed that the frozen food section was pretty small, far smaller than the ones in typical U.S. supermarkets. Italians seem not to have taken in a big way to frozen foods.

After a couple of hours of walking around, I wanted some lunch, so I popped into a local restaurant and ordered a local pasta called bigoli dressed with a ragu made with veal. It was really delicious and was just the right amount of food. It was really amazing how many of the things I was told or that I read about Italy and food culture here that have turned out to be plain wrong.

“Italians eat pizza as a snack, not as a meal,” I read in one book. That would have come as a hell of a surprise to the two guys sitting across from me in a restaurant in Udine, busily eating whole pizzas, using knives and forks, yet another Italian pizza-eating rule. Picking up pizza with your hands is only proper if it is one slice and you are standing up. Otherwise, eating pizza with your hands is – non che fa – just not done.

Italian restaurant meals are typically sold al la carte although some restaurants that cater to tourists sometimes offer price-fixed meals, that include two or three courses and a dessert. In a typical restaurant menu, courses are divided into primi piatti or first courses, and secondi piatti, second courses. Then there are contourni, or side dishes – typically vegetables or potatoes, and dulci, sweets. The great thing about this was that I could order exactly as much food as I wanted and nothing more. I learned to imitate the Italians I saw eating around me and typically ordered primi piatti for lunch and reserved secondi piatti for dinner. It worked out very well, and I never left a restaurant in Italy feeling hungry or that I had eaten too much.

Depending on the area of the country, first courses can include soup (either minestre or zuppa, depending again on location) as well as pasta dishes or risotto. Second courses can include various cuts of meat, chops or steaks. Desserts on the other hand were not a big feature of menus in the restaurants in which I ate. Few had more than three or four or at the most five items on the dessert list.

On the other hand, even the smallest towns I visited had a pasticceria, or pastry shop that offered a very large variety of sweets. Strolling around Vicenza after lunch, I passed one of these shops and saw a mound of bite-sized, crème filled pastries called cannoli in the shop window. They looked so good that I popped into the pasticceria and bought two. The filling was creamy, with a hint of tartness from lemon juice. The cannoli were coated with cocoa powder and the pastry tubes, cannoli means “pipes,” were very crisp. They were the perfect small dessert to end a light lunch.

By evening, my knees were singing Ave Maria from all the walking I had done and I needed to sit down. It was too early for dinner, so I chose a bench in front of a portion of the old medieval wall of Vicenza and settled down to observe Italians performing what is called la passeggiatta. This refers to the very Italian practice of going out for a stroll in the evening. Typically, this starts around 6:30 p.m. and goes to about 8 p.m. In Vicenza, I watched people strolling about, young couples pushing baby carts, older couples walking hand in hand, young girls and boys, roving in packs and eyeing each other. Bars in the area threw open their doors and spread various appetizers along the bar. People stopped in, bought glasses of beer or wine, munched the appetizers, smoked and gossiped.

The bench I was sitting on was in front of a section of old wall, dating back to the early middle ages, according to a plaque. Vicenza was actually founded by Roman settlers a few centuries before Christ, when they called it Vitinium, but it was a backwater then and remained so until Venice became its own city-state. After that, Vicenza became a sort of outpost of Venice as that city became wealthy and powerful thanks to its vast foreign trade. Another independent city-state, Milan, lusted after the riches and the trade of Venice. After it fell under the sway of the kings of Spain, Milan made a few stabs at invading Venice, and Vicenza served as sort of the canary in the coalmine, warning its parent state when things got tense. Vicenza was the place that Milan’s armies would have to go through when that city’s leaders developed the urge to eat seafood themselves, in Venice.

Across from me, an elderly man perched on the steps of a church, playing tunes on an accordion. I nodded to him and he must have tagged me for an American because he immediately switched from an Italian tune to playing “Moon River,” of all tunes. At his feet, a puppy gnawed at stray sheets of paper. The occasional passerby stopped and dropped coins in a box at his feet.

All around me were a sea of Italians, strolling, smoking, eating gelati – ice cream, talking on cell phones or conversing over espressos at tables under umbrellas, set just off the sidewalk. The night was cool and damp with just a hint of fog that gave the street lamps faint yellow haloes.