Venice is sinking, we hear. Venice must be saved. It has long been a city on the edge but, to misquote Mark Twain, rumours of its demise have been greatly exaggerated – for now, at least, although it is characterised by precariousness and a sense of drama.
For centuries, Venice was a nexus between Europe and Asia, much like its historical rival, Constantinople. At the height of its power in the 15th century, the Venetian Republic stretched along the Adriatic and Istrian coasts and as far east as Cyprus.
It was a conduit for exchange between Europe, Africa and the Far East, with a lucrative trade in salt, sugar and spices – cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, coriander, saffron, pepper.... “To the emporia of this famous place the whole world came for its gold, its exotic textiles, its coffee and spices,” wrote Jan Morris in Venice – first published in 1960 and to my mind still the best book written about the city.
Venice dominated the spice trade until two fateful events took place, nearly simultaneously: in 1497, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, which would soon end the Venetian monopoly on trade with the East. And in 1453, Constantinople was taken over by the Ottoman Turks, who would soon outmanoeuvre Venetian merchants and seize their eastern lands. The death knell of La Serenissima’s supremacy was sounded.
Absorbed into newly unified Italy in 1866, Venice became, writes Morris, “just another Italian provincial capital: but she remains, as always, a phenomenon… gilded and agate-eyed … astonishing, exasperating, overwhelming, ruinously expensive, gaudy…” Venice is unlike any other city on earth.
Venice: a ‘gourmet’s city’?
So, what about the food? Though she loved Venice, Morris concluded, damningly, that Venice is “not a gourmet’s city”. “Once upon a time the cucina Veneziana was considered the finest in the world,” she says before lamenting about how far its cuisine had sunk since the glory days. “Certainly by now [now being 1960] the victuals of Venice have lost any traces of antique glory, and generally conform tamely enough to the Italian cuisine.”
Ouch. This is where I have to part company with Jan. Sure, it is possible to eat very badly in the city’s innumerable tourist traps, and visitors are confronted by yet another crap pizza purveyor at every turn (pizza, in Venice – why would you?). And it’s not cheap.
But Venice has a strong, distinctive food culture. As food writer Emiko Davies writes in Cinnamon and Salt: cicchetti in Venice, the mercantile past is there for the tasting. “Risotto is a great example of the marriage of the lagoon’s traditional ingredients with [rice], a borrowed ingredient from the East,” she writes. Then there are classic Venetian dishes such as sarde in saor, which, Davies says, show a love of sweet and sour that can be traced back to the Levant, an edible vestige of the Republic’s transcultural trade.
And, of course, there’s the famed cicchetti that Davies writes about, those small savoury morsels akin to Spain’s tapas or pintxos and served at bàcari, Venice’s civilised answer to the wine bar.
Venture to Rialto Market (a must) and you’ll see on proud display all sorts of edible sea creatures, some that are unique to the Venetian lagoon.
Venice is a city that you need to get to know before she reveals her riches – and that’s best done on foot, nosing out the tiny bàcari as you get lost in the city’s labyrinth of fondamenti, campi and calli, and traversing the countless canals that “stitch the city together” as Morris so poetically phrases it.
My visit was short, and so is the list of recommendations that follows, but it’s a good starting point for a weekend break. Give in, get lost, get away from the crowds and just follow your nose.
Where to eat & drink
Rialto Market
Arrive before noon and behold the artfully displayed, sparkling-fresh seafood. Look out for octopus, granceola (spider crab), eels (called bisato here, and locally fished), mantis shrimp (canoce)... the place is a living tribute to the finny tribes of the lagoon and the Adriatic. And, of course, there’s baccalà, dried salt cod, which you’ll find in bàcari city-wide.
As markets go, it’s relatively urbane. The focus is squarely on the produce, not street food, and it’s none the worse for that. One stall-holder, watching me eye up some beautiful John Dory, took the time to carefully choose which fish he thought was the best fish for me. I felt gutted (excuse the pun) that I had no kitchen to take it home to cook it in.
All’Arco
Unless you have the navigational skills of Marco Polo, you’re bound lose your bearings in the tiny twisty streets of San Polo as you struggle to find All’Arco (even Google Maps was flummoxed). Persist. “Ah, tradizionale!” the server smiled approvingly as he took our order of baccalà mantecata and sarde in saor.
Cicchetti and ombra (it’s what they call a glass of local wine here) in hand, we jostled for space with other tourists, the two of us finally settling our bums on a single rickety chair, one bum-cheek apiece, savouring the fluffy-textured salt cod and the soft, sweet-and-sharp, slow-cooked onions surrounding the sardines. Divine.
Caffè Florian
Yes, it’s touristy, but Caffè Florian, here since 1720 and Venice’s oldest café, is as atmospheric as they come, all worn gilt and padded velvet – and it has the best hot chocolate, thick and bitter-edged, served at white marble-topped tables with pomp and style. It also costs: 14 euros for a tazza, to be exact, and there’s an additional charge for the jazz band playing in Piazza San Marco outside. But spending an hour here for a sugar hit and battery recharge is so worth it. Feeling cossetted, if gently fleeced, we left happy.
Venissa wine resort & osteria
Venissa sits in stately splendour on the island of Mazzorbo, a 40-minute vaporetto ride from the city of Venice. It has five stylishly plush bedrooms, a restaurant with both a Michelin star and a Green Michelin star, the more casual Osteria, where we ate, and the vineyards themselves.
Like so much in Venice, there’s a sense of drama about Venissa, of pulling back from the brink of disaster. A grape variety called Doronia de Venezia is the star of this story. In 1966, Venice was inundated by devastating floods, and the salt water killed many of the grapevines growing on the lagoon islands. But not all. In 2001, Gianluca Bisol, Venissa’s founder, came across some surviving vines growing in the churchyard of the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunto on the island of Torcella – three of which were the Doronia variety, unique to this region.
Brought back from extinction, the variety has been planted in a once-abandoned two-hectare walled garden, now part of the Venissa estate – and it’s here that you can taste the results of this impressive restoration project. The flagship Venissa Bianco is made in the traditional way, with long maceration and skin contact (think orange wine); add to that a lick of salinity and you have a wine that is utterly distinctive.
Eating here is like being in a posh wine estate in Napa or Stellenbosch – and the cooking lives up to expectations. Dishes are traditional but presented in a thoroughly contemporary way. Risotto with celeriac, beetroot and raw prawns looked like a painting was perfectly cooked, the rice retaining plenty of bite. Grilled sardines came tucked under a duvet of flowers and herbs, including one called sea fennel, which gave it a sea-fresh, verdant tang.
Vino Vero wine bar
Feeling the urge for natural wine with your cicchetti? Head for Vino Vero, a buzzing canal-side spot in Cannaregio that’s a magnet for international wine-fanciers, who spill out onto the canal and over the bridge at aperitivo hour. There’s an excellent selection of small eats and an impressive by-the-glass wine selection chalked up on a blackboard.
Spritz
You can’t come to Venice without having a spritz. It’s the definitive aperitivo of choice in these parts. Make sure you ask for yours to be made with Select. It was created in Venice in 1920 by two brothers to help the city recover after the First World War and is made with 30 herbs and botanicals. It’s drier and, to my palate, more complex than, say, Aperol. If it’s the real deal, it will come with a big green olive in the bottom for that balancing saline tang.
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