Italy Part Tre: Venice

When I checked my e-mail on the afternoon before I left for Italy I received this message from one of the professors going on the trip:

Dear all,

Venice is having a very cold and wet winter. They are actually predicting rain, snow, and flooding while we are there. You may want to get to WalMart and buy yourselves a poncho and some rubber boots that are about knee-high. I bought some last night and they cost me $19.99.

See you tomorrow.

Dr. M.

I went out and bought boots. They are brown and awkward and slightly too big because the store I chose didn't have any in women's sizes, but I didn't have time to run around town looking for the perfect pair. In any case I was glad I bought them. Here's why:

This is a mammoth puddle in front of St. Mark's Basilica with the Doge's Palace beyond. It is one of many puddles I encountered in Venice, most of them smaller yet surprisingly deep. One can see platforms in the background of the photo; these are used for walking when St. Mark's Square floods, which did happen a bit while I was there. There are similar platforms elsewhere in Venice, which was good because it rained off and on for most of our time in Venice.

While I was in Italy for school, the trip was very unstructured. Once we reached Venice we were basically told to go do whatever--just keep a journal and come to quick meetings about every other day. This was both liberating and mildly terrifying. The day after most of us visited the islands in the lagoon, however, we did have a bit of direction in the form of a challenge: Find the oldest restaurant in Venice (it's about 500 years old) and try traditional Venetian food. Hint: the staff is known for being rude, it's a bacaro (sort of like a bar that serves food), and the place is listed in most guidebooks.

I joined forces with Carrie and Tasia, my friends and two main travel buddies. We scoured our guidebooks for possible establishments and found two that fit the clues. (My mom gave me Rick Steves's Italy 2010 guidebook and it was invaluable. I've previously called guidebooks boring, and I stand by that if one is just reading one at home, but I now think them endlessly interesting and incredibly useful when figuring out the ropes for oneself in a foreign country.)

We considered asking someone on the street if they knew what restaurant the clues talked about, but nixed the idea since none of us knew how to say "500 year old restaurant" in Italian. We tried a tourist information office, but the woman at the desk just fluttered her hands and said, "A five hundred year old restaurant? It's impossible. Impossible." We went back to the hotel in defeat. One of the professors was in the lobby, though, and after one more hint we were sure which restaurant it was: the Cantina Do Mori.

It's a small place on the other side of the Rialto from St. Mark's, standing room only. The first bartender we saw didn't speak English (nor should he), and we had no idea how to ask for traditional Venetian food in Italian. Carrie pulled out her handy dandy Italian phrasebook from the 1950s (it tells you how to ask for typewriter parts and girdles) and we paged through it awkwardly for about five minutes. It was the noon hour and the place was filling up with locals; it was crowded and full of Italian words.

Finally, the other bartender--who'd watched the whole thing and apparently decided to let us hang for awhile--motioned at us and said that he spoke English. We asked him for something traditional and he gave us a variety plate of cicchetti, which are small snacks with toothpicks in them. The cicchetti we sampled included this slimy eel thing and a bunch of strange rolls and little sandwiches with whole (bony) tiny fish on top. It was all very salty, and while it wasn't my favorite food ever, it was good stuff. I wouldn't cry if I had to eat it again.

We did a lot of other things in Venice, but most of our time was spent wandering around lost. Venice is a maze and maps are only so helpful, since few list all the narrow streets (calli), and some streets change names in random places. Venice is comprised of six sestieri, or neighborhoods, with the southern neighborhood of San Marco being the most touristy. It's definitely worth heading north into San Paolo, Santa Croce, west to Dorsoduro, and beyond. After dark (and it was dark; many streets weren't brightly lit), there were many instances where it was just us on the streets or near the water. This was both eerie and peaceful. (And if you ever go to Venice and want to get away from the awful tourist menus around St. Mark's it's worth the walk to Muro in Santa Croce. It was So. Good.)

And now it's picture time!

Someone boarding a vaporetto (right) from the vaporetto stop at the Accademia Bridge (left). Since I keep talking about water buses I thought I'd show one... Most of the important streets are decorated with pretty lights, which we found both beautiful and incredibly helpful.

There were a lot of people in Venice who really wanted to sell us handbags. We didn't want any. Here are some street salesmen hounding passersby on the Accademia Bridge.

Graffiti near the Accademia Bridge. Does Venice have a faery problem? Could that be why we were lost all the time? Other notable graffiti included the phrase "Thief Cause". It was all over Venice.

We saw many people--all of them speaking Italian and probably not tourists--coming out of a gelato shop down the street as we wandered. We decided that we should go in too, and were glad we did: one euro for a large scoop of gelato in a waffle cone. Yummy and wallet friendly.

I came across this scene as we walked through Dorsoduro, and I promise that the dogs were playing, not fighting. Venetians seem to like their dogs; we saw a lot of them, and many people took their dogs into stores, even big ticket designer ones. (Note the flood platform.)

I deeply appreciate signs like this. We used them frequently.

Beautiful graffiti art on a payphone.

The view from our hotel's cozy little lobby.

Carrie and me obstructing the lovely lobby view on a rare sunny morning.

Ciao,

Tune in next time for pictures and tales from Florence!