Friday, 27 September 2024, Venice on our own: fish and art

Written 25 February 2025

Elsewhere, these two golden hands, each emerging from (or perhaps submerging in) a liquid-like surface, strove to touch one another.

Written 26 February 2025

The breakfast buffet was pretty good. Here's the assortment of of nuts, seeds, and fresh and dried fruits. Behind them, in the mirror, you can see the array of sliced cheeses, which was actually behind me as I took the photo.

At the right are the cake and pastry offerings. The little slate at the right-hand side indicates which are gluten- and/or lactose-free.

The bread assortment was especially good, and this collection of vintage Le Creuset pots held boiled and scrambled eggs, breakfast meats, hashbrowns, etc.

The view at breakfast was pretty good, too. We sat on the covered terrace right on the Grand Canal.

This was the last full day of the tour, and we had it entirely free to do what we wanted in Venice. David and I therefore parted company after breakfast. He wanted to see the Murano glass showroom and maybe tour St. Marks, both of which I did last year but he missed because he was sick. I wanted to see the famous fish market, which I didn't manage to get to last year (and which David found not just uninteresting but positive repugnant).

Outside the back entrance of the hotel (to go out the front entrance, you need a boat; if you really want to, a gondola stand is right there) is this small courtyard with an old well in the center. It was a usefull landmark in all our wanderings.

Another useful landmark was the façade of Saint Moses church, which marked a turn on several of our routes.

I walked with David as far as St. Mark's Square, shown at the right here with its bell tower looking particularly precarious.

We separated in front of St. Marks Basilica, and I passed under the familiar blue clock that was such an important landmark last year and headed for the Rialto Bridge. I also especially wanted to walk over that bridge, and it happened to be right on the route to the fish market.

Along the way, I passed this monument to Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793).

Because ground level and water level in Venice are essentially the same, all bridges are arched so that boats can pass underneath—the only hills you have to climb as you walk around the city are bridges.

The Rialto is the oldest and largest of the few bridges over the Grand Canal. It's completely lined with shops on both sides, but an additional narrow walkway crosses between the shops and the river on each side, and occasional openings let you move to them from the center or vice versa.

At the left here, I'm starting up the Rialto bridge stairs, under shop awnings. Near the top, I moved out to the outer walkway to admire the view of the canal.

But the fish market called, and it's pretty much a morning phenomenon, so I hurried on.

On the outskirts of the fish market, other vendors were clustered. The shop window at the left here features meat and poultry as well as meat products prepared for cooking—beef roulades with cheese and arugula, breaded veal cutlets, bacon-wrapped chicken kabobs, etc.

This vegetable and fruit stand was unusual in that it offered two varieties of jujubes—the usual greenish ones with red-brown markings and the smaller, dark red ones to the right of them. Also captured in this shot are cellophane bags of dried oregano branches, sacks of walnuts, and (behind them), porcini and chanterelle mushrooms, cauliflowers, and speckled beans. Chanterelles are apparently called "finferli" in Italian. And prickly pears are called "Indian figs" in Italian, just as they are in French.

Then came the fish. Lots of fish. And lots of kinds of fish, plus shellfish.

Here, at the left are the dressed tails of small monkfish (Lophius piscatorius). To the right of them are branzini (Dicentrarchus labrax, called "bar" in French). At the far right, a heap of real scampi (Nephrops norvegicus, called "langoustines" in French and Dublin Bay prawns in English), as opposed to the shrimp that are usually called scampi in American restaurants. Behind them, at the top right, sacks of small clams.

At the right, scallops (Pecten maximus) on the half shell, with their brightly colored roe. To the left of them sea bream of some sort.

At the left here, items clearly labeled "cuttlefish milk." When I tried looking that up, I learned that cuttlefish milk just means cuttlefish ink, which is brownish (actually, sepia, the Italian name for cuttlefish). So I guess these are the intact ink sacs from cuttlefish?

To the left of them, an array of fat rainbow trout, and to the right sacks of tiny clams for pasta sauce.

The right-hand photo shows a great heap of "cigale," which I think translates "cicada." Anyway, they are Squilla mantis, which I think are called mantis shrimp in English. The prominent spots are on their tails, intended to fool predators into attacking the wrong end. At the head end, and folded out of sight in this photo, are long praying-mantis-like legs and claws that can cause serious injury to anyone stepping on one in the sand or trying to grab a live one bare-handed.

To the left of them bright red shrimp and to the right whole fish certified (by the little blue tag) as coming from Croatia.

And these gooey-looking little brown and yellow guys are "gò," lagoon gobies, which burrow among the roots of aquatic plants in the Venetian lagoon. I wasn't able to narrow down their scientific name—too many little gobies go by the same common name. They are apparently delicious but small and very bony, so they are principally used in risotto—they are cooked, crushed, strained, etc. in a long and laborious process, then the flavorful broth is used to cook the rice.

The tuna head shown at the right must have been 20 lb even without the rest of the fish attached.

This swordfish might have been even bigger before it was disembodied. The guy behind it is chopping it up into steaks.

A stand just outside the fish market proper was selling fried squid and, its featured product, fritto misto (mixed fried fish) with white polenta—apparently the local equivalent of fish and chips. The cups arranged on the counter were filled with old wine corks and served only to illustrate the size cup you got for each price (16 euros for a large calimari, 13 for a large fritto misto).

I've tried hard to show only the best and most informative photos, but of course I took lots and lots more. Between the ones I've described here, I saw skates' wings, filets of John Dory and hake, salmon steaks, several species of sea bream, many small fishes (ranging from large sardine size to eensy little guys to be fried whole), squid, cuttlefish, at least three species of octopus, shrimp of different colors and sizes, smoked haddock, bristling sacks of small spiny whelks, gurnards, red mullet, grey mullet, several sizes and species of flatfish, tubs of "fish butter" (apparently fish pounded to a spreadable consistency; the ingredients listed included sea bream, mayo, and wine vinegar but no actual butter; also the same thing made with salt cod), at least three species of live crabs, several mixtures of fish bits and tiny clams (apparently for making soup), small whole makerels, mussels and more sizes of clams in the shell, tubs of a mixture for "fish stew" with spider crab, stone crab claws, sacks of razor clams in the shell, a few live eels, boxes of Salicornia, amberjack filets, and of course unlabeled fish here and there that I coldn't identify.

Behind one display, a guy was peeling eels. He would nail the tail to the table with a knife, then rip the skin off like a glove, toward the head end.

Walking back through the vegetable market, I was initially puzzled by these big tubs of flat, whitish slabs, but they turn out to be artichoke bottoms! A guy with a very sharp knife and well-practiced moves was peeling the bottom halves of whole artichokes, slicing off the meaty bottom part into acidulated water (to prevent browning) , and discarding the tops!

At the right is a box of the discarded tops.

At the left here are boxes of the discarded stems and peelings. Their arrangement in two different bins makes we wonder whether they will not go to waste. Perhaps someone cooks them and extracts, e.g., the tender meat at the bases of the leaves and/or the tender stem centers.

At the right are crates of fresh rosemary, fresh sage, and (in the center) squash blossoms ready for stuffing. These are the male flowers. Other stands were selling the female ones, with tiny baby zucchini attached at their bases.

As I passed back over the Rialto Bridge, I paused to take a few photos of the shop windows. Here's an elaborate display of carnival masks and whatever that object is with the painting of a canal on it. Note the sign at the bottom that says "No plastic."

Along the way I crossed this picturesque little canal of the sort that has no sidewalks. People step out their doors directly into boats.

In a shop window, I spotted these Venetian glass flowers, which seem to have some redeeming aesthetic value, but not enough to tempt me, even if they proved to be within my price range.

But when I got back to St. Marks square, I found that the aqua alta had started, and it was rising faster than I could get around it, so I had to walk a long way out of my way to get back to the hotel without getting my feet wet.

David and I rendezvoused at noon at the hotel, whence we walked toward the Academia art museum, prospecting for lunch. Turns out David doesn't like Murano glass any more than I do, but he said the experience was educational, and he would have swum the length of the Grand Canal rather than go along to watch me take pictures of dead fish.

We settled at the Pizzeria Paolin in the Piazza Santo Stefano, deciding to give Italian pizza one more chance. (That's Santo Stefano in the right-hand photo.) The square was pretty touristy, but what can you do?

Here's my "spicy salami" pizza (pepperoni doesn't seem to be a pizza thing in Italy). On his, David had ham and mushrooms. The pizza was actually pretty good, though not the equal (to our taste) of that from the late lamented Park's Twisted Pizza in Tallahassee.

We crossed the Grand Canal on the mostly wooden Academia Bridge. In the right-hand photo, David poses at the top of it, with the Grand Canal in the background. The yellow building at the left is the Palazzo Barbaro, and that could be the dome of Santa Maria della Salute in the distance. The palazzo has a long and interesting history (including its role as the center of American artistic life in Venice in the 19th century), the most recent chapter of which was its use in the 1981 TV series Brideshead Revisited.

Here's a view back at the bridge from the Academia side.

In the Academia, one of the most striking features of the first rooms we visit was this amazing ceiling.

Here's about half of a Veronese "Annunciation"; I particularly liked the angel.

And at the right a Tintoretto "Presentation of Jesus at the Temple."

The permanent collection was great, but I confess to being distracted by a temporary exhibition of art glass on tables in the center of one of the galleries. These two groups of glass fruits and vegetables drew me like a magnet.

In the left-hand photo, you can see grapes, white and red currants, partly shelled peas and beans, a sprig of flowering vine, mushrooms, and in the upper right corner, mistletoe with berries!

In the right-hand one are speckled beans, green beans, asparagus, chestnuts, garlic and shallot with their leaves still on, green and white asparagus, and a couple of kinds of small roots (horseradish? salsify?).

We covered maybe a quarter of the Academia before our feet gave out, when we still had a 20-minute hike back to the hotel. We were just coming to the periods that interest us most in art, so we probably should have started at the other end and worked our way back in time. We'll just have to come back.

Just outside the Academia was this snack and souvenir stand. On the small tray just below the brightly colored artificial macaw is a heap of empty coconut shells, and on the larger tray below it, a heap of chunks of bright-white fresh coconut with the brown skin on the back. Water dripped from the top of the stand down over the coconut shells to trickle over the coconut chunks to keep them from drying out. Perhaps it also helped to cool the bottled drinks and juices on the tray below that.

I didn't see any at this stand, but a ubiquitous souvenir offering was replicas of Venetian street signs, authentically battered and stained, as though stolen right off the city's streetscapes. I began to notice, though, that the stains and rust streaks on all of them were identical! Clearly some central factory makes the blanks, with the rust streaks and stains in place, before the various letterings are applied—Piazza San Marco, Ponte di Rialto, or whatever. One size rust streak fits all.

On the walk back to the hotel, I spotted this cute little glass race car in a shop wondow.

At 5 pm, we met our Tour Director for the walk to a classical chamber-music concert Tauck arranged for us. It was held in the decommissioned Church of San Maurizio, now a museum of Vivaldi and the music of his time.

The performers sat in this rounded apse. The instruments standing behind them were part of the museum and weren't used during the performance.

After the concert, we had time to explore the museum's holdings, which featured stringed instruments from violins to double basses, together with guitars, lutes, mandolins, psalteries, and many I couldn't put names to. At the right here is a series of variations on the mandolin.

Here, at the left with a couple of mandolins, is a "citarra lira," a "lyre guitar"?

And at the right, something I never found a label for.

When our time at the museum was up, we walked back to our hotel for our farewell dinner.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a photo of the menu, and I don't remember what this starter was. Beans or orzo or rice or some such in tomato sauce or soup drizzled with something creamy.

Then perhaps a square of fish on a puree of something golden with salad on top?

Then definitely steak with fat grilled porcini mushrooms. Mashed potatoes and gravy.

Dessert was billed as "chocolate bavarian with berry sorbet," though that doesn't begin to describe it. Outstanding!