You may have heard — or maybe you’re hearing it now — that several Venetian spring months were sparkled-up by the presence of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, here filming “The Tourist.” (Stuntman Vladimir Tevlovski was also here. Just thought I’ve give him a shout-out.)
But naturally the excitement was generally focused on The Jolie and also Brad Pitt, who seems to have come along to drink and eat things and get photographed around town with the kids. And perhaps to keep an eye on her and Johnny Depp, if some unkind comments are to be believed.
I’ve lived most of my life in cities where there are more celebrities than plumbers. And usually Venetians aren’t too easy to impress, even with the annual Film Festival and other big events that so excite reporters and editors. This “Hey buddy, you’re blocking the entrance” attitude is just another of the many similarities between Venice and New York, and just another reason why I love it here.
Hoping to illustrate the reason for Venetians’ general indifference to stars (“So who is that?” “It’s Al Pacino!” “It’s Heath Ledger!” “It’s Daniel Craig!” “Oh……”)I thought I’d add here the number of films which have been shot in Venice over the 100-some years that cinema has existed. But a complete list evidently has never been made. Listers tend to name only their favorites, which is a little annoying. Anyway, it’s a lot. Since I’ve been here I’ve seen at least six in progress, which isn’t all that many.
But in a bar/cafe/pizzeria behind the trees in the generally nondescript area known as Sant’ Elena, at least one barista hasn’t made any effort to be blase’.
The other morning I noticed that somebody had set up a little shrine to a moment of elation which will probably endure till the last person who knows who Brad Pitt was has been cremated and forgotten.
The note says: "Brad Pitt drank from this cup." The date is April 24, 2010. I'm sure it has never been, and never will be, washed.
I don’t mean to pound this topic into the mud like a piling or anything, but I just thought I’d mention two more flavors that make Venice real to the old gustatory organs. By which I mean things I eat here that I haven’t really found (or taken seriously) elsewhere:
When the bovoleti are ready to eat, they look almost good. Gentlemen, start your toothpicks.
Snails, or bovoleti (boh-voh-EH-ti). Think escargots, with absolutely no pretensions — the polar opposite of pretensions. And absolutely no taste, either, which is why they are boiled, then thrown in a bowl with an overload of sliced fresh garlic and olive oil. Snails are merely an excuse to eat oil and garlic, in my view. It couldn’t possibly be for their nutritional value. Or their texture, either. (The garlic helps you get past that, too. Those old-time hungry people thought of everything.)
Bovoleti show up in late spring and are sold by fishmongers; odd, considering that your snail is a land creature, happier clinging to some plant stem in a field somewhere. They’re on sale until after the feast of the Redentore (third Sunday in July).
The thing to remember about snails is that they tend to wander off. Here at the Rialto fish market, their way is illuminated by reflections from the red awning outside.Therefore your shrewd snail-seller will block their exit with a ring of salt. One does wonder how the little critters stay alive under water, since they don't have gills. Maybe they're all holding their breath and hoping for better days, like the rest of us.The palazzo Contarini has a distinctive staircase which has long since been nicknamed "del bovolo" -- of the snail.
In fact, that festival is their moment of glory, if snails can be said to have one, because there they demonstrate their other sterling quality, as entertainment. Eating them gives you something to do while you’re waiting for the fireworks. Slippery little shell in one hand, toothpick in the other, the point is to snag and pull out the bit of whatever you’d call that material that used to be alive, and eat it. The waters of the Giudecca Canal can be speckled with these shells, tossed overboard by oily-fingered people who are beginning to run out of conversation.
The other special item would be fondi, or artichoke bottoms. Perhaps you didn’t realize that an artichoke has a bottom, but usually there is somebody near a fruit and vegetable stand who has been assigned a mountain of big tough artichokes and told to cut off all those leathery outer leaves and other useless bits (which is most of the artichoke) with a knife as sharp as a billhook, then carve a neat disk from what remains.
The artichoke puts up a struggle, but with the right knife and the will to prevail, you'll have something really good to eat. If you get bored with them like this, chop up a few and mix them with some pasta.
Simmer slowly in — you know what’s coming — oil and garlic, throw some minced parsley over them, and there you have your daily thistle.
Bit of useless information: You may discover that in Venice there are two words for artichoke used interchangeably: carciofo and articioco. Carciofo (kar-CHAWF-oh) is the standard word, but across northern Italy, from Friuli to Liguria, you’ll find variations on articioco (ar-tee-CHOKE-oh). Such as: articjoc, articioc, articioch, and articiocc. Both carciofo and articioco ultimately derive from Arabic; carciofo from kharshuf, and articioco probably from the Old Spanish alcachofa, which in turn came from Arabic.
Sometimes words are almost more delectable to me than the thing they represent. But I’ll stop here. Must. Go. Eat.
At this stage, the poppies and artichokes on Sant' Erasmo are more or less struggling for dominance. I suppose you could eat the poppies, but I'll stick with the spiky little purple flower I know.
A rare sighting of the trio of great spring vegetables together: asparagus, peas lurking behind them, and artichokes lurking to the lower right. The jury is instructed to disregard the figs, which are obviously from some hothouse somewhere, as the local ones don't appear till August, as God intended.
The gustatory sense is next on my list of attributes of the sensual Venice because this time of year is swamped, decks awash, in great things to eat. If one is inclined (“one” meaning “me”) to focus on seasonal comestibles, then this is a period that verges on the orgiastic. Naturally I try to conceal this. Sort of.
From October to April we eat in a sensible-shoes sort of way –plenty of local food, warm, sustaining, totally good for you but not very exciting, if you don’t count the castradina in November or the roast eel on Christmas Eve, and several forms of pastry. But this somewhat restrained diet means that by spring I’m watching for the first asparagus with an intensity most people give to watching the Powerball drawing.
At the annual patron saint's festa on Sant' Erasmo in early June, the farmers sell their produce essentially in job lots. It all looks so good I think they must call in makeup artists.
When I finally see that first green stalk, it’s like the starter’s gun on a new season of — how can I put this delicately? I can’t — glorious glut.
First comes the asparagus, which is steamed or boiled and often eaten with hard-boiled eggs cut in half. Sprinkle this assortment with salt, pepper, and extravirgin olive oil, and you’ve had dinner.
These are definitely my favorite flower to eat.
Shortly thereafter the artichokes arrive. Not just any artichoke, but the carciofo violetto from Sant’ Erasmo. This is a purple variety that thrives around the lagoon — we’ve had them from the Vignole, and from Malamocco, though apartment buildings now cover the artichoke fields that Lino remembers. The encyclopedia says they are also to be had from Chioggia, but I’ve never knowingly eaten anything from Chioggia except a type of radicchio. In any case, the saline environment evidently does something important to the old Cynara scolymus, if my taste buds are not lying to me.
This spring we rowed over to Sant’ Erasmo many times, which meant that we’ve eaten more artichokes in the past five weeks than ever before, I think. We’d come home with bags of these little creatures, often cut off the plant just for us, paying about two-thirds less than the price at the Rialto. We’d pull off the outer leaves and eat the inner morsel raw. We’d simmer them in olive oil and garlic. We’d cut them in half and throw them on the griddle. We even experimented with boiling them and then storing them in a jar full of olive oil. No verdict yet on how those turned out, but it’s hard to imagine they could be bad.
I approve of a food that comes in its own wrapper, even if I do have to pay for the extra weight.
Peas: Fresh peas are next up, the crucial element to risi e bisi (REE-zee eh Bee-zee), or pea risotto, a Venetian classic. Preparing artichokes is a very grown-up sort of thing to do, but shelling peas takes me very, very far back. I could be anywhere (say, Venice) and it would still make me feel like I was sitting on somebody’s back porch. The only thing I object to about fresh peas is the same thing I object to about fresh pinto beans: you pay by weight, which means you’re paying for a whole pod in order to get a batch of little pellets. That’s another thing I’m going to have to change when I get to be in charge of the world.
This is an early spring bonus: carletti, which Lino finds on foraging expeditions along the lagoon edge of the Lido.
After a few weeks of glory this trinity of sublime plant life has begun to fade from the scene and I will not be eating them again till next spring, even if I could get them from hothouses in Sicily or Israel or who knows where. But other things will be along — lettuce and string beans and tomatoes and eggplant. The faithful old zucchine. Fresh tomatoes right off the vine — we make our own sauce. Around here, “Eat your vegetables” sounds like an invitation to a party.
Clamming is hard work if you don't really love it. Lino's got the focus of a lion stalking its prey.
And the clamming season is now officially open — to the entire world, if your average Sunday afternoon in the lagoon is any indication. Of course it’s open all year to the professionals, but families spend recreational summer hours digging around in the shallows, and it is probably Lino’s favorite thing to do, way ahead of sleeping or eating. Maybe even drinking. It must be like meditation or yoga. He can do it for hours.
So we’ve already been out a few clam-hunting expeditions. The trick is to find some patch of terrain that hasn’t already been ravaged by legions of trippers. Lino is very patient and he actually looks for the clams, one by one, whereas most of the other mighty nimrods just claw up fistfuls of mud hoping to find something good. These are not fishermen, these are locusts.
After we’ve let the clams soak in a bucket of lagoon water for several hours, we take them home, and get ready for the Great Cooking Thereof. This may not happen immediately; we may have to leave them in the fridge in their plastic bag for a little while. They kind of hang out in there till we’re ready to cook them. When we put the bag in the sink, I can hear them making moist little shifting and tchk-tchk noises. Yes, they’re still alive, and these little sounds sort of do something to me. Maybe they’re talking about how much they enjoyed spending the afternoon in the dark and the cool. I hope so. I’m glad they don’t know what’s coming next.
Lino brought home the ideal assortment -- cape tonde ("malgarote"), caparozzoli, sansonei, lungoni, and the occasional bevarassa. Now we're introducing them to oil and garlic.
So we throw them into a large saute pan with garlic and oil. Steam goes everywhere. About a minute later they’ve given their last dying gasp, opened their shells and succumbed. We put them in a bowl where they slosh around in a celestial broth of their own saltwater, garlic, lemon juice and chopped parsley and we eat them like crazed little swine, right out of the shell — ignoring scalded fingertips, drops of oily water falling at random.
I’ve been talking about clams in a generic sort of way, but there are all sorts of bivalves to be had out there. Bevarasse (Venus gallina), sansonei, cape lunghe (Solen vagina), cape tonde (Cardium edule), caragoi (Vulgocerithium vulgatum), canestrei (Pecten opercularis), to name a few. There are also oysters — Lino went out on Christmas Eve a few years ago and brought back a load of fresh lagoon oysters, which were delicately sweet. Wish he’d do it again.
Just a few short hours ago, these mussels were clinging to their piling wondering what to do today. Unfortunately for them, we got to decide.
And now it’s mussels. A friend of ours went out in his boat yesterday with a fiendish contraption and scraped a huge amount of them off the pilings — wait, I’m not finished! — the pilings in the lagoon near the island of the Certosa, near the inlet of San Nicolo’, where the tide is so strong that the water is always really clean. Last night we permitted ourselves a modest gorge, annihilating a large bowl in a very short time. They were divine.
Somebody gave us a batch of canestrei, or "lid scallops." It took no time at all to open, bread, and fry them. You don't like fried food? Try these.
Whatever remains of the clams or the mussels is either thrown into tomato sauce for pasta later, or set aside (clams especially) for a risotto. Then we go out and get more.
I haven’t even gotten to the subject of fruit or ice cream, which are whole galaxies of delectable on their own, but I’m worn out. So let’s all put our heads down on our desks and be quiet for a few minutes.
But as we do, let me just repeat something I say far too often: It’s not easy to eat really well (not impossible, but not easy, to eat really well) in a restaurant in Venice, but here at home we eat better than the entire dynasty of Gediminids.
That tenor with the Kevlar lungs has no trouble getting your attention. But what may be a little harder to imagine is how beautiful Venice sounds when left to her own devices.
Nothing against sight; of all the senses, sight comes first, at least for us humans. But sight can make you lazy, especially in Venice. All you have to do is open just one eye, even squinting, and you’d still see enough beauty to keep you going for months. Which led me to believe, for quite a long time, that being blind in Venice would be the worst thing in the world. I mean, if you had to be blind, you might as well go live somewhere else. Bland, Missouri. Oil Trough, Arkansas. Anywhere but here.
Venice in fact is doomed to be stared at, posing for a million of the same photos every day, a life as predictable and monotonous as the typical gondolier’s. So it’s easy to assume that it’s your eyes that you need most.
I don’t think so anymore. Here is how Venice sounds to me.
Silence. There is plenty of noise all day long here, normal third-millennium racket ranging from pneumatic drills to 40-hp motors to deafening boom-boxes in passing boats blasting that car-crash-torture-dungeon music. And on summer nights, when people tend to stay out till dawn, along about 2:00 or 3:00 there is the boisterous chorus of their inane “Good-night-it-was-great-see-you-tomorrow-I’ll-call-you-okay-I’ll-text-you” comments from right outside our bedroom window, which naturally has to be open because of the heat. You’d think somebody in the group was going off to walk across Antarctica, the way some of them carry on.
I sometimes wonder whether anybody out on the street bothers to consider that there might be people — us, for example — behind our Venetian blinds. But even if they did, I don’t think they’d care. The street by our window is like Andorra, a zone free of duty — any sort of duty, like not shouting after midnight. Public space here isn’t understood to belong to all of us. It’s understood to belong to none of us, nobody at all. Do whatever you want.
But there comes a mystic moment somewhere in the night when a silence suffuses the city that is almost more beautiful than Bach. Deep. Intricate. Voluptuous. It’s not merely the absence of noise, this silence is an element entirely its own, made of everything alive but inaudible, the tide turning and the breeze that begins to waft from the sea and the luminous darkness itself. The proto-morning is filled with a silence that could be the distillation of every sound in the world that we can’t hear.
Blackbirds. Just as I wait for certain flavors to appear in season, I wait for certain sounds, and beginning in March and going on till around now, the blackbirds announce the dawn with an accuracy a chronometer could only dream of. In fact, I know it’s 4:00 AM as I lie there in the dark because one blackbird will begin to sing. One. A single voice that’s like a flute that wants to be a crystal bell. It’s almost more beautiful than laughter. It is so beautiful that I challenge you to suggest a song that could even come close. It hasn’t been written. And as long as there are blackbirds on earth, I really don’t care. Too bad they got such a boring name, but I suppose calling them the “voice of angels” bird would sound worse.
A shutter opening (or closing).
These are working shutters -- nothing decorative or ogival about them. Strange to say, while leaving a shutter open at night will kill you, you must open them in the morning, even if it's below freezing outside.
For me, this is one of the quintessential sounds of Venice, even more than foghorns or the bells of San Marco, God forgive me. It is one of the elemental sounds of dawn, an intimate, homely scraping noise ( it depends on how old and how plumb the shutters are) followed by two clunks as the shutters reach the outer wall. It’s the domestic equivalent of the trumpet at Churchill Downs.
Shutters are no mere decoration; Venetians believe — sorry, they know — that drafts are the thin end of the health wedge. Anything from a head cold to pleurisy, hiccups, the blind staggers, whatever you’ve got will almost certainly have been caused by a draft that was carelessly permitted to enter. “Colpo di finestra, colpo di balestra,” they darkly say: “A blow (as in punch) via the window is a blow from the crossbow.” No doubts, no discussions. If you don’t close your shutters, you’re just asking for it.
Rolling suitcases, all sizes, from carry-ons to steamer trunks. This is a fairly new sound which — unlike the birds and the shutters and all — the Venetians of yore might have trouble identifying. Considering how tourist apartment rentals have proliferated all over the city, the suitcase-sound has become as irrevocable as the sunrise. I will hear it as early as 3:00 AM, if the hardy travelers are trying to make the first flight at 6:35 sharp. (Unlikely, as that plane is going to Lyon, but they’ll almost certainly want one of the following flock of early flights to Rome, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and all those other big connection points for intercontinental flights).
Your average rolling suitcase isn’t any happier to be up at this hour than its people are, because it makes a heavy low grumbling noise as it is dragged along the granite streets. Then it goes bumpbumpbump twelve times, up the steps of the bridge. And twelve bumps down the other side.
Until a few years ago, the only hotel in this precinct was a modest if overpriced former palazzo with guests who traveled at decent hours. But now there has been an explosion of little bijou hotels which call themselves “bed and breakfast” but which have no relation whatever to the classic British version I remember so fondly (a spare room in some little retired couple’s house). There has been an even greater efflorescence of apartments for rent; if you start noodling around on the Net, you might think there is no dwelling left for Venetians, a feeling which many Venetians have begun to share.
So with all these places to stay, about ten to fifty times more people are hauling their stuff around today than even two years ago. The second-floor apartment across the street from us — all of ten feet away — belongs to someone who rents it through a French agency, because only French people stay there. They annoy the hoo out of the Venetians who live in the building, because they forget to close the front door, or they put their garbage out at inappropriate times (“Well we’re leaving before the trash is collected tomorrow,” one woman told me huffily, and I had to admit she had a point). And they toss their cigarette butts out the window. I never see them do it, but I also don’t see any excuse for it. Every few days I go out and sweep up all the cruddy filters strewn between their door and ours. (Filters — strange, I know. They don’t make French smokers the way they used to. Next thing you know, they’ll be drinking Coke. Oh wait — 42 percent of the French population does drink Coke. Well there you are.)
Via Garibaldi toward evening, not long before the kids begin to have their nervous breakdowns.
The sounds that shape the rest of the day depend on weather, whether or not school is in session (parents and children chattering on their way home), when the shops close (usually between 12:30 and 1:00) which means clumps of women form at the foot of the bridge to finish whatever it was they were discussing). It also depends on whether or not the kids have had their naps, or snacks, or have been thwarted in some way as their blood sugar plummets. Between 5:00 and 6:00 it seems that every toddler in the neighborhood collectively snaps, because what I used to think of quaintly as the “aperitivo hour” I have now re-labeled as the Hour of the Imploding Child.
The invisible piano. This is my favorite summer sound. I’ll hear it in the early evening, wafting out of an upper-storey apartment at the foot of via Garibaldi, behind some trees. It’s obviously a person and not a recording because of repetitions and occasional errors, and whoever it is (man? woman? no way to guess) plays well enough for it to be enjoyable but not so well as to be off-putting. Chopin ballades, sonatas by Scarlatti, “Invitation to the Dance” by Weber, music my mother used to play after supper. It makes me feel happy.
Fog is always beautiful, even if it does wreck your day's logistics.
Foghorns. My favorite winter sound. There are a few unpleasant aspects to fog, of course — clothes on the line which have given up all hope of ever drying; vaporettos re-routed up the Grand Canal for safety reasons, which drastically distorts your route to wherever you need to go. People not from Venice think that high water is a nuisance, but they’ve never seen what fog can do to your day. Hordes of tired, hungry, harassed people accumulating on the dock at Sant’ Elena waiting for the vaporetto with the radar to finally arrive and take them the five minutes across to the Lido. No radar, no vaporetto. Boats used to make this little crossing all the time, now you’d think that they were facing the iceberg zone off Greenland or something.
But when I hear the distant foghorn, it carries more romance to me than 289 gondola rides — or even one, actually — under the Bridge of Sighs. The occasional deeper blast from the Minoan Lines ferry arriving from Greece — warning? threat? — is also exciting, especially if you’re out rowing in the fog and it’s blowing at you. This has happened to me.
Bells. The bells in the campanile of San Marco ring several times a day, but I pay special attention to certain ringing. Such as the single bell that sounds at 3:00 PM every Friday, to recall our thoughts to Good Friday and the crucifixion of Christ. There is the midnight tolling of the marangon, the deepest of all, which you can hear from many parts of the city. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, I’ve even heard it when we were out in the lagoon. Deeply comforting, like the sentinel on the battlements. The bells also ring every July 14 at 10:02 in the morning, to commemorate the epochal collapse of the campanile at that moment in 1902.
But with the dark that sumptuous stillness (eventually) returns, permeated not only with the voices of forgotten doges but also the voices of exasperated mothers and Macedonian plasterers.
Of course it would be terrible to be blind in Venice. But it would be at least as bad to be deaf here.
Silence. There is plenty of noise all day long here, normal third-millennium racket ranging from pneumatic drills to 40-hp motors to deafening boom-boxes in passing boats blasting that car-crash-torture-dungeon music. And on summer nights, when people tend to stay out till dawn, along about 2:00 or 3:00 there is the boisterous chorus of their inane “Good-night-it-was-great-see-you-tomorrow-I’ll-call-you-okay-I’ll-text-you” comments from right outside our bedroom window, which naturally has to be open because of the heat. You’d think somebody in the group was going off to walk across Antarctica, the way some of them carry on.
