Venice in Winter 2

Idle gondolas

In the morning we bought a 7-day vaporetto (water bus) pass to give ourselves more mobility (50 euro but worth it, and cheaper if you buy in advance online) and headed to Giudecca, an island on the south side of the city that has an industrial history but is now a sedate residential area.  We got off at Palanca and started walking down the fondamenta.  We’d never been there and Frieda was curious about it but it turned out to be quite dull, New Jersey to Venice’s New York.  There was little to see or do (which is maybe why Rick Steves doesn’t even mention it in his book on Venice); plus a blustery, frigid wind was sweeping in from the lagoon, so at Zitelle we hopped a boat across to St. Marks, where a massive stage had been set up at the west end (opposite the basilica) for the Carnevale festivities.  After making the circuit and saying hello again to this wonderful quadrangle we caught another boat across to Academia to look for a lunch spot (places around St. Marks tend to be expensive and not so good).  A couple of places lured but didn’t grab us, and then we stumbled upon one called Osteria Enoteca Ai Artisti, not in the guidebooks, with just a handful of tables.  No tourists, only Venetians, but the friendly waiter spoke a little English.  He sat us at a table in back; essentially a little private room with a groined brick ceiling.  I ordered mezzi bombardoni with anglerfish, Frieda got tagliatella with prawns and we asked him to select a wine for us.  He chose an excellent white, so fine, in fact, that I was a little nervous about what it was going to cost, but it turned out to be only 20 euro.  The meal, the wine, the setting, the whole deal was exquisite: the best of the trip.  My dish had caper berries as big as olives in it, along with cherry tomatoes and actual olives.  Each bite had a slightly different flavor.  I was suffused with bliss, delighted to be alive in Venice, and sent the chef my compliments.  Afterward we walked down to the Salute Church and ducked inside to momentarily escape a brutal, icy wind off the lagoon that cut right through us.  But it was still there waiting for us when we emerged so we caught a boat home and stayed in again.  I was beginning to feel like a prisoner shut into the apartment every night by the cold, which was so harsh and hostile that it was seriously interfering with our enjoyment of the city.  Venice, after all, is a walking town, the most superb walking town in the world, and most of the enjoyment of it comes from getting lost in its maze-like streets and coming across beautiful vistas you’ve never seen before, by day or by night.  A lot of that was being spoiled for us by the weather. 



Vaporetto passing beneath the Rialto bridge



Wednesday we went to Ca’ Pesaro, but I wouldn’t recommend it.  The only painting I was interested in, Klimt’s Salome, was nowhere in evidence.  They did have a couple de Chiricos, but not particularly good ones.  We returned to Do Spade for lunch, but this time instead of having cicchetti we sat at a table in the rear and ordered pasta.  When we emerged it was still frigid, but the sun was out and the terrible wind had subsided, so we were able to walk around a little near Campo San Margherita and the Frari Church.  For dinner we went to a pizza place near our apartment, in the old Jewish ghetto.  This was the first Jewish ghetto, named after the copper foundry that was once located here (“geto” in Venetian).  In the 16^th century the Jews were confined here by the canals and gates manned by armed guards and were only allowed out during the day. 

From Ca' Pesaro

The morning dawned sunny so we decided to take a cruise to Murano where we warmed up watching the glass blowers work.  After the display of their skill the owner tried to persuade us to buy a set of 6 different-colored champagne glasses for 180 euro.  We said we’d think about it over lunch but actually considered that it would be next to impossible to get those fragile-looking flutes back to California intact, should we be so rash as to shell out $240 for 6 glasses, which we gave no more than a fleeting thought of doing.  Instead we settled for some colorful shot glasses.  They were both sturdier and a lot cheaper.  Back out in the sunlight it felt so mild I actually unbuttoned the top button of my coat.  It was the best weather we’d had, so far:  maybe 35 degrees.  We took a boat back to Fundamente Nova and walked from there to Campo de Miracoli where we had spritzes, then doubled back to La Perla for pizza.  La Perla makes big claims for its pizza but we found it merely adequate.  But Venice, after all, is not the center of pizza culture, so you can’t expect the quality you get in the south. 

Friday was overcast, windier, and even colder, and Frieda was starting to display cold symptoms so we walked over to Billa to try to get her some Tylenol.  We couldn’t find any, so we asked the checker, who said they didn’t carry it, we would have to go to a pharmacy.  When we asked if she knew of one nearby, she looked puzzled.  A smiling nun who was checking out offered to take us, so we waited for her and then the 3 of us set off.  But it soon became evident, after listening to her ask every passerby where the pharmacy was, that she didn’t know where she was going.  Finally someone said there was one over by the Guglie vaporetto stop, which was our stop, and we realized we would have walked right by it had we just headed for the vaporetto in the first place, instead of going to Billa.  The nun had been trying to do a good deed but, alas, had led us on a wild goose chase.  We left her and headed over to Guglie, picked up the drug, and then took the boat to Arsenale to visit the naval museum, because it seemed a good idea to be inside on such an arctic day.  It turned out there wasn’t much heat inside the museum, but at least we were out of the wind and it was inexpensive and mildly interesting, with models showing a detailed history of shipbuilding, including the galleys built at the height of Venice’s sea power.    

Murano

Afterward we wandered west and north, looking for Brunetti’s Questura (see my post on the Donna Leon novels).  It was intensely cold and our noses were both running so we ducked into a little restaurant to warm up and fortify ourselves.  It turned out to be tasty and warm, if expensive.  Then we soldiered on, found the Questura, stuck our heads inside to eye the cops behind the desk, and then scurried off to a café for some hot chocolate and fritelli.  When we emerged from that café at about 4 in the afternoon, it was absolutely freezing outside.  It was just god-awful, unbelievable cold. You really felt the environment was trying to kill you.  Waiting for the vaporetto I thought my bare face was being torn off by the wind, which was like a hail of razor blades.  My jaw was aching from the cold. 

When we got back to the apartment we vowed to each other that if we take a trip next winter it will be to Hawaii or the Caribbean: someplace warm. 

Venice in Winter 1

My first visit to Venice was in the spring.  Since then Frieda and I have visited 4 times, twice in the spring and twice in the fall, and in all of them the weather was pretty good, except for the first time, in the fall, when it was pouring and we had a taste of acqua alta (but that didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for the city).  So our recent visit was the first in winter, and it just happened to coincide with the worst cold snap in Venice in nearly 30 years, with ice in the canals, snow, and temps well below freezing. 

The concept of the trip was to spend a week in Venice during the lowest season, when it would be as empty of tourists as it ever is, and then get a 3-day taste of Carnevale at the end.  When Frieda first suggested it, I was skeptical, but I checked the average temps and they were only about 20 degrees below what we were used to in California, so I thought it wouldn’t be too bad.  Boy, was I wrong.  Instead we got temps 40 degrees below our norm.  At the airport the regular Alilaguna boat to the city couldn’t get up to the dock because of the ice, so we had to take a bigger boat over to the Colonna stop on Murano and catch another from there into the city.  The cold was numbing.  It seemed we had landed in Iceland instead of Venice.  (Americans, myself included, tend to underestimate just how far north Europe is.  Venice is at the approximate latitude of Portland, Oregon.) 

From our apartment

We’d rented an apartment in Cannaregio, a quiet, middle-class residential area on the northeast side of town, away from the maddening crowds, the same one we’d had on an earlier visit.  We got there around 5:30 Saturday evening, dropped off our luggage, took a quick inventory of the kitchen supplies, and then headed north across 3 bridges, 2 of wood, 1 of metal, over ice-clogged canals to the Billa supermarket.  Unlike the more permanent stone bridges, the wood and metal ones have gaps between the steps through which you can look down at the swirling water below.  In films shot in Venice, falling into a canal usually has a comic note.  Of course, we know the water isn’t the cleanest and if you were to swallow any it could have ill effects.  We also know that if you were to drop anything into a canal—your sunglasses, digital camera, wallet—you can count on it being gone forever.  But in this season the canals took on a more sinister aspect.  If your heart didn’t stop immediately from the shock of hitting that freezing water, you would certainly be quickly dragged down by the weight of the sodden layers of clothing you were swaddled in.  In other words, in this season, falling into a canal meant almost certain death.  And I thought about that whilst crossing those bridges and looking down at the dark, icy water through the gaps between the steps. 

Back at the apartment we closed the shutters and cranked the heater.  Fortunately it had a good one, so we thawed out, made some dinner and polished off a bottle of Sangiovese.  Unpacking, Frieda realized she’d forgotten her skinny jeans, so that set the agenda for the morning: we would have to head over to Campo San Lucas where there was an H&M (sort of like Ross in California) so she could buy another pair. 

Free food & wine

On the way, along the Fondamenta de Cannaregio, we found ourselves in a crowd of people eating off plastic plates and sipping wine from plastic cups.  It turned out the largesse was a preview of Carnevale.  We’d already had breakfast at the apartment, but sampled some of the wine at least, and it and the bonhomie of the crowd cheered us up, despite the frigid temps. 

After scoring a pair of  black jeans for Frieda we crossed the Rialto bridge into the neighborhood of some of our favorite little eateries, among them Do Spade, a place found by accident on a previous visit, where we had a couple glasses of the house white (each) and some cicchetti: sardines, calamari, prawns, croquettes, and octopus.  On the way back to the apartment along the Strada Nuova, a walking thoroughfare created in the 19^th century by filling in a canal, we stopped at a café for espressos and fritelli, pastries like cream puffs made for Carnevale.  Back at the apartment we checked the 10-day forecast on the iPad, but there was no good news for us.  The last time we stayed in Cannaregio we’d had a romantic dinner at a place nearby called Al Bacco where we’d had a table on the edge of the canal and my spaghetti al vongole (with clams) had been delicious.  Obviously, there was no question of dining al fresco this time, but we still wanted to go back there, and it turned out the vongole was still excellent.  But after dinner Frieda needed to use the rest room and discovered she had to go outside to get to it, and it was unheated, which was a thrill; nothing like getting bare-assed in sub-20 degree weather to make you appreciate central heating.  We began to get the impression the Venetians themselves weren’t prepared for this cold. 

From Ca' d'Oro

The next day, having learned our lesson, we bundled up.  I put on underwear, long thermal underwear, sweat pants, and jeans on the bottom.  On the top, a tee shirt, a long-sleeved thermal undershirt, a long-sleeved tee-shirt, a crew-neck wool sweater, a turtle-neck zip-up wool sweater, and my heaviest winter coat.  On my feet, two pairs of socks, one cotton, one wool, and boots.  Plus my Russian hat with ear flaps.  Then we set off for Ca d’Oro, a beautiful Venetian-Gothic palace on the Grand Canal that is now an art museum.  It was a short walk down the Strada Nuova, which provides relatively easy access from northern Canneregio to the Rialto area.  We had little interest in the art on display, but the view of the Grand Canal from the terrace is superb.  Then we went on to Rialto and crossed to our usual stomping grounds in San Polo.  We first went to Do Mori.  I love the house white there, but Frieda thought the cicchetti looked stale and picked over, so we moved on down the street to another place we’d visited before called Osteria alla Ciurma where, on our last visit, we’d had excellent bacala mantecato (a paste made of cod and garlic, served on bread) and it didn’t disappoint this time.  To wash it down we had a couple of spritzes, a popular Venetian drink made of prosecco and either Campari or Aperol.  We prefer Aperol, it’s not as bitter as Campari.  Then we trotted back to Do Spade for sardines and scampi.  We’d intended to visit Ca’ Pessaro, a little modern art museum (we’d been to the excellent Peggy Guggenheim museum on an earlier visit), and Palazzo Mocenigo, the costume museum, but it turned out they were both closed on Mondays, so we wandered northwest through areas new to us in Santa Croce, crossed the bridge to the train station and then strolled down Rio de Spagna, picking up pastries and pasta sauce along the way.  A wine seller on the Fondamenta de Cannaregio, who filled a plastic bottle with red for us, said he hadn’t seen so much ice in the canals since 1985.  We stayed in for the evening, not up for braving the cold after dark which even our many layers could not fend off.