Venice

Those who have visited Venice in the summertime will have witnessed the masses who descend into the heart of the labyrinthine islands, clogging their historic stone arteries and beautiful atria in a gormless and sclerotic trance. Meandering along the canals can always lead to some duomo or piazza that merits a standstill and an upward gawp. If you’re at all like me, after sweating through those tight streets with other tourists, one day certainly feels like enough. So it went on my recent visit. After popping my head in for as much of the Biennale that was still on display, a Bellini at Harry’s, lunch at Staffa and an inspiring visit to the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, I decided to get in the car and leave.

It’s a mist-steeped weekday morning in the Dorsoduro district. The kind when the rising lagoon licks at the old stones as if trying to devour the city, footsteps echo mournfully between peeling palazzi and even the marble statues seem to hang their heads. But not too early nor too dismal, it turns out, for wine. In Osteria Al Squero — named after Venice’s oldest boatyard, which it faces across the narrow canal — the lights are on. A huddle of Venetian men stands beneath the wooden beams with their grocery bags and small dogs, enjoying un’ombra. It means “shade” in Italian but also, here in the Veneto, a small glass of vino.

My mother advised that I get a plain wedding ring. Diamonds, she said, interfere with a woman’s ability to knead dough. “But I don’t knead dough,” I protested. “You will when you’re married.” I guffawed. And yet there I was, four days into my marriage, in an Albanian chef’s Venetian home, being told in no uncertain terms that while my husband Nick could keep his ring on, mine would need to come off. We had arrived in Giudecca, an island in the Venetian lagoon, by water bus, having spent the day in Padova. There, we’d visited the Basilica di Sant’Antonio, home to first-class relics of the great saint — bones, lower jaw, incorrupt tongue and cartilage from his larynx.

More than forty cities have taken it upon themselves to claim the nickname “Venice of the North,” but only one can use it without any hint of irony. When leaving Amsterdam Centraal station — either fresh off the Eurostar or via a quick train connection from Schiphol airport — it is hard not to be momentarily dazzled by the spectacle of glassy-surfaced grey canals, all reflecting narrow, higgledy-piggledy gabled houses. I was in Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum Vermeer exhibition, but took the opportunity to see more of the city than a quick day trip would have afforded.

A few years ago, I moved to Newlyn, a fishing village in west Cornwall. I didn’t understand why I moved to Newlyn until I returned to Venice. I take almost all my holidays in Venice, and it is a cliché that Venice only slowly reveals her mysteries. You must fight your way past a mass of Renaissance portraiture and mirrored palaces but the mystery it showed me this time is this: like Newlyn, Venice is a fishing village. Venice got rich in the thirteenth century, monopolized the trade routes to the east for two centuries and covered itself in Istrian stone, which Newlyn didn’t. But it’s still a fishing village, founded by people running away from barbarians, into the mud flats of a lagoon to fish for crabs. It is easy to forget that — unless you look for Venetian cuisine.