Visiting Venice (Italy)
with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
We
made reservations to take an overnight train to Venice from Naples. We ate an early dinner at the Trattoria da
Giorgio.
We
ate pasta made from the hard flour called durum with marinaria tomato sauce,
which is just tomato purée with sautéed garlic, olive oil, and oregano.
We
cooled off in the air-conditioned dining room and enjoyed watching the noisy
television. The newscasters in Italy
looked cool in their black leather jackets.
Italian women newscasters in their leather jackets wear their hair long
unlike French women newscasters, who wear it short.
I
was tired and slept all the way from Naples to Venice. We left our bags at the train station and set
out in a ferry down the Grand Canal in Venice.
The
palaces were beautiful one after the other, but I thought the logistics of
living in Venice would be difficult with plumbing letting out into the canal,
delivering mail by boat, and grand pianos being delivered by boat.
Water
sloshed into the first floors of these palaces along the Grand Canal. The palaces enchanted me, but I thought of
the logistics involved in carrying out everyday life on water as we passed
boats carrying garbage.
We
did not have a map pointing out all the castles, but you really do not need to
know the names to enjoy them – Peggy Guggenheim’s Palace has big lettering on
it. However, I liked the romance of not
knowing what I was seeing, so I could come back to Venice again.
Finally,
we stepped off the Palazzo San Marco. I had
already seen the most portable treasures of the Cathedral at an exhibit at the
Chicago Institute of the Arts, but we still visited the church.
The
musicians at the Café Florian were just beginning to play as we entered the
Cathedral San Marco. I am a Greek
sympathizer and have to admit that I disliked seeing all the items that had
been looted from the Orthodox Greeks at Constantinople during the Fourth
Crusade.
I
knew the Fourth Crusade still enrages Greeks, because they know most of the
items in San Marco’s Treasury originally belonged to the Orthodox Church.
Next,
we went to the Doge’s Palace. My walks
in Chicago made me able to skip up Sansovino’s Stairway of the Giants without a
problem.
Every
room seemed to be decorated with the golden colors of Veronese, Tintoretto, or
Tiepolo. Gold colors glisten in Venice
due to the reflection from water. Teacups
with gold decoration look beautiful here for this reason.
We
ate salty Venetian fish dishes at a restaurant.
Salt leaves your body with perspiration and can leave you feeling dizzy
and weak in very hot climates. I liked
this food even though I did not eat it at home.
We
walked around the Venetian Piazzas, which are like villages with markets. We crossed bridges and walked. I rested in a park by a graveyard while
Laurent walked around.
Birds
chirped in my lovely yet somewhat eerie resting spot before we took the train.
Edgar
Allen Poe would have written creepy stories about the people buried in this
graveyard. The truly rich had Palladian
Villas on land and graveyards located on land as well.
The
Welsh writer James (now Jan) Morris wrote a book called Venice about living on
Venice for a year when his/her children were small that I liked as well. Scrambling for food, what I call food war
games, were a daily occurrence.
He/She
stayed thin running around to each different village market buying food. These markets were held on different days and
you had to be friends with the vendors to even buy good food.
When
my daughter Florence was born, the first I did was to learn to cook to insulate
my family from “market food supply” shortages and price hikes after reading
Venice by James/Jan Morris.
By
cooking I mean, cooking from dry goods in case of street rioting in a secured
building. We lived in Paris when I read
that book, which does have a history of street rioting as did Detroit where I
grew up.
By
Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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