VENICE AND THE VENETO - 2004

Venezia
OK, first of all, the Adriatic Coast is not as pretty as the Mediterranean. The terrain is flat, the water is bile colored auquamarine and the high rise apartment buildings and new condominiums springing up the coast from Pescara to Venice make it look more like Miami beach than Italy. But at the end of the ride is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
Either there have been a few improvements in getting into the city from the parking garage, or it’s just been too long since we’ve been here. But parking at the Tronchetto garage was a breeze and barely a 5 minute walk to get to the traghetto (water bus). And to make it even easier, we were less than a 5 minute walk from the traghetto stop at the Accademia, one stop before Piazza San Marco.
We’re staying in “The Charming Hotel DD 724”.  As in all European advertising, Charming refers to the size and not the décor. Although the front door is barely big enough to get through, our room (a junior suite) is about 20 m2 or 220 sq ft. It has 2 windows that look out onto a small canal, which has currently been drained in order to repair the nearby building foundations. The DD stands for Dorsoduro, a wonderful residential area on the other side of the Grand Canal from the Piazza San Marco. Actually, we are a few doors down from Peggy Guggenheim’s old villa, now a Guggenheim museum. In fact, when we rented the room, we were told we could have a room with a view of the Guggenheim Gardens for one night or the larger room with a view of the canal for two nights. We opted for the canal (although they forgot to tell us it was drained). However, we did ask to see the view to the garden, thinking we’d be able to sit in the room and view the wonderful sculpture garden below, but when we opened the curtain obstructing the view, all we saw were a few trees. Antonella, our host, assured us that the trees were really in the Guggenheim Garden.
The Dorsoduro is where Woody Allen and Soon Yi have a villa and as we’d walk along the canals, we’d look at the doorways to see if the word Allen is written below the doorbell. No luck so far. But we did have a few celebrity citings. We saw Oliver Platt twice. And today, as we walked though the Piazza San Marco, we saw the filming of the movie “Casanova”.  As we were leaving the Ducale Palace (highly recommended), we saw Heath Ledger getting his makeup and hair done as he was laughing on his cell phone. Apparently Jeremy Irons and Lena Olin are also in this film, and although they never made an appearance, we did see lots of costumed extras, lots of sets, carriages, horses and more backstage and security personnel that at a rock concert, which was obviously required since the spectator crowd was getting larger than the production. Funny, there was a sign posted by Gondola productions, saying that if you (the spectator) are in the area during the filming, they have the right to use you in the film without compensation. However, in this case, the costuming would be all wrong.

This is a small city. Most of the canals are small, the streets are small, most of the buildings are small, but nonetheless, thousands of tourists come here every year. Any guide book will tell you that part of the charm of Venice is to just get lost in the small streets. It’s what Venice is all about. However, for those who don’t like getting lost, there are convenient signs posted along the way from the Rialto Bridge to Pazza St Marco to the Accademia. And sure enough, these norrow paths loaded with tourist shops are literally packed with people at all hours of the day and night. By the way, the only Piazza in Venice is San Marco. Any other square is referred to as "Campo".

The thousands of small shops selling murano glass, venetian masks, venetian paper are a bit exhausting and after a while it’s hard to differentiate between good murano glass and tourist murano glass. But we did manage to enter a couple of the shops and left the city with 3 glass cherries and 2 small glass snakes.
The narrow streets and large Campi sqaures are perfect for street music and in Venice there is no shortage of really talented street musicians. We stopped in one Campo to listen to a guitarist playing the most beautiful samba music, a few hundred meters further on, we were treated to a glass harmonium concert of 1950’s Italian pop music. I’ve seen the version of this instrument where all the crystal glasses were the same size and the musician would tune them by adding different levels of water into the various glasses. However, in Venice, this artist actually searched around for the perfect size glass that would be in the right pitch when he rubbed his finger around the rim. There was an odd assortment of cut crystal, some new, some old. Then, a few hundred meters into the next large square, we were treated to a classical street concert of violin, bass and eastern European hammer dulcimer.
We’ve been to Venice a number of times and although there are a lot of restaurants, I can never remember a meal I really liked. But at last we found the restaurant called Osteria Santa Marina, in the Campo Santa Marina, located between the Rialto Bridge and the Fenice Opera House. This is a local secret, no tourists. We dined on fresh St Pietro (John Dory) in an orange pumpkin sauce and fresh tuna, lightly seared in a citrus and cardamom sauce.  We also discovered some amazing Primativo wines from the Puglia district in the south of Italy. The primativo grape is supposedly the origin of the zinfindel wines in California. Although we could taste some similarities, the primativo wines were more fragrant and bigger in flavor.

Veneto
It was only a 90 minute drive from the parking garage in Venice to our next destination in the mountain town of Folina. We had booked 4 nights in the Hotel dei Chiostri with great hopes of not only exploring some of the Palladian splendors of the Veneto but also sticking our toes next door in Slovenia.
Actually the Hotel dei choistri is a beautiful new hotel. It’s the extension of the Relais Chateaux Villa Abbazia. The Abbazia, a very beautiful and expensive hotel is on one side of the square, while the Hotel Dei Choistri, a contemporary artsy (and lower priced) hotel is on the other side of the square. They are equally beautiful in their design and both owned by the same family. It was explained to us that the Relais Chateaux hotel is more for Americans who like pay more money and the Dei Choistri is more for Germans who like to pay less money. And so there you have it.
Although the room was very beautiful, it did have a few strange design choices like a pass through window between the bed area and the bathroom. Yes, there was a door closing the bathroom off, but then there was this strange opening either put there for light or ventilation, although who wants ventilation from the bathroom to the bed. The other problem was that the church across the square let us know it was there every 30 minutes. It looked beautiful, but boy was it deadly.
That night we had dinner at a local grill house. We were seated in front of the large hearth. For any of you who have ever seen a medieval fireplace you might have an idea of the size. If not, let’s just say the mantel was around 7’ high and under the mantel was all flame. A steel basket was filled with hard wood. As the flame consumed the wood, the coals would fall through the steel ribs and rested under the horizontal cooking grill, where steaks and chops cooked away. I can’t remember the last time I had a steak cooked over a wood fire.

We started our tour of the Veneto with the Villa Barbaro, a joint project between Andrea Palladio and Paolo Veronese. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Palladio’s work, the US Capitol building in Washington DC is based on a classic Palladio design.
The architecture here is Palladio  at his best, but the fun really begins when you see the Veronese frescoes painted in 1560-62. There are the usual mythological allegories but then Veronese places the family in a tromp l’oeil setting with the young sons tormenting each other, parrots resting on the balcony, dogs barking and the lady of the house looking over the scene in perpetuity.  Other rooms have painted dogs sneaking out from behind painted columns and a young girl leaning through a painted doorway welcoming guests. Even though we had to share the experience with a really rude Russian tour group, we couldn’t stop smiling. What a gem.

After Villa Barabaro, we drove up into the medieval mountain town of Asolo who pretty much gained it’s fame when Queen Catherine of Cypress was exiled here in the 15th century.  Not a bad place to be exiled to. In the 19th century Robert Browning wrote volumes of poetry to this view of a hundred horizons. Now it’s one of the most beautiful hill towns in all of Italy. Of course, there must be a thousand hill towns in Italy in this category.

Bassono de Grappa is the home of that clear, high voltage alcohol that so many Italians are so passionate about. I love the bottles it comes in, but I’ve never been a big fan of the contents, but then, maybe I never had a good version. In World War I, an Alpine Italian captain described his love for grappa with the following sentiment:
Grappa is like a mule; it has no ancestors and no hope of descendants; it zigzags through you like a mule zigzags through the mountains; if you’re tired you can hang onto it, if they shoot, you can use it as a shield; if it’s too sunny, you can sleep under it; you can speak to it and it’ll answer; cry and be consoled. And if you really have decided to die, it will take you off happily.
Around the town and through the famous Palladio bridge, the shop windows were filled with the most interesting glass bottles filled with this rocket fuel. However, they were all closed for lunch. Maybe next time…
The Veneto is pretty dramatic; prosecco grapes clinging to the slopes, so steep, it looked like the grape pickers would need to balance themselves with climbing ropes and caribiners or literally fall off the mountain.

But we were getting road weary and the thought of staying awake with the church tower in Folina for another night didn’t sound too exciting. And so, just about 2 hours north and west , near Lago d'Iseo was one of our favorite hotel/restaurants in the world, L’Albereta and the ristornate Gaultiero Marchesi.

The next few days were totally about pampering our exteriors in the spa and on the golf course and in the next few nights we delighted our interiors with the masterful creations of  Gaultiero Marchesi. Every once in a while you just have to reward yourself, and that’s why there are places like L’Albereta.