Alas

We are waiting in the airport to board our flight back to JFK. We have been waiting for four hours. We have another hour to wait. Yes, the flight home, like the flight to Cairo, was delayed 2.5 hours. Delta doesn't even have the excuse of being Egyptair. Oh, and I am waiting without my coat and gloves, which disappeared sometime during our many hour wait. Luckily, I layered. I won't freeze till we are back in New York.

But in the meantime, we had two last busy days in the loveliness of Venice. We decided to go to the Lido because Death in Venice etc., so we took a long boat ride out there. Of course it was pretty deserted—it was freezing —but the beach was wide and beautiful and there were very 19th-century-looking bathing machines in front of some of the shut up clubs. We strolled on the sand and did not fall in the water, though one very buff  but elderly dude in a speedo was taking a dip.

After cichetti and spritzes and an encounter with what Ben calls an “adventure bathroom” the likes of which I haven’t seen since Morocco, we headed back, getting off in Santa Croce to visit the cozy palace of the playwright Goldoni. There were mannequins arranged in scenes from his plays, and the centerpiece was an elaborate marionette theater. Fabulous.

That night we dined at a fancy restaurant whose dishes were all taken from Venetian history. We had 16th century sturgeon marinated in mulled wine and pasta dishes from the 14th and 18th centuries, mine with fermented ricotta that was almost too much for Phil, if you can imagine such a thing. Managed to be both tasty and interesting.

I spent much of our last day packing, while Phil, entrusted with my phone’s gps, ventured to Santa Croce to Ca’Pesaro, a modern art museum where he viewed the original plaster cast of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, Klimt’s Judith, and Chagall’s Portrait of a Rabbi, all first exhibited at Bienniales over the last 125 years. He did have to be led there by a charming grad student who took pity on his lostness and guided him in return for carrying her groceries, but he was glad he went.

Once the packing was under control, we went to the nearby Museo dei Musica in the San Maurizio church. It had an elegant exhibit of musical instruments from the 16th and 17th centuries, including an ancient hurdy-gurdy and a bass made by the man who taught Stradivarius to make violins. We learned all about Vivaldi, who performed nearby, was a priest, and died penniless and unappreciated in Vienna.

We stopped at “our” cocktail bar, where Phil had ordered his favorite college drink, a Harvey Wallbanger, when we first arrived. Though it had always been on the menu, the bartender admitted it was probably the first time anyone had ever requested it.

Dinner was at the restaurant we visited on our first night in town, just as good but considerably less crowded. We woke to learn of our flight delay, took the garbage to the garbage boat for the last time, and now I write this sans coat and gloves from the air above the Atlantic, where Delta has been plying us with endless prosecco to make up for the delay.

Alas, nothing could make up for leaving Venice.

Revving Up/Winding Down

Some people, on their last few days in Venice, might just relax and hang out. Phil, on his last few days in Venice, decided to see everything in the city that we hadn't already seen. I went along for the ride.

We visited St. Pantalon, a small, ornately decorated 16th century church dedicated to the early Christian martyr and physician who after his conversion decided to heal in Christ's name rather than with science (such as it was). He was accused of magic, and authorities tried to torture him, but the whips broke, the hot oil cooled, the wheel cracked, and when they tied a stone to him and threw him in the sea he floated. They tried to behead him, and the ax broke. At last, tired of the whole thing, he told them to go ahead and take his head off, and they did so. Milk flowed from the cut. Somehow this story made me think of RFK Jr., and not in a good way.

The ceiling of the church boasts the largest oil painting in the world, by Giovanni Antonio Fumiani, detailing the saint's martyrdom and apotheosis. It covers 4,768 square feet. It's really very big. The artist fell to his death putting on the final touches. This also made me think of RFK Jr.

After a short rest I went out to see San Marco, having missed the earlier visit due to excessive bacteria. It was not exactly uncrowded, but also not jam-packed, and for the first time I was able to take my time looking around and see how truly exquisite the interior of the basilica is.

Phil bought the first sweater he has purchased in decades, at my (extreme) urging. It's very nice, though made of Italian wool so it will itch and I'll shrink it in the wash. Then we had a fabulous dinner of risotto for two with cremini mushrooms and smoked pork cheeks that almost made up for the six miles we'd walked.

Wednesday we set out for a museum in Castello and happened upon the Byzantine Icon Museum, with two large rooms filled with dozens of Venetian Orthodox religious paintings on gold backgrounds from the 14th through the 18th century. Completely unexpected and quite wonderful. 

Next door was the beautiful Orthodox church of St. Gregorio, filled with still more icons, which we admired before heading to the Scuola Dalmata.

The Scuola, funded by wealthy 16th century Dalmations, was dedicated to St. George and St. Trifone, and featured many large Carpaccio paintings of George and his dragon and Trifone and his basilisk. 

Then it was on to the Palazzo Mocenigo, a 17th century palace/costume museum/perfume museum. The rooms were filled with baroque furniture and some costumes from the time, along with perfume-making instruments.

The museum also featured a most peculiar exhibit of the history of Japanese kimonos. We found this interesting but confusing.

Palazzo Mocenigo is in the sestiere of San Croce, where we stayed three years ago. We wended our way to that lovely apartment building and the square outside (we didn't stay there this time because it was in a very old, high-ceiling palace that would have been quite chilly in January). We took a traghetto back -- a gondola that goes across the Grand Canal for a mere 2 euros -- and ate pizza, which though Venetian pizza isn't the best (they can't use wood-burning ovens so no crispy crusts) almost made up for the six miles we'd walked. Again.

No Sardines in Sardinia

Sardinia's Extreme Coastal Event turned into a Wind Event, which was as loud as a hurricane in our 8th floor room but not actually problematic. In the morning we walked into Alghero to the St. Francis church and monastery, Romanesque with a lovely cloister and campanile. We also admired the mosaic dome of the Church of San Michel, though it was closed. 

Then we headed out in our Audi for the town of Bosa, 30 miles to the south, where there was a ruined castle and brightly colored houses -- colored, so they say, so the fishermen coming home could tell where their homes were. I found that odd. Why wouldn't they know which one was their house, even if it wasn't painted lemon yellow or orange orange?  The drive was glorious -- miles of windy roads with cliffs dropping off to a very nearly wine-dark sea. Our GPS was so precise, so accurate, so polite that we named it Sue, after the most precise, accurate, polite person we know. (It always said "please" when it asked us to make a turn! We really just wanted to make her happy and felt terribly guilty when we made one of our frequent errors and forced her to recalculate.) 

We drove up to the castle, which was closed (ah, the dangers of sightseeing in the off-season), so we walked all over the town, had lunch, and visited the Church of the Virgin Mary of Mt. Carmel, a Piedmontese Baroque structure. We chanced on a funeral, where the entire town stood solemnly at attention as the priest blessed the casket.

We strolled along the river, admiring the tanneries that lined it (how it must have stunk back in the day!). Then we drove back and had cocktails in our rooftop bar, trying the local specialty mirto, which comes in red (from myrtle berries) and white (from myrtle leaves). 

Then we went into the Old Town for Sardinian paella, which is made not with rice but with a form of pasta called fregola, along with shellfish and rabbit. (The island, after the conquest by the Genoese in the 11th century and the later conquest by the Spanish in the 16th century, was forcibly populated with thousands of Catalans. The food there is a mix of Spanish and Italian -- thus the paella.)

Sunday we drove north to the island's most beautiful site, the Capo Caccia cliffs and sea caves. The  caves, which usually can be viewed either by boat or by descending 500 steps, were closed due to the ECE. I was not entirely sorry to forego either the boating or the steps. 

We walked around on the cliffs admiring the views, and went to the  landing where usually the boats come in. I tried to test the waters to see how cold they were, and a rogue wave swept me off my feet, and then swept Phil off his. We regained our footing if not our dignity and were damp for the rest of the day. (The water was quite cold, btw.)

Then we drove another 50 miles to Castelsardo, another town boasting a ruined castle. We parked in town and walked up to the ruin only to find that its ramparts were closed due to the ECE. We looked around it and then visited two churches, one the small Romanesque church of Santa Maria Grazia and the other the Cathedral of San Antonio Abate, with spectacular views of the ocean.

After that we descended to the car -- only it wasn't there. I had pinned it on Googlemaps, which had worked once before, but the internet was iffy in Castelsardo and it erased my pin. Or that was my excuse, anyway.

An hour later, we were still looking. Desperation was growing; the light was fading; our feet were soggy.

At last I remembered that maybe we had parked near a trattoria, so I looked up trattorias on my phone and we investigated them all. At the last one, there the Audi was, looking warm and inviting and as if it had never been lost at all. Nobody wept or yelled or blamed anyone else. We considered it a win.

"If one travels, one eats," says D.H. Lawrence in Sea in Sardinia, which Phil has of course been reading. So when we got back to 

Alghero, after a change of shoes and socks and a well-earned cocktail, we ate smoked swordfish carpaccio and two enormous plates of pasta. After dinner we discovered Cardinal Mendoza brandy, which we sipped on our balcony, since the wind had finally abated.

Our last morning in Sardinia, we wandered again through the Old Town, visiting the Alghero anthropology museum that held objects from dinosaur times to prehistoric peoples to Roman mortuaries to medieval remnants. We were quite prepared for our one-hour stopover in Rome to be an absolute disaster, but everything was on time and we arrived back in Venice at the dinner hour, so we ate at a new place down the street. A short, adventure-filled trip! 

As for the name of the island: there are claims that Sardinia comes from Sherden, meaning Sea People, or from the mythological god Sardus. Plato thought it was named after Sardo, a woman from Turkey who founded cities there. But I prefer the source that claims it was originally named for sardines, though thousands of years of overfishing has left the waters pretty much sardine-free. 

Art/Anemones

Wednesday we visited Ca'Rezzonico, the early 18th century palace-home of a family that produced both doges and popes. Its enormous rooms were filled with period furniture and a great deal of art. It faces on the Grand Canal, of course, and has a water entrance for the distinguished guests who would have arrived by gondola for the balls and parties hosted by the family.

One of our favorite things there was the art album created by a wealthy nobleman, Count Leopoldo Cicignara, for his wife. It included pencil and ink drawings by the leading artists of the time. We each chose our favorite separately and were horrified/thrilled to discover we had picked the same work, of an isolated house under a lowering sky. (Guess who had which reaction?) We also loved an unusual painting of a polenta maker, one of a number of small canvases of 18th century everyday life by Pietro Longhi, and Phil was quite intrigued by several paintings of men being abused or beheaded by women.

I did chores on Thursday, to ready us for our brief trip to Sardinia, a semi-independent semi-autonomous island somewhere in the Mediterranean. Phil went to the Guggenheim, an exquisite collection of 20th century modernist art in Peggy Guggenheim's villa on the Grand Canal. He saw works from Picasso and Braque to Dali and Magritte. The most fascinating for him was an enormous canvas by Max Ernst celebrating his marriage to Peggy Guggenheim, who is presented half naked in an owl costume while the artist/groom is rendered as an onlooking stork.

We rose early to catch the boat to the airport. Our flight stopped in Rome, where we had an hour layover to make the flight to Alghero. I never buy tickets with such a short layover, and I try never to get flights that aren't nonstop, but there was no choice here. The boat was on time, the first flight was on time, the second flight was on time. (The return trip is anybody's guess. We are not thinking about it.)

Our rental car was an Audi, for heavens sake. Not what I requested but the same price, I'm not going to argue. It was quite an upgrade. And our hotel is absolutely gorgeous -- a room on a high floor with a view of the
harbor and walled Old Town. There was a bit of an Extreme Coastal Event going on -- rain and a wind so wild that I think all the flights the next day were cancelled -- but we had a cocktail in the top floor bar with a view of waves crashing in under a constantly changing sky, and when the rain stopped we walked into the Old Town and wandered around on the sea wall. It was charming and deserted. I guess tourists don't go to Sardinia in January? I can't imagine why not.

We found a wonderful restaurant nearby, where we indulged in local specialties, including fried anemones (I KNOW but they were very tasty) and oysters and wild boar and smoked ricotta with pane zichi, which turned out to be bread that masquerades as pasta. And for dessert, seadas, a kind of giant ravioli stuffed with sweet cheese, fried, and drizzled with honey. Omg. Sardinia is turning out to be quite wonderful.

Alone Again (Naturally)

As soon as Klauser and Sue departed, it occurred to me that our one-week vaporetto pass would expire later in the day. We must take advantage of it! I exclaimed. We must go to the glass island, Murano! 

And so we did. The passes expired at 4:12 precisely, and it was not even noon. We hopped on a boat that promised to take us to a boat that would take us to Murano, and so it did. The island's small streets are lined with glass shops; there is a glass museum, there are exhibitions of glass blowing. We were looking for a very particular kind of water glass that Phil had seen in Venice, so we visited many shops, but it was nowhere to be found.

We stopped for cicchetti, now our preferred lunch. Cicchetti are Venetian snacks sold at most bars and small restaurants. They can include almost anything on a slice of bread or deep fried but are most often fresh sardines and pickled onions; prosciutto and cheese; salt cod puree; tuna puree; any of a million cured meats; meatballs of all sorts. One of them even tastes exactly like a ball of deep-fried prit, for those who know what that is. A few cicchetti and a glass of Aperol and prosecco or hot mulled wine makes a perfect shared meal, the Venetians claim. And so it did.

We visited the museum and learned about glass through the ages. I'd just finished a novel by Tracy Chevalier, The Glassmaker, about a glass beadmaker on Murano. It wasn't great, I wouldn't really recommend it unless you're going to Venice, but it was fascinating to see the places, objects, and processes that the novel describes brought to life. 

The basilica on Murano is really unusual, mosaicked from end to end with a very Byzantine influence. The mosaics tell a story, partly allegorical, mostly about Jesus and good and evil. 

We caught the boat back eleven minutes before our passes expired and considered it a day well and frugally spent (well, except for all the purchases we made on Murano. But we didn't waste our vaporetto pass!). 

We dined at a new place, an all-meat restaurant because boy we had eaten a lot of fish in the past 2 weeks. It was tiny and packed, in San Polo, and the meal was delicious. I had duck pasta; Phil had lamb chops. Not a fish in sight!

Tuesday it turned cloudy and there was a stiff breeze. It was COLD. Really, really cold. I doubled up on the down clothing, added long underwear, bought a ridiculous hat at Phil's insistence, was still freezing.  We decided that our best bet would be to go to the Academia Museum, the premiere museum in Venice, which somehow we'd never visited (or if we had, we'd completely forgotten it). At the very least, it would be warm inside.

Because I am very bossy and insistent, we spent most of our time in the early Renaissance section. I'm not a huge fan of late Renaissance and later Venetian art. It's so big. There's too much flesh. A lot of it is on ceilings and I hate looking up at ceilings. Plus we'd already seen a near-constant stream of Tintorettos and Tiepolos, with more to come. We admired and compared Annunciations and Madonna-and-Childs, of which there were many. 

We had cicchetti and then stopped off at the Basilica Santa Maria della Salute, way out at the end of the Dorsoduro peninsula. It was even colder there! The church, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was built after the plague of the 1630s in Venice, which killed 80,000 in the city alone. Every year there's a celebration where the Venetians cross the Grand Canal on a bridge made of boats to commemorate the ending of the disaster. The church's centerpiece is a Black Madonna, a Byzantine icon from the 12th or 13th century. 

We had been told that everyone would go home after Epiphany, and so they had. The Piazza San Marco is now almost empty. It's wonderfully quiet, almost spooky to walk across with our boots echoing on the stones. Dinner, at Taverna Scalinetto, not far from the piazza, was perhaps our best meal of the trip so far.

We feasted on roasted pork shank with sauteed raddichio and raviolis stuffed with raddichio cream in a crispy sausage sauce. Way too full for dessert!