Natale had heard about me from Tom, James Beard, and others, and was curious about my school in Bologna. I invited him to stay at our hotel for a weekend and see for himself. He came down with Connie, his American wife, and his two younger children, Pietro and Elisa, who are twins. Pietro, who has become a tall, handsome young man, is now an assistant manager at the Hilton hotel at the opposite end of Giudecca Island from the Cipriani. The twins were still quite little then, and I remember them squealing with excitement in our car when Victor was taking the Rusconis around Bologna. Victor was a vivacious driver in the Italian mold, while I suspected that their father’s driving was as circumspect as his suits.
I gave Natale a tour of my newly inaugurated kitchen. He was astonished to learn that the city of Bologna had paid for its construction. I outlined our program, described the field trips, told him about Victor’s popular wine and cheese lectures, and gave him a rundown of the curriculum that I covered during a single course. What he saw and heard appeared to excite him greatly. Later, during a subsequent stay at the Cipriani, I discovered that food was his passion. As our acquaintance deepened into friendship, I found that it was also one of his talents. Some of the best meals I had in the years that we lived in Venice were the ones that Natale cooked for us at his house on the Zattere. I was amazed when he converted my husband to the pleasures of tripe, the only thing aside from chicken that Victor had always refused to eat. “Wouldn’t you like to bring your cooking to the Cipriani?” Natale asked me before he left Bologna. It meant squeezing classes in Venice into the intervals that we had between our Bologna courses, sweetly indolent intervals that I would become desperate for when each course ended and the students went home. To dip our toes into Venetian life, however, was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. Nor did it stop at the toes. It wasn’t long before we were fully submerged.
It was 1978 and we had begun to spend most of the year in Italy, returning to the States only late in the fall. Peering into the future, it seemed likely that we would live in Italy full-time. Dividing our life between the hotel suite above the kitchen and the small apartment we had in Cesenatico was not going to work for much longer. We had begun to look around for a permanent place in Bologna, but nothing we saw had clicked with us yet. On a spring day of the following year, Victor and I were sitting across from each other in a compartment of the train that was taking us to Venice, where I would teach the first of the two spring courses that I had agreed to give at the Cipriani. When Victor is dreaming up something that I have not been prepared for, he falls into an intensively meditative silence and you believe that you are seeing streams of thought sweep across his face.
“What are you thinking about, Victor?”
“Ummm . . .”
“I know that you are cooking something up. What is it?”
“Why do we have to live in Bologna?”
“It’s obvious, that’s where our school is.”
“But that’s only for three months of the year, four maximum.”
“If not Bologna, where then?” I asked, but I had already guessed.
“In Venice! Is there any other place like it?”
While we were at the Cipriani, we inquired about apartments for sale. Most of the buildings in Venice are between four hundred and six hundred years old, and in the 1970s, only a small number of the apartments in them had been modernized. It was unthinkable to take a chance on an apartment that needed radical restoration and renovation. There was no way one could predict if and when work permits would be issued or, once they were obtained, foresee the full costs of reconstructing a centuries-old structure. We would consider a place only if it had already been brought up to date with modern utilities, bathrooms, and a kitchen. Of those, only a few of their owners were willing to sell. We had a course coming up in Bologna, so we put off our research to a few weeks later, when I was to teach at the Cipriani again.
On our return, everything we were shown was discouragingly unattractive, except for one magnificent apartment that, sadly, was not a good fit for us. It was a piano nobile, a typical sixteenth-century Venetian layout that took you from a second-floor landing into a monumental high-beamed reception room that ran uninterrupted for nearly the whole depth of the building, from a tall loggia overlooking the canal in front almost to the back of the palazzo. Concealed at the back and side were the rooms for everyday life, the bedrooms, library, kitchen, and bathrooms. We saw no practical way for us to employ the huge ballroom-like space that commandeered half the area of the apartment. It would have been suitable for an embassy’s formal receptions, and in fact, the owner who was showing us around was a retired ambassador. He was Sir Ashley Clarke, once the British ambassador to Italy and subsequently head of one of the international committees that had been formed after the catastrophic floods of 1966 to raise funds to repair the damage to the churches and artworks of Venice.
Sir Ashley was very kind. He was tall and portly but slightly hunched over, which made him seem even more courtly. He sympathized with our reluctance to consider his apartment, and he suggested we try to see the less formal apartment of a Mrs. Kaley, who lived with her daughter Diana on the top floor of a palazzo near the hospital. It had been perfectly restored, he said, with excellent facilities and two splendid terraces. “How can we arrange to see it?” we asked. “Unfortunately, she is away, somewhere in Finland,” he said, “and it is hard to say when she might be back.” He took our telephone number, however, and promised to have Mrs. Kaley call us on her return to Venice. “Do you know this Mrs. Kaley?” we asked Natale. “Flora? Certainly. Everyone in Venice knows her and her wonderful apartment near the hospital. It has marvelous views over the rooftops. And it is fully restored. You wouldn’t have much to change there, except for the kitchen.”
We heard nothing for the next several months. Our teaching year was coming to an end, and we would soon be returning to the States. Reluctantly, we concluded that the Venetian apartment we had dreamt of finding would remain just a dream, and we fell back on our original idea. We went house-hunting in Bologna again. The week before leaving for New York, we were shown a fine, large apartment near the old market, in the center of the city. It was late in the day when we saw it, so we told the agent we’d think it over and let her know in the morning. We called at eight in the morning, but the apartment had already been taken by someone else. I suspected that our show of interest had been used to leverage a decision by the other party. “Mettiamoci il cuore in pace” (“Let us put it out of our minds”), I said to Victor. “We’ll find something when we come back in the spring.”
On the day before we were to leave for Milan to take the plane to New York, Mrs. Kaley telephoned. It was close to lunchtime. Victor took the call.
“This is Flora Kaley,” the woman said. “I am about to list my apartment for sale in the Gazzettino [Venice’s local paper], but Sir Ashley insisted that I call you first.”
“I wish you had called sooner,” Victor said. “We are packing to go to New York tomorrow.”
“Come up today then.”
Victor turned to me, and we made a quick decision. “All right, we’ll be there this afternoon,” he said into the telephone.
We called Natale, who agreed to meet us at the station with a launch from the hotel and take us directly to Mrs. Kaley’s place. “We shall have to move fast,” he said, “because it will get dark soon and you won’t be able to see much.” It was the beginning of November, and Venice is dimly lit after dark.
At four P.M., we rang the Kaley bell in Calle della Testa. When Natale spoke his name into the intercom, the latch of the portone—the tall, heavy wooden entrance door—was released, the portone swung aside, and we stepped onto a nearly intact sixteenth-century courtyard framed by the four wings of a palazzo, but open above to the sky. It was so beautiful my breath stopped. There was a wellhead in the center of the courtyard and two large oleander trees. The floor, an uneven survivor of episodes of flooding and subsidence beyond our ken, was soft underfoot
from the moss on the old bricks that paved it. The tallest of the buildings, at the rear, rested on a columned portico. Beyond the columns, below a wrought-iron gate, a canal rippled with the dying light of the fall afternoon. Natale led us through an arch in the far right corner of the portico and up a marble stairway. After the first two flights, my euphoria began to ebb. By the time we reached the top, I had counted eighty-two steps, and the beauty of the courtyard was no longer my most prominent impression. “How can I live here?” I thought. “I can’t possibly climb eighty-two steps every time I come home.”
At the top of the stairs there was another bell, another wooden door. Flora Kaley opened it. “Fiamma” would have been a better-fitting name for her. Her red hair, her burning eyes, the energy with which she spoke, and the contained sensuality with which she moved made you think of flames, not flowers. Mrs. Kaley showed us into her salone, the apartment’s main room. It was long and very high-ceilinged for an attic. Its far end was framed and crossed by polished wooden beams. There the floor went up one step to form a dais that led to double dormer windows on the sunset side of the house. On another side of the salone, there were two double French doors that opened onto a large terrace. The height of the building allowed us to look down on the neighboring roofs and beyond them to the spire of the campanile in St. Mark’s square and various church cupolas and other bell towers. The terrace was large enough to accommodate several potted trees with space to spare for a dining table.
The views from the terrace on the other side of the apartment were equally dazzling. There was the hospital square, the Gothic basilica of Saints John and Paul, the Renaissance façade of the hospital, and the bronze statue of Bartlomeo Colleoni, the Venetian republic’s greatest general, astride a rearing horse, by Verrocchio, the
At the railing of my bedroom terrace in Venice; behind me is the church where we were married
Renaissance sculptor. The apartment, which occupied the entire top floor of the large palazzo, had twenty-eight windows, and when one walked past them, each brought up a different framed view of Venice. It was like being inside a magic lantern.
I forgot about the stairs. I was drinking in the beauty of the apartment, of its terraces, of its views. Victor was in a trance. We couldn’t bear to leave for New York without knowing that when we came back, the place would be ours. We accepted the asking price, Victor gave Mrs. Kaley a check for earnest money, and we agreed to a closing immediately upon our return in the spring. Going back down, I was not aware of the stairs.
The Cipriani became yet another setting for my cooking school, after the New York apartments, the Fiera, and the new kitchen in Bologna. Many of my students were seeing Venice for the first time, and few of those who had been in the city before had been to the Cipriani. I thought how overwhelming it must have been for them to land in a city that for centuries had astonished its visitors, to board a launch in order to reach, across the dreamlike lagoon, the secluded hotel, itself an enchantment set in gardens thick with flowers, flanked by a vineyard the nuns next door had planted four hundred years earlier. I wondered too how it must have felt, that first, soundless night, when they turned in, reflecting on the wonders they had seen, to lie between freshly starched, crisp linen sheets, experiencing at the end of their first day in Venice one of the rarest of domestic luxuries. Could my classes measure up?
My first class meeting was not in the kitchen, but in the open-air market that has existed for close to one thousand years at the foot of the Rialto Bridge. The produce stalls there are set up on an embankment along a curve of the Grand Canal where the boatmen dock to unload their cargo. Much of the produce that is brought to Rialto—chard, green beans, spinach, purple cardoons, zucchini with their blossoms still attached, asparagus, tiny artichokes, fist-size cauliflowers, blushing pink beets only slightly larger than radishes, miniature salad greens—is harvested by growers in the outlying islands of the lagoon, sometimes even on the same morning that they bring it to
A mess of spider crab at the Venice fish market
the market. It is farm-fresh in the literal sense of that abused term, and its flavors benefit from one of Venice’s unique environments, the salt-bearing breezes of the lagoon.
The students were always fascinated by the variety of artichokes, from the bite-size, rosebud-like, and frightfully expensive castraure to the oversize ones that the sellers stripped of everything but their bottoms. When they observed the stall keeper swiftly decapitate a huge artichoke, entirely removing its leafy head, cut off its stem, and discard everything but the remaining thin disk of its bottom into a basin containing water and a few lemon halves, invariably someone would ask, “Why is he throwing so much of that artichoke away?” “He’s not throwing away anything that you could use,” I had to explain. “Those artichokes are overgrown and the leaves are too tough to eat. What he keeps to sell are the delicious, creamy bottoms. They are called i fondi, a specialty of Venetian cooking.”
Rialto’s greatest glory, and one of the liveliest spectacles that Venice can offer, is the pescheria, the fish market. Venetians are sharp-eyed and dedicated consumers of seafood, and even though there were only a few more than sixty thousand residents left at last count, they support a fish market that in quality and variety has few rivals among metropolitan areas of any size. Of the scores of varieties of seafood that the market offers, the most sought-after—and consequently the most expensive—are the local ones, native to the northern Adriatic or, even closer, to the lagoon. I asked the students to notice the word nostrani that appeared from time to time along with the price. It means “local,” hence more desirable both because it is fresher and because its flavor is familiar. “Look at that salmon,” I said. “It is flown here all the way from Norway and costs one-third the price of these small, locally caught soles.” Salmon in Venice is for the economy-minded. I have never known a self-respecting restaurant in Venice to serve it.
I identified some of the fish for them, pairing the English name with the corresponding Italian or Venetian: turbot, rombo; sole, sogliola ; bream, orata; sea bass, branzino; monkfish, coda di rospo; gray
Squid-cleaning time in Venice, on the kitchen terrace
mullet, otregan; and indigenous crustceans such as canoce, a flat, silvery, sweet-fleshed creature whose folded pincers vaguely resemble those of a praying mantis; schie, a minute shrimp with brown, nut-flavored flesh; assorted clams, whelks, and periwinkles, caparozzoli, garusoli, lumachine; the silver dollar- size moleche, soft-shell crabs, which Venetians were the first to cultivate; seppie, cuttlefish, whose ink, rather than that of squid, as many believe, is what we use in Venice to make black risotto and pasta.
It was curious to observe how some of the students had difficulty connecting the fillets or fish steaks they were accustomed to eating to the anatomically complete creatures they saw in the market. How surprised they were to find that sardines and anchovies had heads, eyes, fins, and tails. And how startled they were when the soft-shell crabs, which were always sold live, would sometimes crawl out of their baskets, or the live shrimp would jump out of their bins. They were taken aback at the sight of a carcass of beef hanging in one of the market’s butcher shops. I thought it useful for them to understand that the steaks, chops, roasts, veal scallops, or shanks that they bought, cooked, and ate were muscles coming from specific portions of an animal’s body. “Muscles?” they would cry. “Of course, muscles. You are not eating bones and skin. You are eating muscles.” Organs I chose not to discuss, never having forgotten the crisis I had provoked at the start of my teaching career when I brought out a bowl of kidneys for my class to prepare.
My kitchen at the Cipriani hotel was set up on a large, glass-walled terrace that faced a broad expanse of the lagoon toward the Lido. The building code did not countenance enclosing the terrace under a permanent roof. We had a temporary one that had to be dismantled at the end of every season. It was shaped like a tent, the interior made of heavy silk draperies protected on the outside by heavy, waterproo
f canvas. It was festive and luxurious—no other kitchen has ever looked like that—but during a downpour, the canvas cladding became a soundboard for the rain, which drummed out my voice. After I stopped teaching, the Cipriani obtained permission to build a solid roof, and my former kitchen space has been transformed into the hotel’s fanciest apartment.
Rain did not provide the only surprise during the lessons. I was once demonstrating how to fry broad zucchini slices in flour-and-water batter. They can hold their own against the crispest tempura. I was slipping the zucchini into the hot oil of the skillet when suddenly the gas went out. I tried another burner, but it was just as dead. I called the concierge, who sent up one of his assistants, a nice young man, but he was as baffled as I. He left and returned with a maintenance man, who had the solution to the mystery. “It’s simple. You are working with bottled gas,” he said, “and your bottle is empty.” He extracted a fresh bottle from a concealed storage compartment, hooked it up, and I was cooking again, with gas!
Aside from the tour of the Rialto market the first day, we scheduled just one expedition outside of Venice. Midway through the course, Victor took the class to Lake Garda to acquaint them with one of Italy’s singular environments. Garda is a vast lake whose surface, like that of a giant mirror, bounces intense light over the vine-growing and olive-grove-studded slopes that encircle it. The light has a profound influence on the personality of such local wines as valpolicella, amarone, Bardolino, Soave—all of them brilliant in hue and fresh on the palate—and on the oil pressed from the olives grown on those slopes. The olive oil from the western shore of Lake Garda is my favorite Italian oil, owing its fragrance and its ingratiating texture to the radiance that comes from the lake. It is neither as aggressive as some of the pressings of Tuscany and the south, nor as bland as some of the Ligurian oils. A pity that there is so little of it, and that it costs so much. It was an instructive excursion, I thought. There is so much speculation about the role of territory in the character of wines and the flavor of food, about terroir, to use the French expression. On the shores of Lake Garda, my students had the opportunity to observe, to taste, and to identify the territorial connection right as it was taking place.
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