Others who disembarked jumped onto their waiting bicycles and sped off to the scattered farms that grow much of Venice’s produce. There is a small hotel on the island with bikes for rent. Next time!
* * *
A STOP CLOSE to Venice, San Michele with its dark cypresses is the cemetery island. Extensive, well-tended mausoleums resembling immense marble chests of drawers give way at the wilder edge of the island to the Protestant plot, where many stones are broken, graves are in the ground, and the cypresses look especially moribund. This area seems cautionary for expats like me. Here are those who died far from home—the final stops of Great-Aunt Emily on the grand tour, seamen who caught fevers, and mysterious others like Archibald Campbell, died 1891, whose lonesome marker says: “The heart knoweth its own bitterness and the stranger intermeddleth not therewith.” This, a story we never will know. Ezra Pound lies neglected and weedy, in contrast to the only tended grave in the section, that of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, all covered in blooms. I can’t help but feel the contrast of the exiles’ abandoned stones with the elaborate private chapels of Italian families decorated with live flowers. Not lingering on such thoughts, I board the vaporetto again for the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, where another wandering expat found solace.
Lord Byron came here, possibly to escape his imbroglio of amours in the city. He rowed over from Venice to study Armenian with the monks, who were given political asylum and the island in 1717. By 1789, they’d started a printing enterprise known for producing works in many alphabets and languages, including Aramaic, Sanskrit, and Gaelic. They’ve been here ever since, in a monastery filled with curiosities and with art of varying quality. We arrive at a serene cloister and, with a few others, follow a copiously bearded monk around the complex. Since I have an aversion to tours, I break from the route and happily wander AWOL for a while, discovering mummies, marble busts, rose-water liqueur made by the monks, and a guest book where many visiting diasporic Armenians record their gratitude for this repository of their culture. What the monastery is most known for is its library of glass-fronted cases holding some of the monks’ 150,000 volumes, ranged around a room beneath frescoes of church elders who are reading books. There, you easily imagine Byron taking out volumes and trying to decipher various languages. I then find the dining room, with tables set for the monks’ silent supper, taken while overlooking, on the end wall, a huge painting of the Last Supper that must sober all their meals. San Lazzaro (Lazarus) previously was a refuge for sufferers of leprosy, as were other outposts in the lagoon. Paul Morand in his piercing memoir Venices credits the monks with importing Angora cats, but I do not see any sign of them.
* * *
WE SPEND A night at Venice Certosa Hotel, a simple inn on La Certosa. The island is under development as a park, but right now is only home to a sailing school, a kayaking center, and a boatyard for the repair of traditional small vessels. Kayaking in the lagoon looks fun and allows access to even smaller islands.
We’re the only guests in the inn’s restaurant, which serves excellent razor clams and pasta with shrimp.
The night should be as deeply quiet as Torcello. However, the loose rigging on a sailboat near the window dings all night. We depart early.
* * *
ACROSS OPEN WATER, the vaporetto speeds up en route to busy Burano, the island that explodes with color. What store offers house paint in magenta, ocher, grape purple, forest green? Why is no house painted the same color as the neighbor’s house on either side? Oh, you’re doing yellow? Well, I’m going for Greek blue. Burano—is there any place on earth with as playful a palette? We’re getting off at the stop before—Mazzorbo. A small bridge connects them.
When I’m traveling, I often look at places with the question, Could I live here? Mazzorbo sets me dreaming of restoring a particular oxblood-red house with white trim right on the canal. Or is the yellow one more appealing? I don’t understand why Mazzorbo is not a coveted residential area. Once it was, like Torcello, a prosperous ancient settlement. The Latin name was Maiurbium, large urban place. Also like Torcello, it succumbed to fevers and silt. It languishes now, but one family has staked a big claim to a positive future for Mazzorbo. The Bisols, known for their prosecco, have revived a plot of land where monks in earlier times made wines and farmed. By good fortune, the Bisols found the prized and rare dorona grape—only five vines—on nearby Torcello. A few dozen others were found elsewhere in the lagoon, and from cuttings they started a vineyard. The family converted quayside buildings into Venissa, a small inn with an osteria and an innovative restaurant.
The square pond of brackish water where the monks kept fish still ripples in the shadow of the old campanile, last vestige of the religious complex. About 90 percent of the restaurant’s produce comes from the garden. This is a “km 0” restaurant, kilometer zero, an Italian designation signifying sustainable and homegrown. Dining at summer dusk on the edge of the vineyard in the quiet of the island is bliss. William is intrigued by all the unfamiliar ingredients on the menu. Geranium and rose dust are just the beginning. Artemisia marina, ambretta, alga nori, latte d’angelica, basilico artico, calamansi, radice di acetosella, houttuynia, stellina odorosa.
He surprises us and himself by ordering the tasting menu. Expensive, yes, but who cares? This is an adventure.
While we have a glass of spicy and cold prosecco, he looks up the strange words. Artemisia marina: not what I have in the garden but a marine version. Calamansi: Filippino lime. Alga nori: a brackish seaweed. Ambretta: a pink wildflower with fragrant seeds. Latte d’angelica: “milk” of wild celery with a white flower; kin also to fennel. Radice d’acetosella: wood sorrel root of an oxalis. Houttuynia: fish mint. (We have this weed in our fields; I never knew the name. If you step on it, your shoes smell like fish.) Also called chameleon plant and bishop’s weed. Basilico artico: a high-perfume basil resistant to cold. Stellina odorosa: a perennial little star, a highly scented plant whose sweet fragrance becomes stronger when dried.
I like a menu that makes you work a little.
* * *
WILLIAM ENTHUSIASTICALLY TRIES everything—granseola (spider crab), sgombro (mackerel) in its silver skin, oysters with green apple, the exotic local fish gò (goby), and roasted pigeon. The latter he enjoys especially.
“So glad you like the pigeon,” Ed says. We’re about to end the dinner with a lemon tart served with the exotic lime sorbet.
“Pigeon? I ate pigeon? Flying rat from Piazza San Marco?” In the dim light, he’d thought “squab” was something mostly squash.
“No, wild pigeon. Nothing better.”
“I ate pigeon,” he laments. “It was good.”
That golden wine! Maybe a bit of the setting sun melted into the glass.
* * *
I AM HAPPY not to leave but to climb the stairs to our sloping beamed suite with a view of the canal. I hope this lively project lures others to the island and a little utopia flourishes again. Mazzorbo, otherwise, lies quiet in the lagoon time warp. Early walks around Burano before tourists arrive, around the perimeter of Mazzorbo, chats with women carrying home groceries from an expedition to market, a few people cultivating plots of tomatoes, onions, and zucchini: a slow honey in this hive.
* * *
JUST ACROSS THE bridge to Burano, two bright wooden boats moor near the vaporetto station. At the inn, I was given the number of the skipper, who will take me over to San Francesco del Deserto, the ultimate peaceful island. Wanting downtime, Ed and William stay behind, in our appealing mansard suite, wrapped in the hotel robes and watching movies on their iPads.
Only four Franciscans take care of the church, cloister, and gardens. One of them guides me. I’m the only guest. His voice is so soothing that I want to curl under a cypress and nap. He doesn’t chatter, just lets me look at the silvery, glazed-water views all around, and watch a white egret that for a moment seems like Saint Francis returned. The
monk relates that when his Francesco visited in 1220, he performed his miracle of the birds. In the dense cypress trees, throngs of them held forth with mighty song at the moment Francis wanted to pray. He told them to stop singing until he finished, which they did. It seems an easy miracle—I clap my hands and the cicadas always hush—but I hope it’s true. True or not, the story survives, threading together all the days since on this small world amid other scattered small worlds.
* * *
AS WE WAIT on the Mazzorbo quay for a water taxi, I remember that many people consider “cellar door” the most pleasing sound in English. To my ear “lagoon,” with its hint of the moon, sounds more melodious. Or maybe this thought comes to me because “lagoon” has now gathered to itself vibrant marshy salt scents, a vast reflected sky, lone seabirds, and the wavering and warp of time in secret places. The taxi speeds us to our hotel on the Grand Canal, back to the glorious, gaudy, fragile city I have loved for many years. Now I may pass that love to my grandson, who will, I hope, adore it all his life.
NOTES:
Navigating the Lagoon—Pick up an Actv vaporetto map. On it, the routes of the many vaporetti, the people ferries that ply the lagoon, are numbered and color-coded. At the train station, the airport, or anywhere there’s a vaporetto ticket kiosk, ask for this map called Linee di navigazione/Waterborne routes. Numbers on the boats correspond to the route numbers on the map. Note that the symbol N designates night routes.
Vaporetto stations are all along the Grand Canal and at Fondamente Nove. If you’re unsure of your route, check with the attendant to make sure the ferry is going where you want to go. Rather than purchasing single tickets, you can buy an economical pass for a day or for several days. A three-day unlimited pass, at this writing, is forty euros. Vaporetti are efficient. They arrive on time and the schedule is no harder to master than a subway’s.
Motoscafi, private water taxis, are plentiful. There’s usually a stand near a vaporetto stop. If you’re at a hotel or restaurant on the islands, the staff can call a taxi. Water taxis are expensive, but sometimes time is more valuable than money.
Sarde in Saor Sempre Croccanti
SARDINES IN SAOR ALWAYS CRISPY, SERVES 4
Chef Francesco Brutto, with the Venetian lagoon and the Adriatic all around him, impeccably sources the outstanding seafood served at Venissa. If I try to think of a more romantic setting for dinner than the garden of Venissa, I can’t.
3 Tropea onions, thinly sliced
3 bay laurel leaves
1 tablespoon sugar
½ cup raspberry vinegar with essence of rose petals
Salt, QB
½ cup raisins
24 fresh sardines, bones removed, then frozen
All-purpose flour, QB
4 eggs, beaten
Fine bread crumbs, QB
Extra-virgin olive oil, QB
Mix the onions with the laurel leaves, sugar, vinegar, and salt. Boil briefly, 3 to 4 minutes. Stir in the raisins. Remove the bay leaves and set aside in a small serving bowl.
Bread the still-frozen sardines by rolling each in flour, then egg, and then bread crumbs. Fry in plenty of sizzling olive oil until golden brown.
On a platter, place the sardines around the bowl of sauce.
Ristorante Venissa, Isola di Mazzorbo, Veneto
A winged lion, symbol of Venice, greets us in the center of Asolo, the fountain still flowing with waters from a Roman aqueduct. As we park, we survey cafés bordering the irregular piazza. On the terraces, everyone seated faces the piazza. Under an awning, a group of men at tables with red-checked cloths enjoy plates of cheese and salumi. After the Veneto traffic, the narrow street into Asolo—those one-way traffic lights—and a couple of wrong turns, we could use a Campari soda ourselves. A groomed sheepdog trots smartly across the street like a politician on his way to cast the deciding vote. A woman opens her car trunk and removes an armful of white lilies. Asolare, a verb, means to “disport in the open air, amuse oneself at random.” Although coined in the fifteenth century, asolare still looks like a good thing to do in Asolo.
Even in Italy, packed with fascinating places, Asolo stands out. Only sixty kilometers from Venice, this is an appealing add-on to a visit to La Serenissima. Henry James, Carlo Scarpa, Igor Stravinsky, the Italian poet Giosuè Carducci, and many others agreed. Then there was Robert Browning. The English poet fell in love with Asolo and his last book, Asolando, published on December 12, 1889, the day he died, testifies to his feelings. Hemingway was here. Wasn’t he, like George Washington, everywhere?
Driving across the industrialized Veneto plain, you suddenly begin a bucolic climb among cypresses and verdant fields, then arrive at this intact medieval town that looks like an illustration in a book of fairy tales. There’s even a ruined thirteenth-century white castle, Il Rocco, perched above town, where a sleeping princess may lie in a glass coffin.
Maybe it was the exile here of fifteenth-century royal Caterina Cornaro, queen of Cyprus, Jerusalem, and Armenia, that put the stamp of exclusivity on Asolo. After she was forced to cede her reign to the rapacious Venetian republic, they granted her control of the town as compensation. Must have been quite a comedown but she took her position seriously and garnered an intellectual and artistic life to her provincial court. Even now that heritage endures. I have the sense that if all the cars were lifted away, we could be back with Caterina, arriving for a weekend of balls and courtly diversions.
* * *
WE CHECK INTO Albergo al Sole, small and exclusive, with a view over the town. I’m already looking forward to dining on the upstairs terrace with the moon shining down on Asolo. Our two tiny rooms are under the eaves, with two desks and an old-size double bed. I remember my freshman year in college when I had a similar room (not quite as nice) on the dorm’s fifth floor. At least there’s an elevator here. The bath is tiled in pretty, flowery green vines, a pattern someone surely would warn you against, saying that you will tire of it. Well, if you like it, you won’t.
* * *
I’M ATTRACTED TO literary quests. Asolo holds a big one for me. The attraction isn’t Browning (I barely can tolerate his poems), but one of my favorite writers, Freya Stark: travel writer, explorer, historian, archeologist, letter-writer, essayist, memoirist—yes, all of these—lived here. She died in 1993 at age one hundred, having participated to the nth in every day of the century she lived. She was first brought to Asolo as a small child in 1901, and her home, Villa Freya, was given to her by a family friend who died in 1941. The house became her touchstone during her travels in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, Egypt, India, Turkey.
We set out to find it, walking along via Roberto Browning, a narrow street edged by low arcades sheltering tiny high-quality shops. There is no tourist junk on offer. Instead, we find the intimate restaurant San Daniele, and Eleonora, an enticing clothing store in a beamed and frescoed building; Gelateria Browning strikes us both as funny. There is also the tempting Galleria Asolana, whose window glitters with antique jewelry; a wine bar; and a bakery selling homemade pinza, the local traditional sweet. It’s a huge, loaf-like cake made with cornmeal, nuts, apples, raisins, and figs, without any added sugar. The owner says it’s baked in a wood oven by his mother, Graziela. We buy a wedge. At a tiny fruit and vegetable shop, we pick up a bag of cherries and walk along eating one after another, down to the bottom of the bag. Of all the seasonal fruits, cherries are my favorites. Back at Bramasole, I’ve made cherries steeped in Chianti, cherry gelato, and cherry roulade every summer for a million years but perhaps they’re best this way, bursting the plump fruit in your mouth, so sweet and juicy, tossing the pit into bushes.
“This is it,” Ed says. At the end of via Roberto Browning, where the small Zen (a family name) fountain from 1572 stands at the intersection with another road, and
timed one-way signals flash, a square three-story house, peachy-gold with green shutters, stands behind a fence. Did Freya plant the hydrangeas and jasmine? Virginia creeper crawls over the façade. In fall it will turn red, not a good color for the house.
All the shutters are closed. Does the revolving desk Freya designed still overlook the back garden, where the remains of a Roman theater were found? We have the number of someone to call who can show us the interior and garden, but I don’t want to spoil this. Eudora Welty’s modest home in Jackson, Mississippi, leaves no doubt that it is authentic; even Hemingway’s house in Key West seems real. But Freya eventually sold this house, built another, and later sold that, so what can remain that is she? I am content to stand in front and imagine her joy as she welcomed friends from among her vast acquaintances, worked in her garden, set out on new quests. The surprise: Her house looks kin to my Bramasole. Three stories, like mine, square, peachy-gold, with green shutters. I’m pleased, as I feel affinity with her longing for travel, her weakness for pretty clothes, her enjoyment of picnics, her fabulous friendships, her passionate interests, and her austere let’s-keep-moving philosophy of life. Quotes of hers serve as epigraphs to several of my notebooks:
See You in the Piazza Page 9