June 6, 2005: Venice

I love how hotels in Europe just give you breakfast – you don't have to make plans or go wandering out on the street to find your coffee but just go downstairs and follow the clinking and sit and they pour you coffee and hot milk from two pitchers and keep pouring until you're done with your croissant and ham and fruit and yogurt and then you're ready for your day.

Last night I'd seen an area that looked to be a marketplace on the edge of the Rialto and that was my first stop today. I've been eating so much since I've been in Italy I decided I wouldn't have an actual meal today but just fruit. Among a hundred possibilities I chose a packet of tiny wild strawberries, a couple of apricots and plums, a banana, and bagful of cherry tomatoes and admired the yellow flowering zucchini stems and the tiny purple-green artichokes and baby eggplants and various mushrooms and herbs all artfully displayed and fussed over between transactions. If only I had a kitchen! I would buy the packet of vegetables labeled minestrone and some chicken and make soup. I would sauté fresh pulled onions with the mushrooms and eggplant. Steam the artichoke hearts. Buy cheeses and salamis and different shapes of breads. There are ingredients here that we have at home but somehow it never tastes the same. Perhaps when I'm camping I can try my hand at it.

The sky was overcast until about 11 and then the sun came out full force. I watched a boat with a crane in it mix materials for concrete and the men wheeling it down an alleyway in barrows. (See the QuickTime movie.) A wood refinisher stripped the varnish from a door. In the university area a craftsman repaired picture frames. At a small bar and coffee shop I was tempted by some boiled eggs herbed and salted for .30 Euros each and they were delicious. This was the St. Croce area, the bar man told me. "It's nice because it's halfway between St. Marco's and the University and it's quiet," he explained. "The tourists don't walk this far, and people are studying," he laughed.

The barman made a green salad for the next customer, cubing fresh mozzarella cheese, halving fresh cherry tomatoes, and plopped in two halves of eggs just like the ones I'd just eaten. Around the corner a dozen students pushed toward the counter of a pizzeria shouting their orders to a young server who was obviously used to the chaos.

Around every corner is a watery canal shimmering its light up onto the stone buildings, and boats of all sorts carrying wood and bricks or garbage or restaurant supplies or tourists or businessmen in linen suits talking on cell phones. Window boxes are everywhere filled with red geraniums or succulents flowering delicately or bright purple and white pansies and in the shady gardens impatiens. The stereotypical lines of laundry are stretched out in the sunshine, everything: shirts and bras and panties and children's clothing. There is no space in this city for discretion.

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