Looking out our kitchen window at another wet, gray morning.
I think this is a laundry-service boat..... At least it doesn't matter if the dirty laundry gets wet (unless it gets too heavy for the boat!).
Our neighborhood fruit/veg market. On its boat. You can't tell, but immediately to the right of this shot is the side of the canal, so customers can walk right up to the side of the boat.
It was clearly artichoke season. They were everywhere.
I'm not going to tell you what anything else is, because either you already know, or I don't know what it is....
We knew that at least some of the produce on our boat was Italian. It didn't occur to me, at the time, to check on the provenance of the fall veggies, like cauliflower and peppers. Now, I am wondering where they came from.
More artichokes. We didn't purchase any, because we didn't want to prepare them, but we surely wanted to eat them......
We stopped in the apartment to drop off our strawberries and broccoli, and to take advantage of access to the internet for a moment.
In the front you see what's left of the lovely fugassa alla venexiana we'd purchased the evening before. That's most of the dove, and only a little of the muffin-shaped one.
Time for lunch. It's lovely, traveling with a foodie. She does all the research on what we should eat, and where, and all I have to do is follow in her footsteps and enjoy.
This sort of sauce, with lots of chopped meat, is called ragu. This is house-made tagliatelle (a pasta shape) with lamb and fava bean ragu. It was delicious.
I'm not sure I'd ever had fava beans before. These were green rather than dried. You can see some in the upper left corner. My daughter, whose job includes thinking and talking about how things taste, said she thought they tasted more like peas than beans, and she was absolutely right.
My daughter had cuttlefish, in cuttlefish-ink sauce. It was better than expected. Squid is so often the consistency of rubber bands. Here it was very tender, and the whole was mildly fishy. Edible, but not something I'd choose.
After lunch, we headed out to find the big market on the other side of the Rialto Bridge (one of the few bridges over the Grand Canal, which cuts through the middle of Venice).
Hmm. Dead end. We'll try another route.
Squid-ink pasta, with pink pom-pom Easter chick.
This is a terrible pic. What I wanted to show you was the pasta, along the right side, and diagonally from bottom right to the mid-left.
It is tubes, which were at least 18" long, and an inch in diameter. Wondering how on earth you cook something that long and big? Without breaking it first, and then what would be the point of having that shape to begin with?
Orchid in a shop window. We saw very few plants and flowers outside. I know Venice had a cold and wet spring (just like Ann Arbor!), so maybe they will have more plants and flowers as it warms up?
San Lorenzo. This surely looks like it is expecting a fancy facade to be applied to its plain surface. I wonder if it used to have one, or if the money ran out and it has always looked like this..... There's a rumor that Marco Polo was buried here.
A pair of "pull-only" doorknobs. One basically unused, one used.
This is an unusually long straight street. I decided the red things in the streets (lower left) are fire hydrants.
Very fancy light.
Goat head, holding the light itself.
We saw lots of newly-renovated buildings in this part of town. There were lots of different sorts of call buttons you could push, to let the person you were visiting know you were there.
Given the layout, and given the metal strips have names, I figure these have to be call buttons, but I don't know how they work.
I don't see anything that would move (to be pushed like a button). Maybe the whole head moves? I really wanted to mess with one and see how it worked, but I didn't want to call anyone.....
In order to facilitate chronological traversal of these posts, here is a link to the next post.
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