Sagra

Sunshine tops the crenelated brick walls in Campo S. Simon Grande. I leaned back on a wooden bench next to a Korean couple to watch it all go by on the grand canal. Trash, trash boats, private taxies, vaporetti loaded with suitcases and their owners.

The freight boats had a little bit of a thrill out in the canals on Friday night. Ah, the Redentore. Instead of fruits and vegetables they carried shirtless twenty-somethings, rack after rack of beer and hours upon hours of electronica music. Now, paint-chipped and sun-stained, they took up their old life, usually under the command of some kind of balding, browned old man in a fisherman's vest.

Less famous is the feast of San Giacomo, which appropriately takes place in the campo of the same name. Not by chance, I'm guessing. The Sagra is what they call it. I shuffled shoulder-by-shoulder through a thick crowd of hungry Veneziani toward the barbecue kiosk's counter. I leaned over, taking in a healthy dose of greasy, salty smoke. The grillers and waitresses drank a beer between orders, smiled at the hassled customers, balancing plates of sausage, chicken, and white polenta. On top of that we ordered a dish of bigoi in salsa, a kind of pasta in fish sauce, and two plates of the saltiest fries I've ever washed down with a Beck's.

The whole night, the locals stacked beer cans next to their kids' legos. They talked, gesticulated under the festive string-lights which their children blew bubbles and a band of 40-somethings sang out in an only half-comprehensible Venetian dialect.

Two tables down , I recognized this girl by her hairdo. It was swirled and flipped up in the back, a little frizzy in the summer air, and held in place elegantly by a pair of chopsticks (she studies Chinese). Next to her, a girl I swear I saw earlier that day as I rattled my suitcase over the cobblestones, up and down the olympic-sized Ponte degli Scalzi. Her new glasses were a graduation gift, obsidian-colored and wide-lensed. I exchanged a quick word and a friendly kiss with each of them. Then the streetlights were extinguished, and that sent us home.

Festa.
-a