Flight of Fancy

In the morning, the campi between San Giacomo dall'Orio and Rialto whisper with quiet local activity. There's the bump of a push-cart on the steps of a bridge, a slurrish shout-out, always in dialect. Fruit vendors and cafe owners are the first ones, more than ready for the waves of tourists that break upon the city at 10 sharp.

The Sagra continues, I think it lasts a week. Maybe less. Each day the rows of wooden tables are unstacked and hosed down, the plastic outhouses cleaned out by a limby old man. The string lights still stretch from church tower to treetop, and the row of white tents still has a vague perfume of sausage and polenta.

A carrier boat pulls up to to the nearby canal steps and unloads a couple hundred crates of Beck's. Yesterday's shipment lies in chips and pieces over the cobbled pavement, some held together by the red label.

At the gelateria near Anna and Juliana's place, they have the weirdest, most outlandish flavors. Basil, peach, licorice, to name a few. A Japanese guy in front of me asked if he could have a taste of the coconut. The gelato man shrugged. "Why? It tastes like coconut."

The next morning, I walked the streets for the last time with Venetian keys jingling in my pocket. At 11:13 I dropped them into an empty jam jar on Juliana's shelf.

Alessia had told me she worked at the airport. I found her at a wine-tasting kiosk, sans those fabulous new glasses of hers. Instead she wore an orange lanyard around her neck. She said she'd offer me a drink before my flight, but she wasn't allowed to open any bottles until her boss arrived.

Lufthansa is steady, efficient, German. On-board refreshments include any kind of drink and a snappy choco-hazelnut bar. It's a step past British Airways, all they give you is a twinkyish ham-roll for breakfast. Alitalia I've never tried, but my intuition, ahem, stereotypography, makes me feel like the CEO puts more funding into in-flight dinners than on-time arrivals.

Dinner on my transatlantic flight rolled around, first on silver trays, then in our stomachs. The baby kicking the back of my seat in time with "Frere Jacques" did not make things easier. But it stopped long enough for me to ask the flight attendant if wine came with dinner. "Yes, and it costs 6 dollars," she said. "Oh," I responded. "So wine doesn't come with dinner." With a confused expression, she assured me that it did. "Not for me, it doesn't," I laughed. She knelt and asked me if I preferred red or white.

That seemed an appropriate end to those adventures.
If you have any inquiries, so do I.
-a

Alla Trevigiana

I expected a swift pick-up at the airport in Treviso, and a simple drop-off. Where? That would be my friend's grandmother's house. She was on vacation, you see. It's a pretty random and complicated-sounding story, right?

Anyway, I knew it was Signor Fuser when he walked in, hands behind his back, yellow polo. He passed through the automatic doors, checked the arrival times, and then he figured the kid with the black duffel and overloaded backpack was that American guy he was supposed to find.

But no quick pick-up/drop-off deal did I receive; in twenty minutes we were in a buzzing Trevigian restaurant before a hot pizza and a cold beer. "I'm glad Helene has this calm, relaxed American friend," he said. "She's always in a hurry, doing a thousand things at once." Good thing I passed the test, right?

After a zippy tour around the grandmother's house in Villorba with Signora Fuser, I sat down with both parents for a glass of bubbly water. It fizzed more than usual. Later in the kitchen, I couldn't remember which glass was mine, so I took the Speedy Gonzalez one. The water was little help against the humidity; it seemed like the religious icons, pictures of the Pope, were all going to melt and slide down the walls. On the TV, almost too modern for such an old-fashioned place, a news story about a mountain festival is accompanied by Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire."

By day, the fish market in Treviso is, well, a fish market. The workers hose down the wooden platform before row after row of fish on ice. By night, it's loaded with aluminum tables, chairs, young people, and later on, empty cans and bottles.

There's a fountain not many people know about in Treviso, fortunately Helene knew about it. It's called "The Boob Fountain." I don't have to explain much, but just so you know, there's a hilarious picture coming up.

Helene took me to the local pool in Treviso. It was surrounded by little cypress trees, and the tiles on the bottom were wide and smooth. Pool rules said you had to wear a different pair of flip-flops in the pool area. And everyone had to wear a swim cap. Mine was a flashy shade of neon red. Picture that, now.

At dinner they set little candles, citronella, afloat in a dish of water. All to ward off the mosquitoes, which spiraled above the fish and tomatoes. Marcello, Helene's father, smiled as he cracked open a heavy bottle of Valdobbiadene prosecco, the best. In the humid garden, it tasted like summer.

A calm sort of nightlife wraps its way up and down the city's ancient walls. Drink-stand deals sprinkle the fringes of the historic center. At still more aluminum tables, girls bat their eyes and grind their heels into the gravel while the boys lean against the crumbly bricks.

Took a trip to Veneto Designer Outlets. Like Tanger, or whatever you know like that... you know, like a kind of consumer's Disneyworld. Here, we got crenelated stucco walls and bell towers in the Venetian style. It was wild, I tell you. Wild!

-a