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

Last batch of photos

Treviso, Veneto

Treviso's little-known treasure: the Boob Fountain. Literally, "Fontana delle Tette."


Watching the Redentore fireworks in Venice

Sagra in the Campo di San Giacomo dall'Orio

Traditional Venetian food worth 30 minutes and an elbow in the gut

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