The daily diary of a wandering restaurateur In Italy
July 15 - Venice

If getting there is half the fun, boy did we have a time! A 6am flight out of Seattle to Salt Lake to Los Angeles, arriving at 11am. Then a 3:30pm Swissair flight to Zurich that arrived at 11am (the next day, of course!) and finally a 5:30pm flight to Venice! While we were waiting in Zurich, I phoned Mrs. Valentini, the contact person for our housing in Venice . . . and she had no record that we were coming! It was a Saturday, a holiday, the office was closed and so on. After some back and forth, she promised to check on it. When we (finally) got to Venice, it took 45 minutes to get a clear phone line. Eventually we got a new housing assignment and off we headed to try to find it!

You must understand that there are no cars in Venice, so you take a vaporetto (like a public bus except that it is a boat) to a stop close to where you need to be, then wander through the labyrinth of tiny streets (some I swear were 2 feet wide!) until, with any luck, you find your destination. It took a few U-turns from the San Stae vaporetto stop before we found the home of Gianmarco and Lucia in the San Croce district. By then it was dark and a little surreal, but 58 steps later (who's counting?) we ended up in a little room on the top floor of their home. Nothing fancy, but clean and with a postcard view of the canal beside the house. (At least the rain had stopped by the time we got there - we would have been drowned rats if we had to schlep bags through that maze in the rain!)

Margene went to bed and I went to dinner at Trattoria alla Fontanella, a little spot around the corner . . . but more on that tomorrow.

Photos of our lodgings in Venice

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