Meal as Special as Murano Glass

February 2, 2023February 3, 2023 by Woody

In Italy, in Venice, in a small shop in a labyrinth of narrow alleyways, my wife and I bought eight water glasses of hand-blown glass made on the nearby famous island of Murano. Each is of a different main color – midnight blue, sky blue, green, yellow, red, orange, white, black – with swirls and teardrops and other designs in contrasting colors.

They have one more striking characteristic: their shape looks like a paper cup that has been crushed in one’s hand, or stomped flat underfoot, then pushed out whole again with the wrinkles unsuccessfully smoothed out. This purposeful imperfection makes them perfectly beautiful.

These exquisite tumblers tumble to mind when I think about the final meal my wife and I had on our recent dream trip celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary. At first appearance, the restaurant in Barcelona, the last stop of our two weeks abroad, looked like a smashed paper cup but in the end it proved to be like masterful Murano glasswork.

Lobster paella was not to be missed — but almost was.

As mentioned here a week ago, on the very first evening of our travels, at an outdoor table under the stars overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice, I had the best spaghetti of my life at a tiny trattoria named Carpaccio.

In the Gothic Quarter, in the historic centre of the old city of Barcelona, Lisa and I set out on foot in search of dinner with no recommendations or idea of where to eat. We had decided, as we often do on vacation, to let our dining destination be determined by serendipity – and, this night specifically, by having paella on the menu for we had not yet sampled this locally.

Aranega’s Restaurante was so small as to be called a mouse-hole-in-the wall. We did not find it so much as the proprietor found us by materializing out of nowhere directly in our path on the sidewalk and handing us two flat laminated menus. Politely, though unenthusiastically, we glanced at the menus, but unlike at many eateries here with English translations – and like Aranega’s sandwich chalkboard displaying a lengthy Menu del Dia – the offerings were in Spanish only. Sensing our language illiteracy, he disappeared through the doorway and quickly reappeared with an English version.

With our appetites rumbling, for we had been walking a long time looking for the ideal restaurant; and with trepidation, for this establishment looked to be only a step above fast food, we perused the new menu albeit with low expectations. As we did so, the owner again vanished inside.

While he was gone, Lisa and I both spotted it at the same time: lobster paella.

The owner returned carrying a two-top table and set it up on the sidewalk, for the evening was too pleasant to waste eating indoors, and without delay next brought out two chairs and gently guided us to sit down.

A waiter, an affable young man who we learned was the owner’s son, took our order; told us one serving would fill us both; and added that it would take half an hour to freshly prepare.

“We’re in no hurry,” we replied, ordered sangrias, and enjoyed people watching and reliving highlights from the past fortnight.

The lobster paella required closer to a full hour, and two sangrias each, before arriving; was served in a giant communal cast-iron bowl, steaming hot, with a full crustacean shell swimming in soupy rice; and was beyond worth the long wait.

Indeed, like Maria’s spaghetti at Carpaccio, it was as exquisite as Murano hand-blown glass. Together, the bookend meals were masterpiece ways to begin and end a masterpiece trip.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and

Bookend Meals to Fondly Remember

January 27, 2023January 27, 2023 by Woody

“Chocolate, s’il vous plaît,” I said, pointing at the dessert menu, at what I thought was ice cream, at crème glacée.“

You mean chocolat?”the waiter said, his tone mocking.

My wife and I were at a charming café in Nice, France, on a recent dream trip celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary, yet our waiter was anything but charming. To call him surly would be far too kind.

“Oui,” I said, trying my best to parrot his pronunciation, “Chocolat.”

“Chocolat,” he sneered again with emphasized inflection and a dismissive eye roll.

Cheers to a wonderful 40th anniversary trip…

My mind flashed back a few days, back to when we were in Olympia, Greece, and our tour guide, a lovely woman named Nicolette, taught me a less-than-lovely Greek word our bus driver had barked out in frustration at a driver who displeased him. I was tempted to repeat those two displeasing syllables now at our waiter, but instead bit my tongue until the chocolat ice cream could soothe it.

Happily, that rudeness and margherita pizza that tasted like it came frozen in a box, were the exception on our 12-day travels from Venice to Barcelona. From a delicious assortment of tapas al fresco while protected under a canopy beneath rainy skies to velvety gelato at a seaside table outdoors where it was impossible to tell which was forget-me-not bluer, the sky or the water, we had many meals to remember for the right reasons.

Two, however, stand out above the rest as all-time unforgettable meals. Remarkably, they were the very first and last dinners of our trip.

The lunch of tapas we enjoyed in Barcelona were simply amazing!

We arrived at our hotel in Venice after a long night, long day, and long evening of travel at nearly 9 o’clock and promptly went looking for a place to dine. Serendipitously, an Italian restaurantwas literally next door.

Carpaccio Trattoria is too small to be described as cozy, but we were too weary to look further. Without any wait, and with the temperature in the mid-70s, we were given a table for two on the waterfront patio with a front-row view of the scenic Grand Canal.

The ambiance could not have been lovelier with lapping water serving as soft music and an apricot-hued moon balanced on the steeple of the landmark Palladian Church directly across the waterway as if it were a basketball spinning on a Harlem Globetrotter’s index finger.

Maria, whose appearance was as pleasant as her manner, showed us to our table; took our orders; and served us as well. We learned over the course of the meal that she is also the owner, pasta chef, and bakes all of the desserts which she proudly noted she always samples. The latter was nearly impossible to believe for the dessert menu was not at all slim and yet Maria very much was – a positive testament to the walking lifestyle here.

Since boyhood, spaghetti has been my favorite meal and the gold standard has always been my mom’s. For the past 30 years, I have wistfully pined for her magical sauce and handmade pasta.

God bless Maria. Her tender-yet-firm pasta and simple sauce that was almost as sweet as chocolat – “The secret magic is the fresh local tomatoes,” she confided – was not the equal of my mom’s, impossibly it surpassed it. I wish you could have tasted it.

We passed on dessert, but Maria would have no such nonsense. Learning this was our anniversary eve, she brought a cannoli and a slice of triple-chocolate cake as her gifts to us. Both were heaven on a plate.

Next week: The second bookend meal to long remember.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Gondolier Lorenzo and ‘Anna Silvia’

October 20, 2022October 21, 2022 by Woody

Head to toe, Lorenzo looked as one imagines a Venetian gondolier should.

His outfit included a flat-brimmed straw boater with a red hatband; loose-fitting, short-sleeved, white-linen shirt over a polo with traditional horizontal stripes of navy and white; black pants and black rubber-soled shoes. Oh, yes, and seemingly a song on his lips.

On the recent Italian afternoon of our 40th wedding anniversary, my wife and I were excited to celebrate with an authentic gondola ride. As we strolled toward a long ticket line, a charismatic gondolier intercepted us and guided us to the nearby dock where his long and narrow boat with high-rising stern and bow was moored.

Celebrating our 40th anniversary in Venice with a gondola ride thanks to Lorenzo.

No sooner did we sit down on a thinly cushioned loveseat bench than I began to wonder if we had been hoodwinked into an unseaworthy vessel for it tilted to the right, and greatly so. A heavy wake from a passing motorboat taxi would surely have us taking on water.

Not to worry. When Lorenzo took his position, standing above and behind us atop the left-hand side of the stern, the boat largely righted itself thanks to his wiry-framed weight. Not only is this imbalance by design in all gondolas, the keels purposely curve slightly to the right because rowing with a single 13-foot-long oar, always mounted on the starboard side, naturally pushes the boat leftward.

Rowing, by the way, is actually a short motion called “stirring”. Thanks to the forearms of a blacksmith, Lorenzo effortlessly stirred the gondola through the “streets” of Venice, as the canals are called. In truth, he only made it look easy.

“I’m 62 and getting too old,” he said at one point as the thermometer’s mercury approached 90 degrees. “It’s a young man’s game. It’s physically taxing and takes more effort that it looks like.”

Lorenzo with his 13-foot-long magic wand of a boat oar.

Lorenzo can still turn back the pages of the calendar. Not only did he turn the oar into a wizard’s wand, he sometimes assisted his steering by dancing on the wall like Fred Astaire in the most memorable scene in “Royal Wedding.” Specifically, Lorenzo would lift and place a foot on the side of a building rising from the water and push off. The gondola, despite measuring 36 feet in length, fishtailed gracefully to turn on a dime around blind corners.

“Gondolas are all handcrafted only in Venice and cost very much money,” said Lorenzo, whose black beauty originally belonged to his father. The floating family heirloom, in accord with the local custom of bestowing gondolas with two female names, was christened “Anna Silvia” after Lorenzo’s mother and sister.

“My dad died much too young at age only 52,” the boatman continued, noting sadly he thus inherited his father’s boat – and job – “at age only 18.”

With more than four decades experience, Lorenzo gave us a masterpiece tour. Here was Casanova’s Palace; there was the home believed to have been the residence of Marco Polo; here was Libreria Acqua Alta, the self-proclaimed “most beautiful bookstore in the world”; there, passing overhead, was the Bridge of Sighs, its name coming from the poet Lord Byron, who wrote: “I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; a palace and a prison on each hand.”

And here, inside the bow of “Anna Silvia”, was another quote, painted in black upon a carved olive wreath of gold, from a poem by Dante: “Lo Bel Pianeta Che Ad Amar Conforta.” Translation: “The beauteous planet, that to love incites.”

Certainly this beauteous city, and our smooth-as-a-magic-carpet ride with Lorenzo, incited anniversary love.

To be continued next week in Olympia, Greece…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

By Any Nickname, Venice Is Lovely

October 12, 2022 by Woody

Our Italian gondolier, Lorenzo, told us Venice has nearly as many nicknames as bridges.

This is an exaggeration, for spans over the canals number nearly 400, but Lorenzo did easily spit out a mouthful of sobriquets: La Serenissima (The Most Serene), Queen of the Adriatic, The Floating City, and The City of (take your pick) Canals / Water / Bridges / Love / Masks, the latter relating to the annual Carnival.

Not to quibble with Lorenzo, who shares his name with Jessica’s lover in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and whose own family roots reach down through the shallow waters of the canals deep into the earth below, but I always thought Paris owned trademark rights to “The City of Love”.

Lisa and me beginning our trip in beautiful Venice, Italy.

And yet after an hour gliding as serenely as an autumn breeze through a labyrinth of canals, I concluded that all of the nicknames are fitting – most especially, perhaps, The City of Love. After all, my wife and I, seated together on a narrow wooden seat, on a Venetian afternoon as sunny and warm as the Ventura day we exchanged wedding vows exactly 40 years earlier, at one point floated past Casanova’s Palace.

To be sure, there is much to love about this enchanted city. Upon our arrival less than 24 hours before, after checking into our hotel after a long, long, long night, day and evening of travel, we found a nearby trattoria – cozy Italian restaurant. It was well past 9 o’clock when we were seated at a table for two on the patio, under the stars with an orange half-moon rising, the lapping water of the Grand Canal a short stone toss away. The pasta and desserts, all homemade by Maria the owner, were as perfect as the setting.

The following day, our actual anniversary, we visited St. Mark’s Square and the magnificent Basilica di San Marco. Thereupon, we took to heart – and feet – the sage advice a dear friend of mine, a travel writer who has visited the four corners of the globe, always reminds me of before I embark on a trip: “Be sure to turn down a hidden alleyway, or go inside a quiet doorway off the beaten path, because that’s where you’ll find some of the most memorable experiences.”

A view of the Grand Canal from the Ponte di Rialto Bridge.

Venice has pedestrian alleyways off of alleyways off of alleyways. Getting lost in this funhouse-like mirror maze was how we found a quiet doorway to a small shop that was like a museum exhibition of hand-blown glassworks made on nearby Murano island. The breathtaking pieces ranged from elegant goblets and bowls that seemed as delicate as butterfly wings; to graceful butterflies themselves; to a resplendent turtle the size of a couch cushion and an even larger dolphin, both featuring swirling currents of blues and greens within as if filled with colorful seawater.

Less beautifully, the canals are so opaque they seemed filled with wet paint. This filled Lorenzo with great sadness.

“The water was so clean during the worst of the pandemic,” he recalled, referring to the Grand Canal, “we saw dolphins.”

Meanwhile, the inner canals – measuring one to two meters in depth, depending on the tide – were so crystalline that a gondolier peering down from his standing perch could see to the water’s bottom with such clarity as to accurately call a coin heads or tails.

Alas, motorboat traffic has returned fully, and with it the green-sheened murkiness, causing 62-year-old Lorenzo to lament: “Man never learns. Man is a dummy.”

Taking a gondola ride with Lorenzo, however, was a smart decision – to be chronicled further here next week…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Vacation Photos – Less Can Be More

October 6, 2022 by Woody

Third try was indeed the charm.

After twice having a dream vacation canceled by the coronavirus nightmare, my better-half, who is half-Italian, and I finally made it to the land where her family roots reach deep into the fertile soil. Specifically, we sailed fully around the thigh-high boot setting out at Venice, through the narrow Strait of Messina at the toe, up the western coast and over to Barcelona with nine port stops en route.

The starting and ending bookends proved to be our favorites, although perhaps this was partly because we spent extra nights in both and were thus able to explore them a little more fully than the daytime destinations.

The ancient Colosseum in Rome was definitely photograph worthy!

A cruise, in my view, is sort of like speed dating in that you learn who (or where) you want to get to know better. In this case, we didn’t ask Croatia and Albania for their phone numbers. Don’t get me wrong, the former’s Old Town Dubrovnik – with white marble streets and forts of stone so magnificent “Game of Thrones” filmed myriad scenes there – was memorable, yet an afternoon inside these historic walls was plenty. Similarly, a few hours sufficed at the ancient sites of the Olympics in Olympia, Greece, and the Pompeii ruins near Naples, Italy.

Our two ports in France – Villefranche-sur-Mer and Toulon – are both gorgeous coastal locales, but to be honest we much prefer Ventura’s similar charms so feel no strong gravitational pull to return. Rome and Florence, however, like Venice and Barcelona, already beckon us back for longer sojourns.

In the coming weeks, I will share here some snapshots-in-words of my favorite experiences from our two-week trip: from memorable people and meals to the canals of Venice to the Colosseum in Rome to the breathtaking La Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, and more.

Speaking of snapshots, my cell phone camera kept freezing with the command: “Out of Storage. Free Up Space.” Just my luck…

…good luck, that is.

In these old lands I was forced to go old-school. Instead of mindlessly snap-snap-snapping endless digital photos, I was forced to point-and-shoot judiciously. It was like going back in time and using a camera with film that comes in 12, 24 or 36 exposures. Instead of paying to have prints made, I had to spend time deleting files.

So it was I found myself taking in the sites, and sights, in their full grandeur through naked eyes instead of miniaturized on a pixel screen. Thus, I found myself absorbing the scenes and memorizing the moments before selectively choosing the very best ones to photograph.

In this reframed frame of mind, it saddened me to see so many others touring these goosebump-inducing historic places, even a museum filled with Picasso artwork, while largely squinting at their tiny cameras. They seemed more concerned with reliving these experiences in the future rather than living them in the present. One romantic couple we encountered seemed to be experiencing their entire gondola ride through the canals of Venice digitally instead of actually.

Conversely, instead of hundreds of photos, so many as to be overwhelming, I came home with only a few “rolls” of selectively snapped images to be developed at Fotomat, so to speak. This was a silver lining, as mentioned, for it seems to me that too many pictures is like not being able to see the forest for the trees. Indeed, the graceful stone columns in La Sagrada Familia are meant to invoke towering trees, a forest of them, something one might miss if looking through a camera lens.

To be continued next week…

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WOODY WOODBURN

Writer, "Streaker" & Speaker

Tag Archives: Venice

Meal as Special as Murano Glass

Bookend Meals to Fondly Remember

Gondolier Lorenzo and ‘Anna Silvia’

By Any Nickname, Venice Is Lovely

Vacation Photos – Less Can Be More