Eating in Venice

Posted: 16th August 2016

Looked at from the bottom up, the offerings of Venice’s shops and taverns can seem very similar: the same trinkets: commedia dell’arte masks, Murano glass and beads, Burano lace; the same chunky cakes; the same snacks – pot-bellied tramezzini sandwiches and dried-up cicchetti (the local form of tapas) on roundels of baguette … so that you might reach the uncharitable conclusion that they were all made in the same factory. When I advanced this theory to a colleague in Venice recently, and proposed they might all be supplied by the same outfit in Calabria, he slapped me down: the factory, he said, was in China.