Thursday, September 16, 1999

That morning, I got my first introduction to the smallest shower in Italy. I hadn’t really noticed the shower when we’d traded rooms so generously the day before. It was about eighteen inches, by eighteen inches on a side. You touched the shower curtain and wall on all sides as you showered. You couldn’t bend over in it to wash your legs or feet.

The real problem was that it had a trick soap dish in it. Anything I put in it—soap, shampoo, razor—quickly slid out to the floor. Since you couldn’t bend over to pick them up, this was a problem. I learned to hold onto the soap and pick up the razor with my toes. This is the truth!

On the brighter side, the shower did have very good water pressure. It also had that emergency cord in the shower again. Perhaps there was a nationwide epidemic of tourists falling onto tubs. The Italian government responded with the requirement for emergency cords. Or perhaps more likely, some government official’s brother-in-law is in the emergency cords installation business. It almost has to be a government regulation because, at least in the case of our shower, you couldn’t actually fall down in it. You could maybe fall out of it, but not in it. Actually, the whole bathroom was too small to actually fall down in. But I suppose you could still use the emergency cord if you got stuck between the toilet and sink or something.

At breakfast, we met the opposite number to the Georgia couple. They were a nice middle-aged couple, perhaps a little older than Rebecca and I. We thought of them as the New York couple because they had such strong New York accents. Of course, it turned out after talking to them that they lived in Atlanta and had lived there for ten years. So the New York couple was really from Georgia and the Georgia couple were from Los Angeles. It all made sense now.

As we gathered for the morning tour of the city, there was a great deal of discussion about the quality of rooms. We had a tiny one, but some of them were quite nice. The newlyweds, of course, got the bridal room with a balcony overlooking a canal. We had a tiny window that overlooked a tin roof. Mom enjoyed complaining about her room and she had a real bathtub. Of course, we’d given her that room in a fit of generosity. If we’d known that she’d wanted to complain, we should have let keep the room with the world’s smallest shower. Of course, given her size, she might have liked it better.

When everyone was gathered, we were ready for our walking tour of Venice. This time the local guide is Piero. He assembled us all in the walkway outside the hotel. When he’d gotten us together, he handed out maps of the city. They were free maps given out by one of the merchants in town. I imagined that he snuck into the shop and grabbed a stack of them for us. He then lead us toward Piazza San Marco. As we walked, he pulled out his cell phone so he could chat with someone for the two minutes it took to get to the first guide-worthy sight. We followed behind him strung out in a line of forty-people along the walkway.

We had noticed Italians and their cell phones already. It seems to be more than an addiction. If you see a group of Italians standing around, say, waiting for a bus, half of them will be on the cellphone. If you take taxi ride, the driver will be making calls as he drives. If you see two people walking together, one will probably be chatting on his or her cellphone. Another couple may be sitting together in a romantic restaurant with one staring off into space because the other is on the cellphone. I half expected to see a couple in a romantic embrace with one of them kissing and the other talking on the cellphone.

When we got to Piazza San Marco, the large central plaza in Venice, the guide got off the phone and described the history of the plaza. On three sides a colonnade of shops and cafes surrounds the plaza. Ornate stone lacework covers the front of these buildings. Our guide explained that these were once all the public buildings of Venice. On the fourth side of the square is the Saint Marks Cathedral, a very ornate and different looking church. The guide explained that the church was designed in the Byzantine tradition, making it more like eastern churches than the other major cathedrals of Italy.

The outside of Saint Mark’s is strange looking by big Italian cathedral standards. The large, dark domes that crown it look like the onion domes we associate with the Kremlin. The church façade doesn’t soar up like the other Duomo’s we’ve seen. It seems long and low, with a long balcony filled with tourists splitting its facade. In the middle of this balcony, a group of four giant, non-religious-looking, bronze horses looms over the entrance. The horses—or the Quadriga as these groups of horses are called—were originally take from ancient Constantinople by one of the crusades that went awry. Instead of going onto recover the holy land from the Moslems, it got side-tracked by conquering the Christian Constantinople. Part of the booty that was brought back to Venice were these four horses. Similar quadirga teams of horses decorated most major ancient building, but they have all been lost to time except these taken from the last capital of the old Roman empire. They were hung on the front of the cathedral as a kind of trophy.

Of course, the horses we saw on the outside of Saint Mark’s now aren’t the real bronze horses taken from Constantinople during the crusades. Like so much of the art you see outside in Italy, these are actually replicas. The originals are inside in a museum in the church. The air pollution was ruining them when they were outside. They had to be put somewhere where you could charge a fee to see them. This theme is repeated throughout Italy.

The plaza and church are named after Saint Mark, the author of one of the gospels. Saint Mark is the patron saint of Venice because his body was stolen from Alexandria in Egypt where he died and brought to Venice around the seventh century. Venice was a rising power at the time and was in the market for a new patron saint. Its previous patron saint, Ambrose, I think, was an okay saint, but the rich Venetians wanted to move up in the heavenly hierarchy. Getting the body of Saint Mark was a real coup. The result was San Marco’s square and the church which entombs his body today. The cool-looking winged lion, the symbol for Saint Mark, also became the symbol for Venice. These people really knew their status symbols.

We were then given an interior tour of the cathedral. Rebecca and I had been in it before, but it was flooded at the time and hard to appreciate. Now there are long lines of tourists forming. One of the reasons they start this walking tour at 8AM was so we could get in before the wait got too long. As it is, we are the second group in.

While we are waiting to get in, the guide explained the plaza. Our little crowd of forty American tourists huddled in the middle of a much larger crowd of tourists building in the waiting lines. During his explanation, our guide got a telephone call. He answered it. When he finished, he drew us closer to him. He said that he was talking too loudly. With so many tourists all together, the authorities need the tour guides to keep the noise down. Apparently, someone, maybe one of the other guides, maybe some plaza manager, had Piero’s cell phone number. When they recognized that he was talking too loudly, they gave him a call.

After a short wait, Piero led us into the church. The floor inside, which was a pool of water on our last visit, is so uneven it is wavy. We were told that the buildings in Venice, at least the major ones like the cathedral, were built on pylons that were driven deep into the marshland that made up the original islands on which Venice was build. On top of these pylons, a wood floor was laid and over that, the marble floor that we see on the church.. They guess that something like ten million pylons originally made up the foundation of San Marco’s. Unfortunately, over the centuries, many have rotted away, leaving parts of the floor to settle, making the floor as wavy as the edge of a lasagna noodle.

Unlike many cathedrals, San Marco’s isn’t very well-lit. It is rather dark and gloomy. In the entrance, it has wonderful golden mosaics in the eastern style. Unlike most mosaics, which are ceramic tile or stone, these are made from glass. They are gold because thin leaves of gold are trapped between layers of glass. The inside of the church looks eastern. A wall separates the public parts of the cathedral from the altar. Piero led us past the tomb of Saint Mark. The most impressive feature for me was the marble mosaics on the floor are fantastic, which made fantastic geometric designs. Rebecca wanted me to remember them so that I could duplicate them in our house, maybe in the back years.

After the church, our tour continued. Piero took us past the campanile, the bell tower. It consists of red brick without all the fanciful, stone, decorative lacework that covers the rest of Venice. It looks oddly out of place. It reminded me of Big Ben in London. The guide explained that this is the only non-original building on the square. The original bell tower fell in 1906. Venice rebuilt almost immediately. However, this doesn’t explain its distinctive appearance. The current tower is an exact duplicate of the original. The only difference is that it has an elevator inside that you can ride to the top to see the area around Venice.

Next to the cathedral is the Doges palace, the center of government in ancient Venice. The Doge was the title of the leader elected by the rich merchants who ran Venice for most of its history. A Doge, once elected, served for life. There were a hundred and twenty-something Doges until Venice was absorbed into a larger empire in the time of Napoleon.

The palace is big and covered with all different colors of marble. It was being restored so half of it was covered with a giant, building-sized tarp to hide the scaffolding. What was amazing about this tarp was that it contained a picture of the palace façade it covered. The picture continued the hidden part of the building in actual size. From a distance, it kept the look of the plaza perfectly. On the top part of this picture, the stonework of the façade was drawn back like a curtain. It showed the inside of the palace, focusing on a huge painting that was in the art gallery inside. It was a picture of a woman, representing Venice, being showered with riches by Neptune, the lord of the sea. This was a very cool idea, much nicer that the tin can sheet metal covering La Scala in Milan.

Our guide then took us around the palace, to the waterfront. While we walked, he had another important phone call to make. He got off the phone as we got to the middle of a large stone bridge over the canal behind the Doge’s palace. From here he pointed out the famous "Bridge of Sighs." This is the only covered bridge out of the four or five hundred bridge in Venice. Today it is known as a place for lover’s too kiss as their boat passes under it, but originally the sighs of its name had nothing to do with love. The bridge connected the Doge’s palace as the seat of justice to the main jail, which sits across a canal behind the palace. The sighs were the moans of prisoners as they were taken to be tortured and killed. The bridge was covered to prevent prisoners from escaping their fate by jumping into the narrow canal. No wonder it is considered so romantic.

The guide told us about one of the more famous prisoners in the Venetian jail, Casanova. He was jailed, as you might expect, for undermining public morals. Actually, he wasn’t really kept in the jail across the , but in special cells on the top floor of the Doge’s palace reserved for the more celebrated and well-connected prisoners. He escaped imprisonment through the roof of the palace with the help of some well-placed bribes from influencial friends. He escaped to France and died some little town in Eastern Europe. The guide made it sound like Venice would really like his body back. A lot of fighting over the bodies of famous, dead people still goes on in Italy, mostly because of the tourist business.

We walked back to the plaza. This time, the guide took us to the front of the famous clock tower. Of course, we couldn’t really see the clock tower. Another building-sized tarp pictures covered of the front of the building. Therefore, we got to see an actual sized picture of the clock. What was particularly interesting about this clock repair was that my Italian Fodor’s guidebook says that you can’t see the clock because of its restoration. Fodor’s published the book nine years before our trip so this work has been going on for awhile.

I wondered if anyone else noticed that the picture of the clock face was wrong. The clock tower actually has two clocks on it. One is digital, showing the time in numbers. The other is a weird clock that shows the time by showing the position of the sun as if on a sundial. Whoever made this giant facsimile made a mistake. One of those clocks, the digital one, shows the time as twelve noon. At the same, the sun position shows that it is about six-thirty. Because it stands about four stories tall, I can truly say that this is the biggest mistake I have ever seen.

The tour ended by taking us to one of the famous Venetian glass factories. They did a very nice demonstration of glass blowing. It ended with the artist making of a glass horse. He made about six tugs and twists at the molten glass. In about three minutes, we had a glass horse, rearing on its hind legs. It was a little long in the legs and a little hunch-backed, but it was still an impressive demonstration. It clearly took years to learn the right tugs and twists to make a horse.

After the glass demonstration came the sales pitch. The salesman was a smooth as any carnival pitchman you’ve ever seen. It was just like a slicer-dicer advertorial on late night television. He dinged the glass together to show how pure it sounded. He tipped over special cups. Their heavy, round bottoms made them automatically right themselves. He dropped the glass to show how durable it was only to catch it at the last second. He passed the pieces around to the ladies of the audience. He knew who the buyers were.

The only problem with his pitch was that the glass prices at this "factory" were about four times what they were in the stores outside. I had already had an extensive tour of the shops the night before, courtesy of my female family members. Those prices were high. These prices were astronomical.

Some one asked him if they negotiated on the price.

"We are not a garage sale," the salesman said haughtily.

And indeed they weren’t. However, we in the factory for quite awhile longer because it was another bathroom stop on the tour. Mom, Michele, and Rebecca all had to wait their turn as they went up a flight of stairs to the bathroom. (No bathroom in Italy is on the same floor as anything else. You always have to walk up or down a flight of stairs to get there.) Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time looking at the glass and the sales people selling the glass. They impressed me by how easily they switched from English to Japanese for the next tour group. These people were geniuses.

After the glass tour, the family had coffee at the Fabian on the Plaza San Marco. We had a few moments to kill before the gondola tour. The Fabian is THE famous café where people have sipped coffee and watched the tourist playing with the pigeons for hundreds of years. Some famous people have sat at the Fabian and watched tourists play with the pigeons. For only five dollars for a cup of coffee, we joined their ranks.

After coffee, we met most of the tour group again under a modern sculpture of a lion’s tail. The lion is the symbol of Saint Mark. The "sculpture" of its tail is this huge yellow thing coming out of a window on the square opposite from the cathedral. It was part of a millennial exhibition. Of course, when the guide told us that this was where we were going to meet, we didn’t recognize it as a tail. We all thought that it was one of those bright plastic chutes we’d already seen in Milan to take trash down to the street from remodeling. We were quite impressed when he pointed out the furry ball at the end that turned it magically from a dump chute into a lion’s tail.

This time we met to take one of the famous Venetian gondola rides. This was an additional tour, not included in our package. We had to pay and extra thirty-five dollars per person, which was cheaper than regular rates, but that was because we would have six people in each boat. We were promised music and singing, which you don’t get with the normal gondola ride. However, when we were standing in line, one of the men in our group discovered that each boat didn’t have a singer. We had one singer and accordion player for our whole group of boats. This gentleman was incensed because he thought that he was getting his own singer. Because he was complaining, Enzo move him ahead of Rebecca and I so that he was in the boat with the entertainment.

Now it was my turn to complain. Actually, I didn’t complain much. I just pointed out to Enzo that if he rewarded everyone who made a fuss, soon everyone would be fussing about everything. He rewarded me for my complaint by getting a boat that had only three people in it. Rebecca and I had the "lover’s seat" in the back and our only company was the twenty-something redhead, who for some reason was never with her parents.

We were right behind the boat with the singing, which was great. They sang loud enough so that the other boats in our tour could hear. That was probably too loud if you were actually in that boat. I think Enzo was actually taking his sly revenge on the complainer by setting him in that particular boat.

It was very romantic, sliding through the canals, trailing behind the music. Rebecca and I cuddled together in the seat. The gondolier behind us polling the water. The only problem was that, every time Rebecca and I kissed, the gondolier got upset. He would shout and shake the boat. We kissed anyway, but his antics were distracting. I was half afraid he was going to hit us with his long oar. Was there some Italian law against necking in gondolas? Did too many tourists get carried away and fall overboard? We never did find out what his problem was.

After the gondola ride, we got some lunch on the way back to the hotel. We found a little restaurant around the corner from the Splendid that was perfect. We got a table near a window on the canal. We could see the gondolas of tourist pass by as we ate. We started a nice habit of ordering a carafe of wine with our lunch. We discovered that this eased the pains of touring nicely.

We then dropped Mom off at the hotel. Michele, Rebecca and I headed off to see the Academy and Guggenheim museums. It was a longer walk than Mom wanted to make; in addition, she’d seen enough museums.

Michele, Rebecca and I headed back through the Plaza San Marco and out the other side. The crowds of tourist were building. We passed a cookie and candy shop that lured us in. The smell was delicious. Inside, Rebecca tried to buy some almond cookies. Unfortunately, the clerk couldn’t make change for our smallest note, a 50,000-lira bill worth about thirty dollars. The clerk first went out the back. After about five minutes, we were wondering if she’d take our money and gone for lunch. She then reappeared without change and started heading out the front door. We stopped here and found the three or four thousand lira we needed as change.

One of the more interesting features of the shop was a fine selection of pornographic chocolates. It looked like someone had gone through the Karma Sutra, taken all the pictures of sexual positions, and turned them into chocolate bars. Apparently, children don’t come into these candy stores very often. I was curious about the tradition involved. Was this just a treet for the tourists, or do Venetian husbands make a selection of a certain position, buy the candy and then give it to their wives as a suggestion? My Italian was not nearly up to the task of asking.

Rebecca and Michele stopped in another antique shop further up the walkway. I waited outside. A group of twenty-something, young female English tourists stopped at the window to look. They were talking about Italian men. I asked if Italian men still pinched women all the time. Twenty years ago, when I made my first trip to Italy, it had been quite a popular activity. Rebecca told stories of young men putting their arm around her as she tried to cross the street. The girls had never heard of the tradition, but expressed their displeasure at the fact that Italian man had discontinued the tradition. Another sign of the passage of time.

We walked through several smaller plazas and then crossed the Grand Canal on a large wooden bridge. Climbing up the bridge was like climbing a small hill. Poor Michele needed to take two or three breaks to make it up. It gave us a nice opportunity to enjoy the scene, the beautiful buildings that surrounded us, the colorful traffic on the canals, and, of course, the curious things floating down in the canals.

Looking down at the canals, it occurred to me that you could never really drown in them. One reason is that most of them are only about three feet deep. Even in the Grand Canal that serpentines its way through the middle of Venice and is all of ten feet deep, you still couldn’t drown. It is almost certain that you would die of infection long before you actually expired from water in your lungs.

We finally got to the Academy museum thought the walk was longer than what we had expected. I wanted to see two pictures specifically. One was The Tempest, an enigmatic picture of a young woman nursing a child under a tree. Across a stream from a woman is a young soldier, apparently not noticing the woman, despite the fact that she seems to have forgotten her skirt and is quite naked from the waste down. In the background is a medieval town with a storm hovering over it. One thing that makes The Tempest so interesting is that the artist painted it at a time when everyone else was painting exclusively religious subjects. You can see this clearly from the paintings around it which were all taken from the same school at the same time. Rooms and rooms of crucifixions and Madonnas and this naked lady and her indifferent soldier.

The other painting I wanted to see was Titian’s Pieta, the last painting by the great artist. He painted it when he was in his nineties and Italy was racked with plague. The picture show Mary holding the dead body of Jesus, but it also have a self-portrait of the old Titian praying beside the body. The body of Jesus and the other figures in the painting including the painter are ghostlike as if dead. Only Mary seems real and alive. In the lower right hand corner, there is a painting within the painting. The Titian of the painting was working on another smaller painting of himself and his son before the throne of God. What makes the painting especially spooky is the knowledge the both Titian and his son dies the following year of the plague.

After touring the Academia museum, we went on to try and find the Peggy Guggenheim Museum of modern art. The museum is set up in what used to be her house on the Grand Canal. It almost fooled us because we came into the museum from a walkway behind the house. This building had some art drawings in it, but after going through it in ten minutes, we were wondering if that was all there was. We hadn’t seen a single painting, just some sketches. We walked out to a sculpture garden out back only to find another building at the other side. This was the real museum. It had a lot of modern painting in it, but very little that any of us liked. Instead, we found ourselves admiring the house, especially the marble floors. It must have been a beautiful place to live.

We did see a picture of a man sitting down that was interesting. The artist painted the picture in the bright, crayon-like colors. The man was in an overstuffed chair, staring off into space or a wall or something. His seemed to be in a trance, but at the same time the bright colors made him seem almost frantic. This picture was done at the beginning of the century, but it almost perfectly captured the look of someone zoned out on television. The artist was a true visionary.

On our way out of the museum, we walked around looking at the sculpture garden. In one corner, we found the grave of Peggy Guggenheim herself. On the wall next to her memorial was a list of names. It said: "In memory of my beloved: Sammy, Duke, Sheldon, Peppy, Snuggles, Pugsly, Veronica, Buck, Perry,

Sheila, Piddles, Corky, Dikens, Mr. Loggy" and so on. After each name was a span of years. The shortest was three of four. The longet was eight or nine.

"I think I read that she was very close to her pets," Michele said.

"Oh, good," I said. "I found myself thinking Munchausen-by-proxy."

This generated a good laugh only because I understood the tastes of my audience. Munchausen-by-proxy is the mental disorder where the mother makes her children sick and eventually kills them in order to get attention for herself.

We found ourselves too tired to walk back to the hotel, so we planned to ride vaporetto, that is, the water-taxi system, back to the Hotel Splendid. The water-taxi runs up and down the main-canal of Venice, stopping at tall the major locations along the way. Mostly we wanted to take it to save Michele the climb over the wooden bridge. Unfortunately, when we got to the stop by the Academia, there wasn’t anyone at the ticket booth. There was only a sign that said, in Italian, "be back soon." The ticket seller didn’t return until the boat was already at the dock. After rushing to try and get some tickets, I discovered that we would simply have bought them on the boat.

The ride on the water-taxi turned out to be better idea than we thought. Not only did it save our sore feet, but it offered one of the best views of the Grand Canal. The canal is lined with beautiful palaces, all decorated with the lace-like granite that distinguishes the buildings of Venice. The canal was filled with gondolas and motorboats, but it was so broad that it still seemed empty.

We got off at the next stop, which was the Plaza San Marco. It had seemed like we had walked a long way to get to the Academia, but we had actually seen very little of the city. Getting off at the plaza, we passed all types of souvenir stands similar to ones at the Venetian parking lot. Rebecca reminded us all of pickpockets.

I was less interested in pickpockets than in this small child. He was about three years old. What made him special were his shoes. He had a special pair that squeaked with every step. Each bouncing step sounded like a Rubber Ducky squeaky toy: Someone actually designed these shoes to do this intentionally. Moreover, the child’s parents actually bought those shoes intentionally. You could hear the kid coming from about a hundred feet. Fast squeaks when he ran. Slow squeaks when he slowed. Blessed silence when he stopped. Moreover, his parents obviously put these shoes on him intentionally. I was amazed.

I suppose that it made sense as a security device. You didn’t have to keep your eye on the kid to know exactly where he was. Your ears could follow him. If the squeaking stopped, you naturally looked to see what he was getting into. No kidnapper would be tempted to grab such a noticeable kid. You would hear if the kid got too close to the water. It was a good security device. Of course, it seemed like it had to drive the parents quite insane by the end of the day.

These shoes appeal to my sense of fun. Maybe I’ll see if I can import them into the U.S. American parents are certainly paranoid enough.

While walking through the souvenir stands, I also notice something that had been going on for awhile, but had until now escaped my attention. I noticed that people trying to sell their goods always seem to pick Rebecca out of the crowd to go up to. There is something about her that just screams out to the sensitive salesperson "buyer!"

Actually, not only sales people are attracted this unique quality of hers. For all our lives, we’ve noticed that once Rebecca going into a store, everyone else wants in that store as well. We have walked into hundred of empty stores with lonely shopkeepers only to have a dozen other tourist file in behind us. There is something about seeing Rebecca in a store that suddenly makes its merchandise seem much more appealing. Her magic even works when she simply starts looking at a certain type of goods. If she picks up something to look at it and puts it down, people will start forming a line so that they can look at it too. This is a very strange power. All our lives together I’ve hoped to find a way that makes some money from it, but thus far it is merely inconvenience.

We were able to make our way through people trying to sell Rebecca things and walked back to our hotel. We were ready for a nap, but it was about time for dinner. Mom, who had had plenty of rest, wanted to get going. Before we went out, we went up to the rooftop garden of the Splendid. It was just beautiful at sunset. You could look at and see the rooftops of Venice with the domes of churches in the distance. This would be a nice hotel to return to, especially if we could are room with a real bathtub and double bed.

We walked through the alleys to find a couple of cute restaurants that we’d seen the nice before coming back from the guidebook restaurant of the previous evening. We had some trouble picking between two of them. We finally decided on the Trattoria La Scala on the Conte Lucatecco because it looked the busiest. After we got a table for four, it was a bit of a wait to getting a waiter. We saw many waiters, but they were all zipping by carrying food to the other tables. Although it was early by Italian time, the restaurant was full. Of course, waiting for a waiter wasn’t such a problem since we were having trouble decided on what to eat. When the waiter finally stopped at table, he was in an obvious rush. We started to give our order, but kept mixing up first plates and second plates. Finally, the waiter tore of the page of the pad he’d been writing on and tore it dramatically in two.

"Let’s start over," he suggested politely.

This time, we got the first and second plates in the right order. You see, in Italy, the Italians order multi-course meals. They start with an antipasto, that is, an appetizer. Then go on to the "primo" or first course. This is usually pasta, soup or a rice dish. Then they go onto the "secondo," that is, the second course. This is a meat course. The meat course is usually accompanied by "cortorni," accompaniments. These are various potato and vegetable dishes. A salad course, a fruit course and finally a desert course can follow the secondo course. To do it right, you intersperse a variety of apperitivos, vinos, and digestivos with these various courses.

Of course, we never do this right. We want to start with a soup or salad course and have pasta as a main course. Even in Venice, where they are used to barbarian tourists, this makes them a little crazy. It is very hard for them to understand when we want what.

This isn’t to say that we haven’t tried it the Italian way. Rebecca and I have done it on a few occasions. It takes about three hours. You get really drunk. You can’t move afterwards. It’s fun, but paralyzing. If you don’t keep the alcohol coming, you are full by the time you finish the pasta. If you keep drinking, you can get through the whole meal, but it is always a bad idea to start eating like this at the beginning of a trip. Especially if you want your clothes to fit by the end of it.

We notice some people from our tour group at a table in the back. They too were trying to get a waiter. I wanted to go over and apologize to them. After taking our order, I think the waiter needed a rest from tourists.

We had another delightful meal. I discovered "gnocchi boscaiolla." Gnocchi is a dumpling-like noodle made of potato flour. In this case, it was in a highly seasoned sauce with mushrooms, cheese, and tomatoes. Of course, the real secret to European dining is the house wine. We ordered red wine everywhere we went and it was always great. The perfect sauce for every dish.

A young woman came into the restaurant selling her pictures. Of course, she went right up to Rebecca. The girl probably didn’t even plan on coming in the restaurant until she walked by and saw Rebecca sitting there. Rebecca said that she wasn’t interested without even looking. The young woman tried a few other patrons, but you could tell that she was disappointed. If you can’t get Rebecca to look at your goods, you don’t have much of a future as a merchant.