Siamo in Italia

For once I’m writing off line for posting once back on the internet (off the internet! Can you imagine!).

This is our fourth night in Venice, where we have been staying in a lovely apartment with high vaulted, beamed ceilings, and a walled garden with a tennis court. The kids’ room is a little attic-like space with a slanted beamed ceiling. Eliot declared it “snuggly”, and noted that Woods Hole (which perhaps due to the beams, it reminded her of) is “unsnuggly”. While we chose the apartment mainly for minimal distance to our favorite coffee place, it turns out to be more brilliantly located than expected—in a quiet calle just across a tiny bridge to the “best pizza in Venice” (say locals), a bulk wine store that sold me a half litre of cold prosecco to accompany dinner this evening for about a euro, and one minute from a lovely, relaxed open piazza-- here, campo-- where kids gather in the evening to skateboard and kick balls under the eye of wine-sipping parents in the several outdoor trattorias.

I’ll break this into a couple of parts.. starting Saturday: we arrived in the afternoon after a night with little sleep for anyone, but the kids handled the airports calmly then were overjoyed by the water taxi ride into town. We spent the afternoon exploring the neighbourhood, taking a short nap (parents, anyway: the kids romped in their room) and eating, late, at a traditional Venetian trattoria off our square-- seafood “fritti”, polenta and squid cooked in its ink, pasta with scampi and zucchini flowers, and for Anselm, spaghetti amatriciana. Eliot ate nothing, having passed out on Blaise’s lap.