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of prosecco from the Veneto blended with white peach purée and served ice cold. It’s beyond delicious, and having just one requires willpower. You’ll be in good spiritual company here—Truman Capote, Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin all haunted Harry’s, as did Ernest Hemingway and the heiress and art patron Peggy Guggenheim. Today there will be well-dressed Venetians inside and perhaps too many tourists. So visit Harry’s at least once. But for a true giro di ombre, head to other places for a tipple as the sun goes down, to bacari that are more local and more chic. Wander the streets as the many church bells mark the time, with a backdrop of kids shouting in a square as they thump a soccer ball off a thousand-year-old wall. One memorable night I stood outside of La Fenice, the fabled opera house. The performance was sold out but you could hear opera emanating from the windows and doors, filling nearby streets with a performance too big to be contained within four walls. No other city is quiet enough for quite this experience. Your next stop could be Al Prosecco, which is on Campo San Giacomo all’Orio, one of Venice’s great neighborhood squares and away from the wellworn tourist routes. Here you can watch the locals on the square and sip some of the city’s finest prosecco, even sampling the slightly more sophisticated prosecco fermo, a non-effervescent version. Venice is remarkably safe after nightfall. I’ve always thought that for that reason it’s the best city on Earth in which to get lost. Eventually you’ll find your way to wherever you’re going, thanks to the kindness of strangers or maybe a street map from your hotel stuck into a back pocket. (Note that your phone’s GPS may not work well in the stone maze.) I know from experience about getting lost. One night I left a restaurant with a group of friends, offering to lead everyone back to our hotel. I pride myself on my innate sense of direction, and so we walked left and then right, down one passageway and then another, into a square and beyond, as they talked and I
SPRING/SUMMER 2017
Feel those cooling breezes wafting in from the lagoon? Pretty soon you’ll notice that the masses of day trippers have departed with the sun—budget tourists who’ve left for their hotels on the mainland in Mestre. That’s fine. Now the curtain has risen and Venice has become your secret show. But this isn’t Berlin, Rome or Prague—it’s not a place for partying. The fact is that restaurants are stacking their chairs not long after 10 p.m., while many bars close by 11. It’s the rare boîte that stays open until midnight. So I prefer to be in league with the locals, who choose twilight to leave their homes for a local bar or café for an aperitivo. In Venice, that drink is a highly ritualized one and is typically either an ombra or a spritz. An ombra is a tiny glass of red or white wine that is tossed back quite quickly. A spritz is an aperitivo of white wine, Campari and a shot of seltzer or sparkling water. Prosecco, the bubbly white wine made in the hills of the Veneto region, is also a favorite. This is also when classic Venetian wine bars, or bacari, offer snacks called cicchetti, the Venetian version of tapas. They can include baccalà mantecato (creamed salt cod) on warm polenta, or polpette (breaded morsels) of meat, cheese or tuna. There could be sardele in saor (sardines with sweet and sour onions and sultanas) or ovosodo con arringa (hard boiled egg topped with herring fillet). My favorite is seppioline alla griglia (grilled baby squid). The best way to enjoy these true Venetian cicchetti is to do as many locals do and engage in a giro di ombre, literally an ombra-crawl, hitting various small bacari. In this twilight ritual you literally rub shoulders with a wide range of Venetians relaxing. And after a while you realize you’ve also eaten dinner—there’s no need for a formal meal. It’s a cool melange of sightseeing, dining and drinking. But where to go? For decades, the favorite tourist haunt for an aperitivo has been Harry’s Bar, which opened in 1931 and claims to have invented the Bellini, named after the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini. The cocktail consists
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