Raw Shrimp in Venice

Read part one of this travel story, “Water Rots the Boat Poles.”

Listen to the author read this essay aloud on Season 4, Episode 1 of the Modo di Bere Podcast.

I pretended that I wanted to be alone, and it wasn’t working. 

I’d managed to find the Cannaregio neighborhood mostly by feel after a get-lost-on purpose walk, which is is how I’d been convinced to spend my first day in Venice. 

It had been good, to be alone with my thoughts, as I drifted over tiny bridges, through twisting narrow streets, past walls dotted with tumbling plants with faces carved into the stones. I wouldn’t have been half as dazzled if I’d been listening to some companion talk instead of noticing the acoustical changes rendered to a European townscape when the streets are made of water. Every bird chirp and echo had artful shadow. 

Reflections in Venetian shop window

It was off-season, April, and the people I passed live in Venice. Kids in school uniforms bouncing balls. Old people with canes clacking on the cobblestones. Women discussing how to tactfully un-double-book their vacation rental. Deliverymen maneuvering ingenious carts  designed to be cantilevered up and down the endless stairs. For every tourist gondola there were five everyday motor boats filled with city residents, dogs and the odd refrigerator. 

Faces in the stone

I was transformationally charmed and retroactively incredulous of anyone who’d ever complained about Venice. Looking back, I couldn’t actually remember anyone trashing Venice itself, only lamenting that too many people want to enjoy it, a situation that creates an un-Italian possibility of bad restaurants. But the restaurants I was noting through iPhone photographs for the many return trips I knew I’d be making to this place were almost painfully enticing, with daily menus written in brown paper that included Venetian spellings that omitted the “l” among vowels. 

After my sound walk, I enjoyed the frisson of boarding the Vaporetto, a Venetian water bus, with zero understanding of where it was bound. I could be on the last bus of the day headed to an outer island with no way to get back, and that was the adventure I committed to when I finally figured out how to pay and enter the boat. But it only took me up and down the Grand Canal. 

Only the Grand Canal. The flapping tails of the Venetian flag, shaped like no other flag I’d ever seen, saluted me from the facades of every historic palazzo from the movies. I had dreams about Venice before I’d ever been, that I was laughing in a boat with all my Italian friends, who were all wearing fabulous clothes. It wasn’t a vanity dream. It was a hit of pure and radical pleasure, the kind that might make you explode like Monty Python’s Mr Creosote’s wafer-thin mint. The Vaporetto wasn’t exactly like the boat in my dream, but I grew up in Nebraska and didn’t see the open ocean until I was sixteen. Boats and saltwater and seafood make me feel like a little kid excited to see a firetruck. If I’d had a companion, I might have been too distracted to feel the delicious danger all the way down to my toes.

Venetian flag

I got off the boat and ambled up and to the left, also known as northwest, and was thrilled to locate the Cannaregio sestiere—I’d just learned that word, like “quarter” except that Venice has six districts. The wine bar I’d been told to visit spends all night explaining that they don’t serve any spritzes, even though this fact is also clearly printed on a large sign by the counter.  

As the sun started to set, I sat down in a boat where you’re allowed to drink wine in plastic cups. I made the dramatic decision that I wouldn’t try to talk to anyone. I’d continue to be alone, to observe humanity, like a writer.

The truth is that I was feeling shy. I’d been in Italy for two weeks doing wine things with wine people. No matter how many of them were strangers, I could walk up to anyone and ask what they did in wine. On the final day, faced with actual strangers, I resolved to remain stylishly aloof. 

I lasted about thirty seconds before I twisted around and made friends with the couple on the bench behind me, using my failsafe method of asking someone about their local dialect. Sara had dark hair and an impish sense of humor, Fabio had brown eyes and a friendly face. They lived outside of the city and had come in to make a day trip. 

Fabio asked me, “Have you had a Select Spritz?”

“No,” I said, “But I ordered an Aperol Spritz for lunch, even though I know that’s too early for a spritz.” 

“Aha!” said Fabio. “But in Venice, we drink Spritz all day! And not with Aperol, with Select!” 

He paused and looked at me seriously: “Never more than five.” 

Fabio and Sara

I liked this new spritz rule a lot. Fabio had an early morning at work the next day and they were supposed to head home, but clearly they had to take me out for my first Select spritz instead. 

So Fabio and Sara came with me to dinner at Casa Bonita, the restaurant my pal Narciso from the hotel had recommended when I said I wanted to try moeche, a rare soft shell crab found only in Venice. I’d been told to try them by the by the wine writer Filippo Magnani. 

We ordered a giant plate of seafood. The tiny crabs were battered and fried golden, an excellent bite out of many before us.  

The “proper” name is “moleche,” but I”m spelling it the way Venetians spell (and pronounce) it: moeche, leaving out the “l”

“Sara, I see they use two words in Italian for shrimp, ‘Gambero’ and ’Scampi.” What’s the difference? Are they different animals?”

To indicate that the two prawns move differently, Sara wiggled her fingers like shrimp legs, moving her hand forward or backward. 

“Gambero,” she said, and moved the imaginary shrimp backward. “Doodle doodle doo!” 

“Scampo!” Wiggling the shrimp legs forward. “Deedle deedle dee!”

Fabio joined in the “deedle deedle dees,” deeper for the Gambero and higher pitched for the Scampo, as Sara repeated the leg movements of the various prawns several more times. 

But now it was time to eat the raw shrimp. As a teenager in Nebraska, I got called weird when I wanted to eat at the new sushi place that opened up in town. Now I’ve eaten many oysters, many an Italian raw fish “crudo,” and even some raw horse meat in Verona, but I still felt a little challenged when I saw a raw shrimp on the platter. Most of the raw shrimps I’d handled in my life were thawed from a freezer bag, gray and a little slimy. 

I explained in Italian that I think Americans might find raw shrimp to be a little much. 

“Why?!” said Sara, in shocked incomprehension. “It is the flavor of the sea!” 

Well, I had to try the shrimp now. 

Sara was right. It was the flavor of the sea. From this moment on, I said yes to every raw shrimp that has come my way, and these have accounted for several of my life’s list of most sublime bites. 

Seafood platter at Casa Bonita restaurant in Venice

By this point, I thought I had had the perfect day. But then Fabio and Sara called their friend who has a boat, and he picked us up in the canal and took us for a boat ride in the lagoon!

The vaporetto was one thing, but I had never expected to go on a boat ride my first day in Venice! Everyone knows the gondolas are too expensive. But here we were in a little wooden motorboat, zooming around the dark flat water, looking at all the lights!

Fabio was astonished at my good luck. “Rose!” He said in awe. “Your first time…in Venice…..and you go….by a BOAT!” He was crying. 

The thing that moves me most about Italian people is how much they truly love to see other people enjoy themselves. And I truly was, enjoying myself, so much. I wiped a way a tear myself, then we docked the boat at a tiny, supremely local bar where the only drink is a Select spritz, glowing in the fluorescent light. Select is stronger than Aperol but less bitter than Campari, garnished with an olive as well as an orange. It is the perfect drink. The bar tender plucked each each ice cube from the ice bucket on the counter and served me another one.  There was a single old man inside, drinking a spritz. We went outside, where the young men were  singing rowdy drinking songs. 

Sara at Venetian bar, everyone drinking Select Spritz

Fabio and Sara continued my education of local sayings. 

“Gorna,” Sara over-pronounced, dramatically indicating the drain pipe running down the wall outside the bar door. “When you drink, too much, you are like a gorna!”

When I had drunk the exactly perfect amount of Venetian Spritz, Fabio and Sara walked me back to my hotel. I realized that if I had dined alone I would have wandered the streets forever, truly lost. Instead Fabio and Sara delivered me right to the gates of the Hotel Ca’ Nigra, where we parted as bitterly as old friends. 

Vaporetto passing under bridge, Venice

The next morning I continued living large and took a water taxi, a sort of fancy motorboat, from my hotel to the airport. Venice zoomed away behind me as the boat sped up and water droplets sprayed on my face. I felt like an absolute queen. 

I asked the driver to teach me a local saying. 

“Ti se sta bateza con acqua dei polpi” he said. “It’s what you say when someone is being stupid. It means ‘I think you were baptized in squid water.”

I laughed, then he asked me if I had tried the Select Spritz.

“Yes!” I said. “It is the most delicious spritz ever!”

“Brava!” He declared. “How many did you have?”

“Cinque!”

The water taxi driver responded with thundering approval.

Here are my recommendations for Venice. The first three go for anywhere. 

Learn some local slang. 

Eat the raw shrimp.

Make friends with somebody who owns a boat. 

And blow every last cent of your money on a water taxi at least once. They’ll feed you on the plane. 

The author blowing all her money on a water taxi, 2022