I sometimes wonder where the old adage about seeing yourself as others see you has gotten off to. I’m thinking of the recent procedure the US government has implemented for folks to get a visa waiver to enter the United States. It’s obvious these government wonks have no idea that the US is having some perception problems in the minds of potential visitors—or are working overtime to see that nobody even thinks of entering our beloved country.

Besides charging our visitors $10 for the privilege of paying for the advertising that tells them the US is a really neato place to visit, there is an outrageous questionnaire visitors must fill out before they’re given the privilege of embarking. I give thanks to by Charlie Leocha who penned Washington’s twisted tourism logic for this incredible insight into the insanity the US government makes visitors sweat through.

The questions foreigners have to answer include inquisitions into their “moral turpitude” among others. Have any idea what moral turpitude includes? Imagine if you were a foreigner!

The reason you have little knowledge of moral turpitude is that the concept is a legal one which has never been precisely defined. In fact, there is a 28 page PDF Document which attempts to help consular officers with the impossible task of determining a persons moral turpitude. If I’m reading it right, it would be pretty darn easy to deny entrance to just about anyone using the criteria established in this document. But then again, it’s pretty much all incomprehensible legal jargon.

Wanna come to my country, oh ye Italiani? Bring your suitcase, your passport, and your lawyer (who speaks English).

Oh, and don’t even think of coming to our great country if you’ve been a Nazi concentration camp guard. The form is quite specific on that one.

Why does the US government insist on treating everyone as a terrorist? Can’t you powerful folks blind to everything that goes on past our borders get over that? Can’t ya’ll see that treating people poorly is why tourism to the US is dying?

In the end, I agree with Charlie Leocha:

We will need far more than a Travel Promotion Act that adds another tax on entry and then creates a fluffy picture of the beauty of America in order to increase tourism to our United States. We need to begin treating tourists like the visitors they are and work at welcoming them into our country rather than treating them like suspected war criminals, potential child molesters, spies, terrorists or common crooks.

—-

Discuss why more women than men seem to actively promote Italian on our Facebook Fan Page.

By now you’ve probably heard about the study that showed the size of food in paintings of the Last Supper compared to head sizes of Jesus and the disciples had increased tremendously over the years, 69 percent to be exact.

Now, food to head ratio is not a common measure of, well, anything really. But in a press release, the authors state:

“The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food,” said Cornell’s Wansink, author of “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.” “We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history’s most famous dinner.”

Well, hold on a sec. Over the time of the sampled paintings, the plate size increased by 66%, it says in the lit. Artists were struggling with perspective and pseudo-perspective. If plate size increases proportionally in time and space to the size of the food on it, can we really say that art is reflecting the linear path toward overabundance of food?

In any case, you can get a very good idea of what medieval art was all about and how it relates to the study from Got Medieval: What’s All This About Super-Sized Last Suppers

To put it simply, this study is a load of crap. It’s a load of crap as big as your head. With my head, Jesus’s head, the apostles heads, and the Brothers Wansinks’ heads thrown in for good measure.

Ok, so Carl has some enticing bones to pick. But for me there’s another issue. It is this: we always see what fascinates us in the art we peer into. In my opinion, the study’s conclusion is backwards. Many want to see abundance, so they see the food as bigger, despite the fact the plate it’s on remains proportional to it. We think people should be stupider than their food, so we see shrunken skulls (ok, so the last one I made up because I’m ornery).

Remember when space travel was new? Boy, send in several plethoras of Chariots of the Gods! because we really, really wanted the advance of culture to be determined by what we’d find in space. Archaeologists (well, fringe archaeologists) were seeing space ships in every prehistoric engraving on earth. It’s the easy explanation we crave. “They were given that technology by little space men!” “Eat no salt and you can live forever!”

Sometimes, life is more complicated. You have to dig.

In any case, this phenomenon wasn’t the only occurrence. It happened earlier, when Victorians started developing “water closets” so they didn’t have to head to the outhouse in winter. Suddenly, according to archaeologists and pseudo archaeologists, every ancient Egyptian in the upper class had plumbing, every drain drained bodily fluids from voluntary emitters (when most likely those drains were a necessary part of the embalming process). Everyone looked for ancient bathrooms, and often found them.

We see what we want to see in the art in front of us. Instead of seething with wonder, we often seek the too-easy answer.

And that’s what the authors of the study did. As large corporations beat their hairy breasts and tout the wonders of the unrelenting genetic manipulation that has had allowed them to produce cheap crap food while they ravage the environment, we see it reflected in holy paintings. But it’s all an illusion. There, look at the plate…

Well, that’s how I see it anyway.

Last week I wrote a post about a sort of Journalism Talent Contest which I’m holding here on Blog from Italy.  This initiative is designed to help aspiring Italian journalists gain some exposure and, with a little luck, move on to greater things.  Well, I’m happy to announce that I have now received three applications.

There are still a few things to sort out, but with a little luck, a new face, or new faces, will soon grace the pages of Blog from Italy.  Actually, one applicant is not Italian!  I would like more Italians, which is why I’m writing this brief update.

I’m pretty confident that there is some hidden talent out there, and I hope it will drift in this direction.  If you, dear reader, have any friends who are Italian and who can write well in English, please give them a gentle nudge in this direction.  I know Blog from Italy is not the Associated Press, the BBC, Time magazine, or The Guardian, but the internet is a very public medium which certainly has the power to help reveal hidden talent.  And people from the aforementioned publications have been known to pay a visit or two to this here blog.

Remember too, that the nice people from GlobalPost may also offer budding journalists and opportunity to write for them.

Would you like to help out too?  Well, if you would, read on.

Help Spread the Word!

Spread the word, or, if you like, sponsor someone (contact me to find out how).  As an alternative, if you are someone who often purchases items from Amazon.com, then please use this search box to buy things.  If you do, then Blog from Italy will receive some commission which, if it grows, can be used to pay Blog from Italy contributors:



Amazon.com Widgets

I know times are hard, and they are really tough for young Italians at the moment, believe me, so any help you might be able to give will be greatly appreciated.

If enough is raised, I’ll turn Blog from Italy into a ‘real’ publication, pay people to write, and this will help Italians qualify as fully blown journalists in Italy.  It’s only a small contribution, I know, but if it helps even one or two people on to better things, I’ll be very happy, and if you’ve contributed to this, you can feel very happy too.  Let’s uncover some hidden talent together!

Thanks for reading.  An update on the new additions to Blog from Italy will follow in the next few days.

---

Copyright © blogfromitaly.com 2005 – 2010
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
Please note that GlobalPost.com and Shesdaily.blogspot.com have permission to use blogfromitaly.com content.
The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of copyright.

Ok, I didn’t really like Tuscany Tourism’s promotional advertisements when they first came out (see I So Don’t Want to Live Like This), and I still loathe their dreamy romanticism. But there is hope at the end of that dreary rainbow. The Around Tuscany blog network is doing some fine work.

I liked the recent post on Vespa Tours. It gives you a road map to experiential travel bliss—besides the suggested route map I mean.

Sure, if it’s your first trip to Tuscany you’ll want to stand in line with the tourists in Florence and do all that Medici gawking you came to do—but some of us who’ve poked around Italy for a while really appreciate the culture we find; we’d like to take one of those iconic scooters and zip fancy free through Tuscany, in part because all those button down-people devoting their lives and vitriol to keeping their neighbors from getting proper health care think it’s a nutty thing to—do but secretly they’d give a left ventricle to be there right along side of you on one of those little two wheeled time bombs, senza dubbio.

What a great way to pass one’s, ahem, 45th birthday – in Venice with lots of prosecco, good food in good restaurants, and great company too.  Even the weather was kind and the great spirit kept the rain at bay too!  I like Venice an awful lot.

One of the great advantages of living in Italy is that spending a weekend in somewhere like Venice can be done easily and painlessly.  It takes just over two and a half hours to get from Milan, where I live, to the Venice by fast train.  The FrecciaRossa service was very efficient too.  On-line booking simplifies things a great deal.  With great thanks to my Italian other half for having kindly made all the Venice trip arrangements.

We stayed for one night in a very well appointed new four star hotel, called the Hotel Al Duca di Venezia, which sits just off the Grand Canal and is easy to walk to from Venice’s station, and this hotel is within striking distance of some good eateries too.

On the subject of places to eat in Venice, we tried three, each of which was a little different, but we ate well in all of these Venice restaurants, and drank copious quantities of prosecco!

I also took along my camera, but not the tripod, as ’she who must be obeyed’ issued an oral legislative decree in which she stated that the tripod be left in Milan, or else.

Here are some notes on the three Venice restaurants we tried: the Osteria Al Nono Risorto, the Osteria Mocenigo, and the Trattoria Alla Madonna, as well as few Venice flavour photos too.

Osteria Al Nono Risorto Restaurant

We stumbled on this place by accident while heading towards Saint Mark’s.  Well, it was a lucky accident, as the place, which does not look great from the outside, was very pleasant internally.  Semi rustic look, full of life and full of Italians too – always a good sign.  We ordered a selection which included sepe in nero – squid in ink, a bowl of mussels and cockles/clams for my 6 year old wee one, and Baccalà for me, plus a carafe, which became two, of prosecco.  I can’t remember what else we ordered, but the prosecco was not at all bad considering that it was ‘house’ plonk.

My Baccalà was tasty, even if it is not my favourite Italian dish, and neither is inky squid, however the two Italians present, my other half Cristina, and her friend, also Cristina, both thought the food was good.  As a general rule, if Italians give food the thumbs up, you can expect the flavours to be genuine.

As a matter of interest, part of the proceeds which the Al Nono Risorto restaurant raise go to the Italian medical charity Emergency, and the menu of this liberal eatery made it clear that gay couples were more than welcome too.  The rainbow peace flags set the tone, but it was not really a hippy joint.

The staff were efficient and everything arrived quickly.  The two little monsters resembling small boys who were with us, were welcome too.

Cost? Well, there were five of us, and we each had one main course, all was fish based, and the total came to around €90, including the wine and coffee.  That’s around €18 a head, say twenty to be on the safe side.  I came out feeling full – which is always a good sign, I feel.  I’d happily go back there too.

Link to Osteria Al Nono Risoto on Google Maps. Other people seem to think this is not a bad place to eat too, from the comments I’ve seen.

Osteria Mocenigo

The Mocenigo restaurant has been open for around three and a half years, and seems to be a popular spot, despite its rather anonymous looking entrance.  We did not book and had to eat up fairly quickly as the table we were at had been booked for nine.  Mocenigo more of an evening restaurant than the Al Nono Risorto and the subdued lighting gives it a nice romantic ambience.  There were several couples dining there when our happy little band descended upon the place.

Here, aside from the two very good bottles of prosecco Colbe we downed, we had the fish risotto, cheese potato gnocchi, spaghetti with mussels and cockles (My son’s favourite!), fried calamaro – squid rings, and I had San Pietro with potatoes. San Pietro is a white sea fish.

All was very good and cooked well enough to meet with a hearty thumbs up from the Italian contingent.  The fish risotto was of particular note, and the subtly flavoured, rather meaty San Pietro fish I ordered was lovely too, as were my cheesy gnocchi.

The only downside in this restaurant was the desert which I had.  It was supposed to have been a chocolate mousse, but it was really a cold chocolate custard, or budino, as they are called here.  This pretend mousse tasted OK, but I’ve had much better.

Service in the Mocenigo was very good, although we did have to wait quite a time while our orders were cooked. The results, however, were well worth the wait.

Aside from the mousse which wasn’t, I’d be more than happy to send people to this eatery.  Oh and I got a free pen from the gentleman on the table next to us, who, I later learned, was from Canada, and runs a technical support services, translation and technical writing business called Rossion Inc.  He gave me a Rossion pen to thank me for explaining what polenta is.  The Italian owner, I think it was, did try his best to explain polenta is made of maize, however the Italian pronunciation of maize sounds not unlike ‘mice’! How was your food? Very mice, thanks. Lovely nibbles.

Cost? Not far off €30 a head.  I had a two courses, whereas the others had one. We all had wine and coffee.  Not exactly cheap, but not at all expensive for Venice, I’ve been reliably informed.  Nice place.

Here’s the Osteria Mocenigo, Salizada San Stae, S. Croce, 1919, on Google maps, should you ever find yourself in Venice.  I’d say booking would be a good idea.  The Trip Advisor comments on this restaurant are a little mixed, but we had no problems whatsoever, and English is spoken.

Last, but by no means least, and recommended by Germano, a friend of ours from the Venice region, there was the Trattoria Alla  Madonna.

Trattoria Alla Madonna

Situated in side street close to the Rialto bridge, the Alla Madonna restaurant certainly was a hustling, bustling place at lunchtime, which was when we paid it a visit. As with the other two restaurants we tried, it looked somewhat uninspiring from the outside.  This, however, is quite often a good sign in Italy, and the number of people inside seemed to indicate that it was very popular.

We had not booked, and were probably lucky to have got a table, as the little room we sat in filled up shortly afterwards.

Here, apart from ordering the by now obligatory prosecco, the two Cristinas had the impressive looking fish starters served in upturned crab-shells, plus fish risotto, inky squid, and I went for the mixed fried fish.  My son ordered his usual: mussels and clams.

The starters, which I decided not to go for, did taste good and were very fresh.  My fried fish was good too, and the fish risotto was delicious, but quite different from the one we had had in the Mocenigo the previous evening.  The squid came on a bed of extremely well cooked spaghetti which was very well received by my Italian other half and her friend.

I did go for pud in the Alla Madonna, but the millefoglie, flaky pastry with confectioners custard and cream, was not the best I’ve ever had.

The only slight let down was the prosecco, which seemed to be a little on the flat side, and it was not quite as cool as I would have liked.

Service in the Alla Madonna was very good, and they did not complain when I got in the way with my camera either!

I don’t know how much it cost to eat in the Alla Madonna, as I did not foot the bill, but I think it was more or less in line with the other places we ate in, and is probably a lot less costly, and better quality, I suspect, than the elegant looking touristy places, with overly persuasive staff, which line the banks of the Grand Canal along Riva Del Vin.

Would I go back? Yes, I would, and I’d happily send others to Alla Madonna too.

Click here to see the approximate location of Calle Della Madonna on Google Maps.  To find it walk down Riva Del Vin with your back to the Rialto bridge, and keep an eye out for the Calle De La Madonna alleyway.  The restaurant is a short way down the alley, and wooden clad façade with two green lanterns mean that it is difficult to miss.

My Personal Favourite?

The Mocenigo. I liked the food, the prosecco, the low ceilings, and the subtle lighting, very much indeed.  It was by far the smallest of the three Venice restaurants we tried, but this was one of its advantages in my book.  A good place to take a close friend, I’d say.

Right, I’ve written enough, I’ll write about the interesting hotel another time.

Just in case you were wondering, aside from the pen, no money exchanged hands with regard to this post.  Indeed, if you do try any of the Venice restaurants mentioned, please do leave a comment, but note that management does change from time to time, so if someone happens upon this post in a year or so, keep this in mind.

Boy, do I like Venice!

Photographs by Alex Roe, ably assisted by a Canon EOS 40d, and a Tokina F4.0 12-24mm lens.

---

Copyright © blogfromitaly.com 2005 – 2010
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
Please note that GlobalPost.com and Shesdaily.blogspot.com have permission to use blogfromitaly.com content.
The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of copyright.