Home is something that you never really outgrow. Not fully – anyway. I’m the first to hold my hand up to that one. You know, I’m a fully fledged grown-up – with my own flat and a dog and a child and everything; but year on year, I migrate back here for the summer. There is something about the place where I grew up that keeps calling me back. Much like Odysseus, I might dally here or dally there – and enjoy it, no less – but Venice is my Ithaca. It’s my roots.
The lagoon air – virginal and unmarred by grey clouds of pollution; water – pleasingly salty – spraying on your face as you speed on a motorboat; the thrill of bumping gently over the waves – fast enough to feel like your flying; the chitter, chatter of gruff voices, cursing crudely in Veneziano, Venetian dialect. That’s what home for the summer holidays feels like. Sunny and carefree. And that feeling has never changed – not even when I turned thirty. Except now I have a little boy to share it with too.
Of course, if we’re going to talk ‘home’, then we need to talk food. It’s one of life’s great idiosyncrasies that somehow what you eat as a child dictates what you will crave for decades to come. There is nothing – nothing - quite so deeply nostalgic as the food of home.
Venice in the summer tastes like deep dark chocolate ice cream; plates of vongole cooked in a light white wine sauce with spaghetti doused in grassy olive oil and handfuls of fresh parsley; like moon-shaped slices of yellow melon – sugary sweet, and wrapped in prosciutto - and sage leaves deep fried in a batter as light as air. It’s not summer without jugs of homemade peach iced tea, made with fruit picked on the island of Sant’ Erasmo - that’s where the really good peaches come from; and hot water infused with lemon verbena grown in our garden - so very digestible Especially after the fried sage leaves. Venetian Summer is spaghetti all’astice eaten under the stars, al fresco and to the soothing sound of crickets crocheting in the distance.
