A fine Sunday jaunt

We arrived at Murano’s Ponte Lungo several minutes after 12:30 last Sunday but Professor Ammerman was not yet waiting for us, and just before we turned a corner on the way to the bridge closer to the boathouse, Professor and his blue boat rounded the bend in the grand canal of Murano.  Caroline, Hiep, Howard, Preston and I boarded from a dock that had nearly flooded because of the high tide.  Professor leisurely backed out into the canal and motored us for half an hour straight across the lagoon sandbars submerged by the tide.  He pointed out the island that once housed the world’s first quarantine community utilized during the periods of the Plague that ravished Venice’s population, and a group of duck hunters on their way to areas of the lagoon popularized by Hemingway.  After we navigated a natural canal no wider then the boat was long, Professor let us out at the island of Sant’Erasmo for the Festa del Mosto while he searched for a place to tie the boat.

 

For the first time since I was home in July, I smelled the sweet smoke of a grill so I immediately joined the meandering line for food.  Professor quickly joined us and I forfeited the line when he bought two liters of mosto, partially fermented grape juice that would have later become wine.  The festival loosely celebrates the whole harvest of the lagoon’s most agricultural island, but despite the stands selling fruit and vegetables, the true attraction, and the name of the festival, is the mosto.  Some might call it impatience, but the mosto was actually remarkably smooth, and the lower alcohol content allows for continued consumption as proved to be crucial during our long wait for polenta, fennel, sausages, and spare ribs.  Alayna, Kathryne and Melissa arrived as we were nearing the head of the payment line, but the actual food would not be ready for another two hours.  I bought a losing raffle ticket to win kitchen supplies, watched a twelve-year-old Italian who was taller than me win a fancy pen in a game of Simon Says, and had my share of the second bottle of mosto during the wait.

 

After eating the four o’clock lunch that would serve as dinner and seeing the other girls take a vaporetto back to Venice, Caroline Hiep, Howard, Preston, Professor and I re-boarded the boat and took a tour of Burano before returning the boat to the Murano boathouse.  We took a vaporetto home to Venice and Howard and I left professor at Fondamenta Nova to find a cheap kilo of ice-cream at the supermarket.  The late lunch proved not to be enough for the evening, so we baked apples with cinnamon and sugar and the whole apartment helped with the obviously cheap gelato while reading about Palladio’s Venetian churches.

 

A piu tardi!

 

Ciao.

 

Andy