August 2023 was an interesting month, I was extremely happy having found myself working for a company I had fallen in love with, a small team of outstanding people, with character, charm, humour in gallons and generally totally bonkers! My manager was just brilliant, I had been given enough empowerment to make my own impression on the local team in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and I had just returned from Berlin after an extremely successful customer trip, I felt great; but I needed my annual foodie break and nothing was in the diary!

I am a massive fan of the sadly departed Russell Norman; an author, restaurateur, writer, chef and generally nice bloke who had inspired me in the kitchen with a number of cookery books, the most influential being Polpo, and Venice: Four Seasons of Home Cooking, which sit proudly on my bookshelf alongside his other books Brutto: A Simple Florentine Cookbook and Spuntino: Comfort Food.

Fast forward to June 2024 and my dream had come true, over 9 months of quite, no very intensive planning and I was in my hotel room at A Tribute To Music Residenza, on Riva deli Shiavoni and overlooking the Lagoon In Venice!

I had been looking at a number of social media feeds since August the previous year, sounding out what and how people got to Venice, what they did, and the variation was immense. I am the sort of person that prefers an agenda, typically a jam packed itinerary, travelling to another country for me is an invitation to explore, excite the taste buds and cram as much in as possible, the financial investment needs to be justified, leaving family at home for a period of respite on both sides is not something I take lightly.

After some thought I adopted what I considered a methodical approach to planning a week in Venice, focussed on food and preferably avoiding crowds of people which I don’t enjoy in the slightest. The process ended up with 34 pages of colour coded routes, visits, restaurants all carefully calculated around food and exploring the least ‘apparently’ busy areas of Venice, the one exception being The Doges Palace, but more of that in a future post.

I spent hours studying restaurant reviews on a multitude of sites, and plotted each one on Google Maps which created the ‘framework’ for my visit. I then started to look at ‘what to see’, checked opening times and started to create a plan which was really fun to do, even though it did take up a lot of time. There are approximately 472 bridges linking areas of the city which added another interest, locating the unique ones and adding those.

Further material i studied intensely included YouTube videos which to be honest, were mostly disappointing as the same places kept on being shown, again and again. I purchased some more reference material, signposted by the likes of Rick Stein who had featured Venice on one of his TV series ‘Venice to Instanbul’ where he had lunch with a local gentry Francesco da Mosta, I had to get his books too; they were insigntful and a great read.

The day before I was due to leave I headed to the local library, they had a quality colour printer. My months of planning appeared on 34 colour coded sheets, each maliciously prepared and timed. The walking distance each day had been calculated to allow for itinerary changes on the fly, and the ability to swap days should the unexpected happen. I also included some notes of the sites, historical detail and architectural notes, creating a bespoke tour guide to enable time to be focussed on the do, not the how too.

I had a lovely flight, the pre-booked shared water-taxi was brilliant (get your guide) the title picture is the journey into Venice from Marco Polo Airport which dropped me 5 minutes from the hotel. After settling in, a quick orientation walk was taken to find the evenings restaurant, more of that in post no.2 and on the way a quick ‘pit stop’ at Osteria alla Bandiera to start the week of, a plate of delicious, simple seafood, a theme that would continue throughout the week, delicious.

…………………….. Until Next Time …………… L8ers ……………………