In Italy July 19 - 31

Thursday 7/19: Departure day

• Delicious airport and airline food!
  

Friday 7/20: Arrival in Venice

• Lunch - Bar Nostro in the Campo S. Bartolomeo
• Benjamin: After settling into our apartment, we wanted to find a lunch spot that would be relatively quick and easy, and found what we were looking for just a few blocks away. Tables were set up in the middle of the Campo -- under umbrellas, fortunately, since it was quite warm -- and we enjoyed our first tastes of Italy. Nothing elaborate: just a pizza margherita for me and a salad for Carrie, washed down with some acqua minerale and a glass of prosecco. We got our first taste of the crowds as well, since the sottoportico that lead towards Piazza San Marco disgorged a constant stream of people into the Campo, strengthening our decision to avoid the most congested spots until we'd better recovered from our flight.
  
• Dinner - Trattoria Casa Mia
• Benjamin: This was a nice find -- marked on our Rough Guide map, but really just a neighborhood joint in Cannaregio a short walk from the apartment. Prices were lower but the food was tasty and they were generous with the prosecco. We sat "outside" in a small roofless but enclosed space that was just as hot and stuffy as the rest of Venice.
  

Saturday 7/21: Venice

• Breakfast - Cafe near our apt on the Salizada S. Canzian close to Campo S. Maria Nova
• Lunch - Bar Ristorante Le Bomb, Biennale-Arsenale Cafe
• Benjamin: Mostly a stop of convenience, since we'd spent the morning at the Arsenale exhibits of the Biennale, but the space was nice -- an enclosed courtyard within the Arsenal walls -- and a Caprese Salad with a beer was the perfect meal for another sweltering afternoon.
  
• Dinner - Birraria La Corte
• Benjamin: The evening started with frustration. We had telephoned the day before to reserve a table at a place called La Zucca, which I'd read about in guide books and seemed like the closest I was likely to get to a vegetarian-friendly restaurant in Italy; the food was supposedly good all around, and we were looking forward to dinner after an afternoon at Torcello. By chance, I called ahead to change the size of our party, since we'd been expecting Emily and Kate but they'd been delayed a day, and it turned out they had no record of our reservation....no room for a party of two either. I was extremely disappointed and resolved from that point on not to bother with making reservations. Plan B was a popular and family-friendly place on the Piazza San Polo. Eating outside would have been nice, but we chose not to wait and instead ate inside, with a full view -- and some of the heat -- from the kitchen, staffed apparently by Africans. Regardless, the food was satisfying.
  

Sunday 7/22: Kate and Emily join us in Venice

• Breakfast - Cafe near our apt on the Salizada S. Canzian close to Campo S. Maria Nova
  
• Lunch - sandwiches to go from Snack & Sweet, eaten on a canal-side quay
• Benjamin: The sandwiches were tasty, but the most remarkable feature of the Snack & Sweet was the collection of pornographic paintings (painted by the owner?) hung on its walls.
  
• Dinner - Hotel Malibran, Cannaregio
• Benjamin: Just around the corner from our apartment, this was a friendly spot with adequate but not distinguished food. The diverse soundtrack of English and American '80s hits -- ranging from New Wave to early rap -- was a somewhat jarring element.
  

Monday 7/23: Venice to Ravenna

• Breakfast - Cafe near the Rialto market
  
• Lunch - Pizzeria Cupido
• Benjamin: We found this spot just off the Via Cavour on our way from our hotel to see the sights -- and happily they specialized in piadina, one of the unique regional foods of Romagna, a type of flatbread sandwich somewhat akin to a fajita. We ate outside in a little courtyard where the proprietors generously set up a small table and chairs for us.
  
• Dinner - Cafe Grand Italia, Piazza del Popolo
• Benjamin: Our choices for dinner were somewhat limited by the fact -- unknown to us until our arrival in Ravenna -- that this was the festival day for the city's patron saint, San Vitale, and many of the inhabitants take the day off and head for the beach. The place we chose was right on a central Piazza, so the highlight for me was less the food than the people-watching, since it seemed to be a spot where families gathered in the evening to let their small children race around before bedtime.
  

Tuesday 7/24: Ravenna to Siena

• Breakfast - on the rooftop of the Hotel Villa Santa Maria in Foris
  
• Lunch - sandwich place in Poppi
  
• Dinner - Al Marsili, Via del Castoro
• Benjamin: We tried to find a place to eat outside on the Piazza del Campo, which was set up for an evening jazz concert, but that apparently would have required some advance booking. Just as well really: when we stopped back in the Piazza later, with the concert still going strong, I found the music not to my liking. Anyway, we wandered back towards the cathedral and stumbled upon Al Marsili, housed in a beautiful old space with vaulted ceilings, where we enjoyed a very fine meal. The ambiance was somewhat diminished by a large party of noisy Americans seated near us, though in this case the culprits were small children rather than boorish adults.
  

Wednesday 7/25: Siena to Florence

• Breakfast - on the lawn of the Hotel Borgo Grondaie
  
• Lunch - B. Gallo, Piazza S. Giovanni
• Benjamin: A late lunch outdoors, just across from the Baptistry, after a morning spent in San Gimagnano.
• Dinner - Trattoria Za-Za
• Benjamin: A large, noisy, boisterous place that came well-recommended in several of our guides for its genuine Tuscan fare. Good food, but memorable mostly for the very loud group from Alabama at the next table, where discussion of "carbon credits" seemed to elicit a surprising level of passion (and decibels). Here, as elsewhere on our trip, we found ample evidence that we were not the only Americans undeterred by the weak dollar.

Thursday 7/26: Florence

• Breakfast
• Lunch - sandwiches to go, eaten on the steps of the Uffizi watching the street performers
  
• Dinner - Trattoria "Il Porcospino" alle Cappelle Medicee
• Benjamin: My favorite restaurant name of the trip -- "The Porcupine" -- but one of the least satisfying restaurant experiences, not so much because of the quality of the food, but because our waiter seemed like a hustler, more concerned with steering us towards "high revenue" menu items than with making our dinner enjoyable. Both he and another waiter (an Albanian if we overheard accurately) spent much time flirting with the attractive women who were dining alone at the restaurant.
  

Friday 7/27: Florence

• Breakfast
• Lunch - Trattoria Za-Za
• Benjamin: We stopped back at Za-Za (our only repeat visit, other than breakfasts, during the whole trip) since it lay along our route from San Lorenzo to Santa Maria Novella, but it was also nice to eat outside on the Piazza Mercato Centrale this time. A nice lingering lunch: pizzas, salads, wine and coffee.
  
• Dinner - Osteria L'Antico Noe
• Benjamin: A hard-to-find little spot recommended to us by Luca, the owner of the apartment we rented, and probably the best restaurant we ate at during our whole trip.

Saturday 7/28: Florence to Verona

• Breakfast
• Lunch - Pizzeria da Gianni, Carpi
• Benjamin: We stopped in Carpi somewhat on a whim, since we didn't think we could stave off our hunger pangs until arriving in Verona. Carpi was a few miles off the autostrade, but our Blue Guide spoke well of it, so we decided to check it out. We explored the porticos around the large central piazza a bit before stopping in at Pizzeria da Gianni.
  
• Dinner - picnic fare at the Arena
  

Sunday 7/29: Verona to Stresa

• Breakfast - at the Hotel Verona
  
• Lunch - cafe off Via Mazzini, between Piazza delle Erbe and the Arena
  
• Dinner - Albergo La Ripa, Baveno
• Benjamin: An inn just down the road from our B&B where we could eat on a lawn looking out over Lago Maggiore towards the Bartolomeo islands. The food was quite good and our three omnivores, for the only time on the trip, decided to order both primi and secondi (the herbivore might have, but vegetarian secondi were not to be found).
  

Monday 7/30: Stresa

• Breakfast - at our B&B La Sorgente
  
• Lunch - on the lakeside piazza in Orta S. Julia
  
• Dinner - Ristorante Posta in Baveno
• Benjamin: Perhaps our most amusing dinner. On the recommendation of our B&B hostess Francesca, we walked down to this spot off the central square in Baveno. On asking the middle-aged woman who greeted us for a table, we were generously offered prime real estate - a table outside - and gladly accepted, since the weather was lovely. From the start, there was clearly a communications gap that the woman's English and our Italian could not bridge, but we muddled through and ordered successfully. Meanwhile, other evidence of our waitress's confusion mounted: for example, she somehow decided that one waiting party of four was actually two different groups and tried to split them up at different tables. It was also clear as the meal progressed that there was a backlog waiting for outside tables, and eventually the woman approached and asked -- in French, which nobody had spoken to this point -- whether we'd had a reservation. Happily, my French was up to the challenge so I could explain that we'd simply wandered up, asked for a table and been seated. She did suggest that she'd asked us then whether we had a reservation, but -- despite the very limited Italian vocabulary that Carrie and I had managed to acquire -- we're quite certain she did not. It crossed my mind that she might ask us to move -- right in the midst of eating our primi -- but she didn't. From that point on I spoke to her in French, though she responded mostly in Italian, and I offered to pay in advance and to clear out after our secondi, since there was a gelato place just steps away that looked like a better bet for dessert. For all that, the food was excellent -- perhaps one of our three best dinners in Italy. Francesca later suggested that the ladies who own and run the restaurant (but don't do the cooking) are known to refresh themselves at their own bar a bit too often.
  

Tuesday 7/31: Home again

• Breakfast - "brown bag" breakfast prepared by our hostess at La Sorgente
  
• Lunch - US Airways
  
• Dinner - TGI Fridays at the Philadelphia Airport
• Benjamin: Had the one merit of making me realize how good the food had been at even the worst places in Italy....