S. Worthen | Weblog

Italian folklore holds that each lentil eaten on the first day of a new year represents some money that will be obtained that year. How much does each lentil represent? Who knows - "un pezzo d'oro" could be any size.

I would be anticipating far more income in 2006 if we hadn't eaten our lentils (along with the equally traditionally pig's foot) as the third course of our New Year's Day feast.

The wall calendar is in Venetian. It's the sort of calendar which shows all the months and weeks and days in one large poster layout. It cycles through the year, column by column, month by month, week by week, day by day: luni, marti, mercore, zioba, venere, sabo, domenega.

But this week in this year, there is no Sunday. There will not be a Sunday until next year, until 2006. Today, the Feast of St. Silvester, New Year's Eve - it's the last day of the year. As the wall calendar says by today's sabo, "xe l'ultimo".

For the last year or two, the Torre dell'horologio (Clock tower) in the Piazza S. Marco has been under restoration. Now in the last several years, one of the nicest features a set of Venetian scaffolding can offer is a life-sized photo of what the building underneath the scaffolding looks like. It not only makes the scaffolding look better, but is a useful service to tourists who can't see what the building is that is there under wraps - at least they have a sense of it. But something else entirely has been happening with this tower - a series of tower-sized photographs of other major tall towers in Europe and New York. Having worked their way through the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower, we're now up to a large multi-sided scaffolding depicting Big Ben. It's not quite like being in London for Boxing Day.

Today, we were a group of nine, three of us being eight years or fewer in age, pushing our way through the St. Stephen's Day crowds on a prolonged walking visit of the city. We passed through Campo S. Stefano, partially for convenience and partially in honor of the day - no going in the church, since we were such a motley crowd. Campo S. Marco was looking good, especially since the scaffolding on the left side of the basilica was removed only a week ago. The marble was luminously blue-white in the evening's shadows and fluorescent lights. In the Calle Large XXII Marzo, a musician played music from The Nutcracker on the glass harmonica, the notes as crystalline as the glasses from which they rang. On the Rialto, an Albanian choir sang French Christmas carols.

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With my medievalist/history of science hat on, the most exciting gifts I received were copies of Alexander Neckham's De naturis rerum and Al-Fragani's Il ‘Libro dell’aggregazione delle stelle’, both from La Finestra editrice. Most of the other gifts I received are less condusive to helping me with research, with the possible exception of a nice selection of chocolates - including windmill-shaped ones.

The mid-morning coffee break is a long-entrenched Italian traditions. It's the one time of day when cappucinos are traditional, but all other drinks are fair game too. I erred on the side of a cioccolata calda, a densely rich and chocolatey version of hot chocolate. This and Italian pear juice are why I love the local bars so much. And, of course, the good ones serve good pastries too to accompany the drinks.

We were at a bar not all that far from the Rialto, one which specializes in traditional Venetian pastries, in addition to the usual brioche and other pastine. With Befana's day tomorrow, they also featured baskets of candy coal in the windows. What really drew us in this time, however, was the promise of the year's first fritelle.

Fritelle are a kind of fruit cake sugar-coated doughnut traditional around Carnivale, possessing the rich flavor and lightness of panettone, with all the sugary deep-fried goodness and heat of a freshly made doughnut. They're only available for about a month a year, in the time leading up to carnival, and as soon as Shrove Tuesday hits, they're gone.

I rationed mine out until the cioccolata calda was finished, only then reluctantly consuming my last bite.