by szabolcs
A cup of Caffé Corretto in a tranquil backstreet at dawn
Maybe this needs some explanation: this July I toured Southern Italy with my best friends for almost three weeks. On the last two days of this trip we were doing basically nothing but sitting on trains to get from Sicilia back to Hungary. Once we interrupted the homeward journey in Roma and then in Venezia - the latter being rather a forced-stop. We were already running out of money and did not want to pay supplements or anything. Therefore the only train connection we found was like this: we arrived just before midnight to Stazione Santa Lucia but it wasn't until 8 in the morning that the train bound for Budapest departed.
All of us had been to Venezia before and we really didn't plan a tour of the city this time. However it soon turned out that a sightseeing tour is the only available option since the station is closed for the night. So we headed for Piazza San Marco in the middle of the night. As far as I know most tourists day-trip to Venezia so not many of them get to walk the dimly lit medieval streets at night. Well we walked all the way to Ponte di Rialto and across it until we reached Piazza San Marco. We didn't meet more than 10 people on the whole way. We made it to the square eventually but were pretty tired and hungry by this time. We sat down all by ourselves at a place that swarms with tourists during the day. Piazza San Marco was very beautiful at this time of the day but it was VERY cold and we had quite a few hours to spend on the street since it was no use going back to the station before 5AM.
Hoping that at least one decent trattoria or grocery store would still be open we walked around only to find out that it is basically impossible to find any place open from 11PM to 8.30AM. Time eventually passed and as the first traces of light appeared on the sky we started walking back towards the station. The streets were just as deserted as on our way to Piazza San Marco. So we walked on shivering with cold and then suddenly there it was: a small bakery (PASTICCERIA LISA is the name) in a small backstreet had just opened. The sweet scent of pastries reached us and we were inside eating croissants and drinking coffee in no time. We wanted to try caffé corretto throughout our trip but we never actually got to drinking it up to the last day. This sort of coffee is an espresso with a dash of grappa or brandy. It has a distinctive taste and after a night at chilly Piazza San Marco it was probably the best thing we could get. Needless to say it wasn't that cold anymore on the streets of Venezia. Satisfied and refreshed we walked to the Canal Grande to watch the sunrise (see photo) thereby giving a spectacular ending to our tour of Italia before boarding the train for our homeward journey...