Venizia, Brava

Even better if you bookend it. With Venice. This place is like no other, and on top of that,  they are even banning luggage on rollers, to preserve the cobblestone streets and alleys.

The area is a series of small islands, but the main attraction is Isle Saint Marco, the Grand Canal surrounding it, the great Venetian merchant homes eliding the Canal still in resplendent repose. You cannot drive by (on the water, of course) these places without wondering who actually lives there.

The tiny alleyways, themselves not really that much smaller than the main thoroughfares, lead to all kinds of unexpected visual delights, even it they are, as they most often are, dead ends. But “dead” is not the right word in this case; more like a repose. The entire island is a kind of repose, which might explain why there are only 70,000 inhabitants, and nearly 2 million tourists here each year.

Still, of an Early September evening, meeting Sandro Bottega and his associate Daniela Cester, at a restaurant just off a well-travelled piazza, an authentic Cistercian well in the little courtyard that partially constitutes the restaurant, there is no other place you would rather be. The place has what we knows as sommeliers, but in this instance, one or two of them know as much about charcoal-crusted goat cheese and flash-fired mollusks as they do about wine, and they are more than pleased to share glasses that might be good match.

The place is Fiaschetteria Toscana,  just off Campo San Bartolomia. Find it . Sandro Bottega sits, happy, almost content , which is saying something, given his frenetic pace, his hyper-active life, and says: “this is for me the best restaurant in Venice. And that is saying something.”