We'd planned an early morning Rialto trip, but it wasn't as early as expected; I was up at seven, but everyone else slept until eight-thirty. We had a bit of juice (I'd already made my customary coffee in the little moka pot) and headed out, picking up croissants and raisin buns to eat along the way.
The market also suffered from the August shutdown, with fewer vegetable sellers and fishmongers. We wandered back and forth before making decisions, and the kids were good while we waited for service. Figs, peaches, "strawberry" grapes, canteloupe, beans, peppers. N took the kids ahead towards Piazza San Marco slowly while I made some final decisions on fish: a kilo of caparozzoli, the Venetian vongole veraci, or "real clams", and, on impulse, a couple of sfoglioli, Adriatic sole, white on one side and dark on the other.
I ran everything back to the apartment, gulped a glass of water (it was cooler, almost overcast, but I'd been walking quickly) and headed down to the Piazza. I found the Museo Correr in the Ala Napoleonica and got in using my ticket from the Palazzo Ducale the day before. N and the kids were in the first room.
The museum was a grab bag of various things, some dull, some mildly interesting, and some surprising. There was enough variety to keep the kids entertained: de'Barbari's huge woodcut map of Venice in 1500 with the original blocks, platform shoes worn by Venetian women during the Renaissance, jigsaw puzzles and playing cards. The picture gallery also had some gems, with enough dross that we could pass quickly from room to room and give the tots the illusion of rapid progress. They are actually quite good in general in museums (usually the only kids present), but during this time Z was suffering a by-the-clock eleven a.m. meltdown, during which she got quite rambunctious and pugnacious. The painting of a massive street fight on the Ponte dei Pugni (over the Rio S. Barnaba, which we'd visited earlier) was thus much appreciated.
We walked back by the usual direct route for lunch, stopping at the neighbourhood panificio for zocolloto rolls and ciabatta. These were really just variations on the same basic white bread, but a good foil for the prosciutto crudo and sopressa we had for lunch, washed down with Prosecco. A and Z tried a sip; they usually think wine is "sour", but liked this.
While A read, the rest of us napped. I was first up, around 3:30, and took A down to the Campo S. Maria Formosa, where I had a caffe at the bar (and A watched with fascination the bartender drinking a mixture of creme de menthe and milk), and then to the Su.Ve supermarket. It was closed for siesta still, so we had to content ourselves with a kilo of cherry tomatoes from a stall in the campo (the tomatoes, amusingly, bearing N's name).
When Z awoke, we all started out to the east, but on the first corner stopped for the kids to have some gelato (coconut and limone for Z; melone and vaniglia for A) which was consumed on the western steps of San Zanipolo. We walked down towards the Scuola San Giorgio della Schiavoni, through quite deserted streets, but found it capriciously closed for the day.
So we continued on to our second destination, the church of San Zaccaria. We spent some time at the Bellini altarpiece on someone else's coin (used to pay for illumination), and paid to enter the crypt, which the kids liked so much they walked through twice. The Vivarini altarpiece and the chapel with paintings by Tintoretto and Palma Il Giovane were both under restoration and only partly visible.
We headed back towards the apartment and wandered into Santa Maria Formosa, where a coda was added to an earlier story. When looking at the picture of Santa Barbara in 96, the not-quite-four A asked about the people surrounding the main painting, and when I confessed ignorance, pointed out that one of them was Saint Dominic, a saint I had not studied, but whose iconography she had absorbed from a Bellini painting we'd studied in a book on the Accademia. The coda was that this time the painting was better labelled, and we discovered that while the figure had the tonsure of Saint Dominic, it was in fact Saint Vincent Ferrer.
Back to the apartment for dinner. I worked feverishly in the small kitchen, trying not to bump my head: cooking green beans in salted water, then penne while I heated up the tomato sauce I'd made earlier, washing a mixture of arugula and baby lettuce and dressing it, and finally cooking the clams in the manner suggested by Marcella Hazan (whose apartment was on the same street as ours, passed by us en route to the Rialto or Piazza San Marco): garlic is lightly coloured in oil, chopped parsley is added, then the clams are added and the heat turned up until they open.
I brought all this to the table and bid everyone start while I contemplated the sole. "Is it cleaned?" asked N. No, it was not. "Did you consider asking them to clean it?" I would have, if I'd had the words and thought of it, though perhaps they'd have laughed at me. I took the small cutting board and small knife I'd brought (sharper than anything in the apartment, but duller than our home knives) and managed to saw open the fish and get what appeared to be all the guts out without totally hacking it to pieces. I cooked it briefly on both sides in oil without breading or flouring it; it was not overcooked, if anything just slightly undercooked, and the kids thought it was fabulous (they had already finished more than half the clams). All in all, quite a success.
We gave the kids a bath, and tripped the circuit breakers twice trying to run the washing machine, the dishwasher, and the A/C at the same time (or even two of the three, as we discovered).