Biography Da Mosto was born in Venice and his family has been part of the city's history since possibly as early as the fifth century. Originally, they were wine makers - the name da Mosto coming from the word "mosto" meaning grape must juice from crushed grapes.
Later, the family became traders, explorers and politicians. The family's previous Venice residence, the Ca' da Mosto which can be seen from the Rialto market by the Grand Canal was lost through marriage in the 17th century, when Chiara da Mosto, a female member of the family married four times, with each husband dying of natural causes — thus enabling her to become one of the wealthiest people in Venice.
Da Mosto lives in his family home in Venice, with his South African born wife Jane, his four children, and his parents. Emilio says no one cooks them like his mum, but a good way to eat them is in pastella, a kind of pancake mix. You throw the crabs in and they 'stuff themselves and suffocate', he explains, 'and then you have the eggy mixture inside and out. The spikes disturb the sediment and the net catches whatever is lying in the mud, which is mostly stones. I can barely lift the pole, but Emilio says sometimes he does it for hours at a time.
There is a Venetian saying, he adds, 'healthy like a fish'. Next morning, I leave the Hotel Cipriani quite reluctantly, because it's so fabulously luxurious and I'd really like to loiter by the pool and gaze across the water at the views a bit longer and take the hotel's speedboat-shuttle over to St Mark's Square.
From there it's a short walk over the Grand Canal to the Palazzo Baglioni. Francesco and I sit and talk in his vast book-lined studio. Francesco still isn't entirely sure how or why he is about to present his personal view of Venice on British television. A BBC crew came to interview him for something else entirely, and then three months later a proposal arrived for a series of personal films on the history and architecture, character and future of Venice. They must have identified him immediately as a natural presenter: unselfconscious, restlessly interested, vibrant, good-looking, and steeped in the city.
He was born in Venice and grew up in this palazzo; he walked to school and university, where he studied to be an architect. You feel the past. It can be damaging psychologically. In , he was about to make a film with Jacque Tati's son, Pierre, when Pierre was killed in a motorbike accident.
He decided to return to Venice and take his final exams. His architecture finals project was a plan for the restoration of the Palazzo Baglioni, on which he is working as money becomes slowly available.
He has begun at the top, with the artists' studios under the roof, and now plans to install a glass lift the top of the building can currently be reached only by climbing stairs. For five years after he graduated, Francesco ran the public works department of Venice. He met Jane, who was working for an environmental economics think tank in Milan. After falling out with the public works department for 'being asked to sign things I didn't want to sign', he set up on his own in this studio.
He has worked on the rebuilding of La Fenice under Aldo Rossi, designed the Luxembourg pavilion for the Biennale, and completed a number of restorations.
Venetian palaces were designed to combine splendour with functionality, to be at once warehouses and living quarters for large families. He takes me up to his parents' apartment and I feel a sense of incredulity that anyone in the 21st century might live in an apartment like this.
The ceilings are impossibly high, the walls covered with frescoes, and there are wall-sized windows of leaded glass at either end of the central room, the piano nobile. Off this chamber is a room - covered in leather wallpaper - that was used for the filming of The Talented Mr Ripley. After this, we need another prosecco, so we head round the corner to Cantina Do Mori The Two Moors , a narrow bar with an entrance onto a street at either end.
It's customary to come here for a glass of wine and perhaps a snack in the late morning when you should drink white wine; if you come in the evening you're supposed to drink red.
I ask Sergio Fanello, the tall, silver-haired barman, how long the bar has been in existence. It probably hasn't changed much. There's nowhere to sit, just a bar stretching the length of the room, from the wooden doors with bottle glass in them at one end to identical doors at the other.
Behind the bar are barrels of wine and bottles stacked from floor to ceiling. Locals - including lawyers from the nearby courthouse - still come in for a mid-morning snack or a light lunch.
Do Mori sells cicchetti, the Venetian version of tapas: baby artichokes in season, slices of pecorino or polenta, tomato bruschetta, boiled salt cod mashed with oil to make a paste and spread on toast. Francesco takes me from here on a short tour of the city. He describes himself as 'a historian of the little things'. He didn't much like history at school and came to it by ferreting around in the Venice archives in pursuit of the history of his family and palazzo and discovering the thrill of, for example, turning up a document about a dispute over the noise made by barrels outside his window in the thirteenth century.
When you're only in a city for a couple of days, it's often the little things that make it come alive. Scurrying through the backstreets, Francesco points out the water-borne vegetable sellers on a boat near the Ponte dei Pugni. The Tiozzo brothers Fulvio, Gino and Ernesto and their father have been selling vegetables under this bridge for half a century. From the traditional type of a boat known as a bragozzo, you can buy baskets of herbs - sage, thyme, oregano and mint - orange zucchini blossoms, fat porcini, shiny nearly-black aubergines, bunches of densely red peperoncini, peppery rucola and boxes of frutti di bosco.
Many of their vegetables come from the island of Sant'-Erasmo, famous for castraure, baby artichokes so tender they can be eaten whole. We cross the Ponte delle Tette, the bridge of the tits, where the prostitutes used to flaunt themselves bare-breasted from windows and balconies encouraged by the Republic in the 18th century in a bid to reduce sodomy and into the quarter known as Carampane, where the brothels were clustered.
Here, in a restaurant called the Trattoria Antiche Carampane, we are to have lunch. The waitress, Antonia, comes out and tells us what's on offer today: a choice of three dishes for the antipasti and three for the primi piatti. Everybody's husband, Jane informs me, is in love with Antonia, because there's something so effortlessly welcoming about her, 'and she's already decided what you're going to eat before she tells you what there is'.
There are no printed menus, and a sign outside announces that the place doesn't serve spaghetti bolognese, lasagne or pizza. In fact, in Venetian dialect, it actually says: 'We really don't know how to make pizza because we're too stupid to learn. The owner, Piera Bortoluzzi Librai, doesn't own a freezer. She and her son Francesco go every morning to the fish market and decide what to buy. Today there happened to be a lot of excellent scampi and with these she has made a fish soup, which is evidently one of the things that Antonia has decided I'll eat.
It is without doubt the best fish soup I've ever tasted. The party assembled for lunch is a large one, consisting of eleven adults and ten children, but the da Mostos take it in their stride. Sitting in the dining room with its neoclassical frescoes soaring to the ceiling, one cannot help feeling that the palazzo is on the large side for a family of five. In fact Francesco and Jane share it not only with his parents, but with some fifteen other families, who rent a variety of flats at the top of the building.
It was a subject at which he excelled, although he did not graduate until his early thirties, taking time out to work for a film-maker in Rome, write screenplays, and become a magazine photographer.
It takes the form of a two-month trip aboard a magnificent late nineteenth-century schooner, from Venice to Istanbul across the Adriatic, Ionian and Aegean seas, to discover the cities and islands where Western civilisation was born.
0コメント