Let me teach you a few words of Venetian. We’ll start with bacaro. A bacaro is a bar, often small, sometimes medium and never large, the name deriving from that of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. Real bacari are found tucked up side alleys, and can be spotted from a distance because of the clutch of people, like fish caught in a net, standing outside with small glasses in hand.
The contents of those glasses is our second word, ombra. An ombra is a drink, traditionally a glass of local wine, but now often a shockingly orange Aperol spritz. It’s a small drink and its name means ‘shade’. Some say this is because wine was once sold in the shadow of the majestic campanile in St Mark’s Square, but anyone who has experienced Venice’s searing August heat will understand how ‘let’s get some shade’ came to mean ‘let’s dodge up a side street into a bacaro for a quick drink’.
If you do dodge past the crowd into a bacaro, you’ll notice that the counter is made of glass and stuffed with dishes of food; sometimes elegant crostini, more often abundant fish or meat in sauces, served on small plates as a snack. Cichéti (the Venetian spelling for the more commonly used word cicchetti or cichetti) is the name for these small-plate snacks, and our third Venetian word.
It’s easy to see how, in a small city where space is at a premium, cichéti became a popular way to eat. You can meet your friends at a bacaro, start off with a small plate of something delicious, then when it gets too crowded, go for a quick stroll over Venice’s fairytale bridges to the next bacaro and the next plate of food. You can have a whole meal made up of all sorts of dishes, without being forced into a pattern of starters and main courses. You can eat as much, or as little, as you like. It’s a very democratic way of dining, highly appropriate for a city once the centre of one of Europe’s first republics.
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A guide to Venetian cichéti