Menu
The city of Venice
Why is born Venice
The gardens of Venice
The
Venetian festivities
Traditions and curiosities
The ombra Venetian
The Venetian "ombra"
text Laura Hierche
If you walk in Venice, you will often run into a group of Venetians one of them to tell the other: "Andemo bèver un ombra" (Let's go drink a shade) Follow you them and you will see them enter in a bar, order little glasses of wine and continue to chatter before until that they are finished...
But why to call "shade" a simple glass of wine? It's a typical Venetian word that has been being used for centuries and is born in the absolute center of the city: San Marco Square!
Canaletto
Today San Marco square is crowded almost every days from everybody and everything, Venetians and tourists, columbiums and various stands. One would never imagine that this square has always been so! Especially the Venetians but also the foreigners, the tourists of the epoch, didn't miss to spend so many times on the square, and not to blame! The square was then already, as it's possible also to verify in the pictures and in the incision of the artists from the XIV century in then, full of various stands, usually around the base of the bell tower of San Marco: junk dealers, bakers, spezieri, wine's sellers etc... For more, under Carnival they were added itinerant, acrobats, jugglers and others that hastened for the occasion. What good place to meet! But staying to speak under the sun makes thirst!
And here are our wine sellers intents to quench the crowd thirst! And for not ruin the liquid jewel, to always maintain it fresh despite the warm one that at times it suffocated the whole city, they turned with their stand around the Bell tower, pursuing as soon as its shade the sun he moved. The wine, to be good, had to remain to the shade... Said, done: by now the wine in Venice it called "shade." You went to drink on the Square a glass of "shade"... No, too much long. You went to "bèver a shade!" And this way the glass of wine remained forever the shade.
And our wine sellers? With such a big responsibility, them rimaserò up to the last one, also when all the other stands had disappeared. Around the bell tower with them was the place of meeting for everybody, from the people common to the patricians that went out of the Ducal Building, men, women and children, nobody missed. They disappeared only with the first cafes around the procuraties.
Francesco Guardi (1712-1793)
But not the "ombra", rather: in 1889, in a restaurant now closed situated near San Polo, the trattoria "alla Speranza", it was begun to officially call ombra the standard glass of wine, that is a decilitre.
Today the Venetians still go in the "bacari", a typical venetian word for the inns. Here it's custom to accompany this "ombra", or these..., by "cicheti", delicious tastes of Venetian cuisine: polenta with stockfish, fishball or meatball, small octopuses, sardines in "saor," small cuttlefishes, boiled sausage, fried flowers of courgettes, etc....