This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Toasting a maestro

Gioachino Antonio Rossini was said to have wept thrice in his adult life; once when his first opera was booed, a second time when he heard Niccolò Paganini play and last when he watched, appalled, as a truffle-stuffed turkey fell out of a picnic basket into Lake Como. 

I owe this anecdote to Michael Contarini Procino, polymath, gastronome and Venetian neighbour who held a dinner in Rossini’s honour for the Venice chapter of the Chaine des Rotisseurs. This glorious fraternity of feasters has more than 25,000 members in 80 countries, all dedicated to conviviality enjoyed over food and wine. 

Daniele Zennaro, chef at Algiubagio in Cannaregio, served the most delicate risotto, followed naturally by Tournedos Rossini, finest of the nine dishes to bear the composer’s name. The man himself always insisted on at least six wines at dinner, but our host wisely chose to showcase two exceptional Amarone vintages, an Allegrini 2018 and a Campo di Titari Classico Riserva 2017; rich, complex, exuberant and lavish as a Rossini score. 

The portly maestro considered himself “a third-class pianist but the first gastronome in the universe”, and Michael’s brilliant talk included a description of a concert in Siena devoted to Rossini’s gastronomic music, the Hors d’oeuvres Quartet (the pieces are named Radish, Anchovy, Pickle and Butter) and “Di Tanti Palpiti” from Tancredi, which Rossini composed whilst waiting for a risotto to cook.

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Banquet for the brain

Another great treat at the Chiesetta della Misericordia, site of this year’s strongest Biennale show — Yu Hong’s Another One Bites the Dust, presented by the Asian Art Initiative of the Guggenheim NYC. An evening of conversation and exploration between curator Hans Ulrich Olbrist and artist Michael Armitage, “The Choice of Realism” focused on contemporary perceptions of the real, debunking the dichotomy of figurative and abstract art. More cerebral fare, but a banquet nonetheless. 

The event was also a chance to learn more about the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, which Mr Armitage founded in 2020. The Institute’s new show, Sahej Rahel’s Wayfinder, opens on 21 November and the institute is currently seeking donations of art books to furnish their library. Screens can provide great introductory encounters with art, but books allow for more intimate, tactile study — to donate, www.ncai254.com/about. 

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Turkish delights

Where history went to hell: I’d longed to see the Uluburun wreck in the museum at Bodrum, so a cheapo Turkish Airlines weekend hop was irresistible. The ship sank in 1306 BC en route to the Aegean, with a cargo including copper and tin for making weapons, as well as ostrich shells, hippopotamus teeth, spices, rose oil and gold. Discovered by a sponge diver in 1982, the wreck is a haunting link to a busy, vivid, archaic world, and I’d have been happy if Hallowe’en could have stopped there. 

The exhibit, the recently restored castle of the Knights of St John and Bodrum’s Ottoman harbour were all fabulous, less so the enforced night in Istanbul after a cancelled flight. The Wyndham Grand is a “five star” horror which prides itself on its convenient location at the heart of Istanbul’s hideous industrial district. After being bullied onto various buses, we stranded passengers emerged bewildered into the night of the living dead. 

Turkey is a hotspot for cosmetic tourism, and the Wyndham lobby was populated with a shuffling horde of the bound and bleeding. Spongy pates prepared for transplant and pre-veneer black-stubbed mouths loomed around a buffet dreamed up by Dante. 

Jerrybuilt and already shabby, the hotel’s amenities included collapsing shower cubicles and a dry bar, but for me the highlight was the man who lost a piece of his scalp in his puttanesca. He carried on eating.

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Land of milk and honey

Sweetness and light back on Sant’Erasmo, the long, slender island in the north of the lagoon which has been Venice’s garden for centuries. Circling the white paths along the perimeter, the tower of San Marco is visible to the west, but Sant’Erasmo is another world. 

Amongst the wild pomegranate and fig trees, one finds dacha life Venetian-style; small, painted wooden cabins on pockets of land where locals escape the tourist fret of the centre to potter between tomato frames, forage purslane and samphire or watch the waterbirds, the same herons, cormorants and wild ducks who stand aloof in the background of Giovanni Bellini’s Barbarigo Altarpiece on nearby Murano. 

The air is thick with the bees who produce the famously salty Barena honey, the varnish of elderly boats and the acrid fumes from the (possibly not quite legal), brewing of a verdant, lethal Cynar-like artichoke hooch — which is a taste worth acquiring. 

Nikolai Navrozov was born in Venice and quit his job in London last year to make wine on the island at 15 Via de le Motte. He’s propagating his own vines and experimenting with an ancient Veneto method of growing, in which the grapes are bound around living trees, creating shady mini-ecosystems. 

Nikolai is hoping to produce a wine which will be expressive of Sant’Erasmo’s tiny but unique terroir, and an evening spent speculating on the deep ancestry of the Malvasia grape, which came to Venice from the colony of Crete and perhaps to Crete from ancient Anatolia, was the perfect end to a golden autumn afternoon.