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Café Life Venice
A Guidebook to the Cafés and Bacari of La Serenissima
Joe Wolff; photography by Roger Paperno
7"x 7" • 192 pages • full-color photos • maps
ISBN 9781566567183 • paperback • $20.00 •
"Café Life Venice is a lively, anecdotal, and highly readable introduction to friendly neighborhood hangouts where you can enjoy good food, drink, and company in Venice's historic center. It's well worth reading before any trip to Venice, and it makes a perfect gift for the Venetophiles on your shopping list... the best new Venice book that we've seen in 2008."
—Venice for Visitors (www.veniceforvisitors.com)
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Venice is a city without parallel. This essential companion will enrich anyone's experience of the magical city of lagoons.
The Café Life series takes you to its third Italian city-La Serenissima (the Most Serene Republic)-with Café Life Venice. Like predecessors Café Life Rome and Café Life Florence, it explores a select group of family-run establishments. However, because Venice moves to the stroke of its very own gondola paddle (voga), you'll be drinking less coffee, eating less gelato-and sipping more wine. This may be good news to some of you. The Venetians do love their wine, and you'll see them loving it at almost any time of day in one of the city's many bacari. The bacaro is a cross between a café and a wine bar, where you'll find locals knocking back an ombra (Venetian for glass of wine) and eating cichetti (tapas-like snacks) as they stand at the bar. This wine that they quaff like mineral water is usually lower in alcohol content-around 11 percent.
Bacari are a hidden treasure: they offer good value for money (remember, Italy is expensive), and they are run by proprietors obsessed with the quality of their traditional Venetian cuisine. In addition to the bacaro, this guide includes some superb pasticcerie (bakeries), a café or two, and one gelateria.
● Filled with richly anecdotal text and fascinating interviews with the owners
● Stunning photography that beautifully evoke the city, its neighborhoods, and bacaro
● Carefully chosen establishments sprinkled throughout the sestieri of Venice to help you refuel during your wanderings
Joe Wolff and Roger Paperno worked together on Café Life Rome and Café Life Florence in this series.
Click here to view an excerpt.
Interlink Books
“Café Life Venice is the third in the ‘Café Life’ series authored by Wolff and Paperno (Rome and Florence are their previous volumes). It’s an attractive little book, full of color photographs of 17 cafés, bakeries, wine bars, and gelato shops and equally colorful and entertaining stories of their owners and of Venice. Readers will feel ready to greet the owners as if they were old friends after having read about them in such familiar detail...travelers to Venice will find much to appreciate...recommended for public libraries with large travel collections.”
—Library Journal "Venice: a supermodel among cities, but one that has been written about and photographed so thoroughly, it's hard for guidebooks to find anything new to say. Although there are some fine restaurants in Venice, the family-run cafés, or 'bacari', a cross between a café and a wine bar, are probably a better way to get a glimpse of the glamorous bustle of everyday life. This little guide is full of interesting information about the city, while selecting and telling the stories of some of it's longest-established and best-loved, cafés.
—Sunday Telegraph (London) "an informed and informative guide to the cafés... offers illustrative and descriptive anecdotal commentaries and interviews showcasing and highlighting the best that Venice has to offer the tourist, traveler, or native resident. 'Café Live Venice' is an ideal reverence for tany finding themselves in Venice...Also very highly recommended are Joe Wolff's two earlier travel guides 'Cafe Life Rome' and 'Cafe Life Florence'."
—Midwest Book Review
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