Under this heading we have gathered together a number of wine-shops, taverns and bars offering simple food in typical and informal surroundings. You usually help yourself, choosing from the fish, ham, salami, cheese and in-season vegetable dishes on display. Occasionally you will also be offered home cooked first courses, usually of pasta, rice or soup. All, of course, accompanied by good wine. As to the cost, if you don't go overboard, it should all come to about 25,000 lira per person. Then there's another way of eating out in Venice: "andare a ombre e cicchetti". This consists of going round a number of "bacari" and "osterie" tasting the fish, ham and salami dishes and sipping "ombre" - small glasses of wine. To learn more, read the item "Andar a ombre"

Andar a ormbre

In Venice, 50,000 "ombre" (glasses of wine) are drunk each day. This is a remarkable figure for a city where the recent demographic drop has left just 75,000 inhabitants. Legend has it that long ago, street sellers selling wine in Piazza San Marco would move round with the shadow (ombra) thrown by the bell tower to keep the wine cool. An etymology a touch less romantic but rather more plausible comes from the use of the word "ombra" to indicate a small amount. The quantity of wine contained in an "ombra" is about 100 ml, even less if you ask for an "ombretta". The term "bacaro" is said to go back to the exclamation of a gondolier who one day tasted a new wine from the south of Italy: "Bon bon! Questo xe proprio un vin de b?caro" (Very good indeed! This is indeed a wine fit for making merry). The Venetian expression "far b?cara" is equivalent to the Italian "far baldoria", to eat and drink in good company. And for this, "vin de b?caro" is the perfect choice. According to this legend reported by Elio Zorzo in his book "Osterie Veneziane" published in 1928, the gondolier had invented a new term which became a synonym for wine from Puglia and the wine-shops were it was sold. The "bacaro" became a favourite meeting place for all Venetians and to drink an "ombra" together was a social ritual, a declaration of friendship and solidarity renewed day after day, hour after hour. If you are not from Venice, then a visit to our "bacari" could be a real key to understanding the different dimension of a city where being in a hurry is unheard of, where the rhythms are those of the sing-song cadence of the Venetian dialect, the steps which slowly echo down the secret, hidden lanes. A city where you never need to make a date, because each day you bump into the same people again and again in a series of fortuitous encounters which follow the laws of predestination. Where popping out for a moment is nothing but a wish to find yourself in familiar surroundings with familiar people.

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