Visualizing Venice

We built our first trip around the visiting exhibit from Venice at the Portland Art Museum: "Venice, the Golden Age of Art and Music". It promised to be a rich visual experience, and Portland has no shortage of wonderful Italian restaurants!

Starting three nights before our date in Portland, we watched documentaries, travel shows and movies filmed in Venice, a combination of Netflix offerings and library DVD rentals.

It was an interesting exercise for us, saturating our eyes with a single place. We became comfortable with familiar scenes, developed an expectation of what we would find at the museum, and anticipated ways Portland could become Venice for a day.

Our two favorites:

Bread and Tulips

Bread and Tulips is an Italian film, and has that quirky random quality we love about foreign films. The characters are lovably human.

Jamie Oliver's Food Escapes- Venice

This has classic Venetian scenery, and we enjoyed watching Jamie interact with local people in his charming, down to earth manner. We wanted to try everything he cooked on the show, so we found similar recipes to make at home, and hoped to find other dishes when we went to Portland.

This clam pasta reminded me of the Spaghetti Vongole Jaime Oliver created in his video. It was wonderful!