Talking Location With author Nicky Pellegrino – She knows Venice like the back of her hand

10th August 2018

TalkingLocationWith… author Nicky Pellegrino, who knows Venice like the back of her hand! La Serenissima plays a large character in her novel “A Year At Hotel Gondola”

In a way Venice is the most important character in my novel A Year At Hotel Gondola. It’s a city where nothing is ever ordinary, because it can’t be, and that’s why my character Kat Black is there. Kat thirsts for adventure and new experiences and in this shadowy, watery place she wants to learn to be like a Venetian, to eat and love like them. With its bridges arching over dark water, graceful squares, cobbled streets and quietly crumbling palazzi, the city seduces her.

Many of the locations where scenes are set will be familiar to anyone who loves Venice. Kat shops for spring vegetables at the Rialto market: leafy greens like barba di frate and bruscandoli grown on the marshy, salty lagoon islands.  She sits in the sculpture garden of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and drinks tea in its café filled with framed prints of the rich art collector who once lived here. As she seeks inspiration for the book she is writing, she wanders round the bacari, the cosy Venetian bars where locals pause for a glass of wine and a taste of something delicious. And she finds romance in Harry’s Bar:

“Right there in that intimate room that can’t have changed for decades, where there was always a white jacketed waiter when he was needed, and the lighting was a soft butterscotch haze, and the clientele a mix of tourists twitching at the prices and old people who might have been there forever, in Harry’s Bar, tightly tucked behind a table, I fell in love.”

Venice is a city that attracts millions of tourists but still has its quiet places. There are secret gardens and empty stretches of the lagoon where boats can navigate channels through the marshes and mudflats, past wading herons and screeching seabirds. There are islands with walled vineyards and market gardens, a monastery surrounded by cypress tress, and the cemetery island of San Michele. Kat visits all those places and takes her readers with her.

This is a novel about learning to see life differently, about friendship and food, about becoming older and wiser. But it’s also very much about a year of falling in love with a city that’s all pinks and blues in the sunshine, misty and mysterious on winter days…because there is nowhere else like Venice.

Thank you so much to Nicky for her wonderful insights into the city. Please do follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and you can connect via her website.

You can buy her novels through the TripFiction database!

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Photos ©Nicky Pellegrino

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