Venice Cicchetti Tour (Bacaro Crawl)

A crawl covers three to five bacari in two and a half to three and a half hours, six to twelve cicchetti and three or four glasses. A bacaro is a small standing bar with a counter of food under glass; the word probably comes from far bacara, to make merry, out of Bacchus. Cicchetti, cicheti in Venetian, comes from the Latin ciccus, a trifle: small plates eaten standing, in the room or on the ledge outside, in the twenty minutes it takes to drink a glass. No reservations, usually no seats, no cover charge, and the moment there is table service, prices go up by half, which is the entire economic logic of the form.

The glass is an ombra, a shadow: six to ten centilitres, €1.20 to €3.50, and the phrase is andemo a bever un'ombra. The story is that the wine sellers in Piazza San Marco pushed their carts through the day to keep the barrels in the moving shade of the campanile, so going for a drink became going into the shadow. Whether or not that is the true etymology, it is the word everyone uses, and un'ombra de bianco or de rosso gets you the house pour, an inexpensive Veneto white or a Raboso. That is the point: the ombra is a unit of sociability, not a wine flight. The other Venetian order is the spritz (white wine and soda over ice with a bitter) and it has a local grammar. With Select, which was created in Venice, or with Campari, you get an olive; with Aperol, which is from Padua, you get a slice of orange. Asking for it with an olive is the fastest way to sound like you have been here before.

The counter. Baccala mantecato comes with a linguistic trap that catches nearly everyone: in Venice, baccala means stockfish, air-dried cod from the Lofoten islands, not salt cod, which is what the word means in the rest of Italy. Venetian usage kept the older sense, and the trade began after Pietro Querini was shipwrecked on Rost in 1432 and came home with the technique. It is soaked two or three days, poached, then beaten with olive oil until it emulsifies into a pale loose cream, and served on a square of grilled white polenta. Sarde in saor is fried sardines layered with onions cooked down slowly in vinegar, a preservation dish off the galleys; the pine nuts and sultanas are the later, wealthier addition and both versions are correct, but it needs twenty-four to forty-eight hours in the cold to be any good, so a saor made this morning is not right. Folpetti are small musky octopus, boiled, cut and dressed warm with oil, lemon and parsley, mostly autumn and winter. Francobolli, postage stamps, are the smallest thing there: tiny squares of soft crustless bread with a filling, two bites at most. Beyond the four, look for polpette, the fried meatballs that are the cheapest item and the most reliable index of a place, nervetti, half eggs with an anchovy, schie on soft white polenta (the tiny grey lagoon shrimp, genuinely local and hard to find), castraure in April and May, canoce in the cold months, and moeche, the lagoon crabs taken in the few weeks they moult, which will be the dearest thing on any counter. What is not a cicchetto: a slab of baguette under a mound of soft cheese with a curl of speck and a cherry tomato on a cocktail stick, at €3.50, on the axis between Rialto and San Marco. That is the invented version of the form, and it is what most first-time visitors eat.

Reading a bacaro takes ten seconds. Most cicchetti are €1.20 to €2.50, seafood €2.50 to €4.50; the wine by the glass is four to eight things, chalked up or written nowhere; a till receipt appears without being asked for; the counter holds six to fifteen items and they change through the day, because the fried and the seafood are made for the service windows rather than held from morning. Against that: photographs, a laminated menu in four languages, someone outside inviting you in. Which brings us to the hours, the thing most listings do not tell you. There are two windows, roughly 11.30 to 14.30 and 18.00 to 20.30. A great many bacari shut by nine, a significant number do not open on Sunday, and some close Monday, because most of the people who work in Venice commute out of it at the end of the shift. A crawl planned to start at nine is a crawl of the four late places that cater to visitors, and even inside the evening window the counter is picked over by quarter past eight. Start at six, when the room should be three deep.

The zones are distinct, and choosing one matters more than choosing bars. Rialto means the calli behind the Erbaria, the vegetable market, and around the Pescaria, the fish market, which trades Tuesday to Saturday mornings and closes Sunday and Monday because nobody fishes on a Sunday; the bacari there open early enough that an ombra at nine in the morning alongside the market porters is normal rather than a stunt. Cannaregio means the Fondamenta della Misericordia and the Fondamenta degli Ormesini, a four-hundred-metre canal-side run of bars that is the single best evening stretch in the city, mostly local and noticeably cheaper, with the Ghetto a few minutes away. Dorsoduro means Campo Santa Margherita and the streets towards San Barnaba and Ca' Foscari, the university zone, youngest and loudest, with the cheapest spritz in Venice at €2.50 to €3.50. Castello beyond the Arsenale, along Via Garibaldi, is the most residential and least visited, and it is where Venice is still a town. What to avoid is the axis running San Marco to Rialto to the station, which is where the €3.50 crostino lives.

Guided crawls run $75 to $130 (roughly €70 to €120) for two and a half to three and a half hours, three to five bacari, with food and three or four drinks included. Wine-led versions with a sommelier and better pours are $130 to $190 (€120 to €175). Private tours are $290 to $550 (€270 to €510) per group of two to six.

The honest comparison is what it costs unguided: five bacari, two cicchetti and one ombra at each, comes to €28 to €45 a head. You are not paying a guide for the food. You are paying for the routing, the language and the fact that somebody else has already worked out which counters are restocked and which are not.

Component prices: cicchetto €1.20 to €2.50 standard and €2.50 to €4.50 for seafood, moeche €5 to €9 each in season, ombra €1.20 to €3.50, spritz €3 to €4.50 in Cannaregio, Dorsoduro or Castello against €7 to €12 on the tourist axis. A seated coffee in Piazza San Marco with the orchestra supplement runs €10 to €15 and is posted on the menu rather than sprung on you. Budget separately for the city accommodation tax, roughly €1 to €5 per person per night by category and season, and note that day visitors not staying overnight pay an access fee on a set list of peak days whose rules and price have changed every year since it was introduced.

This is an indoor, year-round activity, so choose the month by the counter rather than the weather. Late September to November and January after Epiphany are the best of it: cold, often foggy, the city half empty and the bacari full of Venetians.

The lagoon calendar is worth planning around. Folpetti, schie and canoce are autumn and winter. Moeche, the moulting crabs, appear in two short windows, roughly March to May and October to November, and they are the delicacy people fly in for. Castraure, the first violet artichoke buds from the island of Sant'Erasmo, are April and early May and last three weeks at most. Sarde in saor is on counters all year but belongs to the Redentore, the third weekend of July, when the city eats it in boats. Castradina, the smoked and salted mutton, is cooked only around 21 November for the Madonna della Salute, and if you are there on the day, order it without asking what it is.

Dates to avoid unless they are the reason you came: Carnival in the ten days before Lent, the Redentore weekend in July, the Regata Storica on the first Sunday in September, and the Biennale opening weeks, all of which push accommodation sharply up. August is hot, humid and full of closures. Acqua alta season runs roughly October to January; the mobile barriers now prevent most of the events that used to flood the calli, but not all, and the city publishes tide forecasts a day or two ahead.

GetYourGuide, Viator and Airbnb Experiences all carry Venice cicchetti tours, and the same route is often listed on two of them at different prices. Read the listing for five things. How many bacari. Whether both food and drinks are included or drinks are charged as you go, which is the most common unpleasant surprise. The start time, because a tour beginning at seven is well judged and one beginning at half past eight will arrive at closing time. Group size, since a bacaro that holds fifteen people cannot host a group of eighteen. And whether the route stays in one sestiere or crosses the city, because every crossing costs twenty minutes of walking over bridges.

The question worth asking directly is which sestiere the route uses. Cannaregio and Castello are the answers you want. A route confined to the Rialto to San Marco strip is a route through the most expensive and least representative bars in Venice.

Book three to five days ahead in ordinary weeks and two to three weeks for Carnival, the Redentore and Biennale weekends.

Self-guiding is entirely viable here, more so than in most Italian cities, because the format is designed for walk-ins. Pick Cannaregio or Castello, start at six, and stop five times within four hundred metres. One practical warning: Venetian addresses are given by sestiere and a house number, not by street, so an address is nearly useless for navigation. Pin the places you want on an offline map before you leave the hotel, and expect the map to be wrong about at least one bridge.

Cannaregio is the best base for this specifically: the Misericordia and Ormesini fondamente are on your doorstep, prices are lower than San Marco by a wide margin, and it is ten to fifteen minutes on foot from the station. Castello beyond the Arsenale is the most residential part of the city, the cheapest inside Venice proper, and about twenty minutes from San Marco through streets where people are hanging out washing.

Dorsoduro is the art and student quarter, mid-priced, with good bars and the Zattere for walking. San Polo and Santa Croce put you next to Rialto and the markets. San Marco is the most expensive ground in Italy per square metre and the least interesting place to be at eight in the evening. Giudecca is quiet with the best views back at the city and depends entirely on the vaporetto, which runs through the night but thinly.

Mestre, on the mainland, costs half as much and is ten to twelve minutes away by train. It will still cost you the evening, because a bacaro crawl ends when the last convenient train does, and the walk from the Fondamenta della Misericordia to Santa Lucia at half past ten is the least pleasant part of any Venice trip.

Two practicalities. A single vaporetto ticket is around €9.50 and valid for seventy-five minutes, so if you intend to move by water at all, buy a day or multi-day pass. And everything you carry, you carry over bridges, which is the argument for one small bag rather than two.

Sitting down, Venice serves bigoli in salsa, thick wholemeal pasta with onions and anchovy, which is a fast-day dish; risi e bisi, rice and peas, historically presented to the Doge on 25 April for San Marco; fegato alla veneziana, calf's liver with onions, on white polenta; seppie al nero; moleche fritte in season; granseola, the spider crab dressed in its own shell; pasta e fasioi; and castradina in the days around the Salute. The polenta is white rather than yellow, because the Veneto grew white maize and still eats it with fish.

The fish is lagoon and Adriatic, and the Rialto Pescaria is the place to see what is genuinely in season, with signs distinguishing nostrano, local, from imported. Nostrano is a useful word to learn before you read a menu.

Sweets: bussolai and esse from Burano, ring and S-shaped butter biscuits made for dunking in wine; baicoli, the thin dry biscuits that were ship's provisions; frittelle and galani during Carnival; pinza at Epiphany; zaeti with sultanas and cornmeal.

Wine, which is what the house ombra actually is: Prosecco from Conegliano Valdobbiadene DOCG, Soave, Custoza, Raboso and Refosco from the Veneto and Friuli side, plus Friulano, Ribolla Gialla and Malvasia. Almost none of it is expensive by the glass and none of it is meant to be studied.

What to avoid, in a city where avoiding matters more than choosing: the fixed-price tourist menus with photographs near San Marco and around the station, and the cones of fried seafood sold on the main axis at €12. The giveaway on the second is that it is available at three in the afternoon in a place with no fish counter, which means it arrived frozen and pre-breaded. Also avoid sitting down to eat on bridges and church steps, which is fined in parts of the city; the ledges outside a bacaro are where you are meant to stand.