Venice’s Bacari Trail: A Love Letter to Cicchetti and Vanishing Traditions

The Venice of €20 tourist menus and €18 spritzes exists—but so does my Venice, the one where marble counters stick to your elbows and fishermen argue about Adriatic currents over glasses of straw-yellow wine. This was a city that once breathed in seasons: winter mornings when the fog clung to the calli like damp lace, and the osterie of Castello stood half-empty, ours to claim. Back then, the city took a siesta from crowds, and bar-hopping meant lingering over francobolli at Do Mori without elbowing through selfie sticks. Now, even in January, you'll fight for standing room at All'Arco—though there's a perverse charm in the scrum, like joining some tipsy, carb-fueled rugby match where the prize is the last sarde in saor on the counter.

This was a Venice where every osteria had its cicchetti fingerprint: at All'Arco, Arrigo would layer sardines atop polenta with the precision of a jeweler setting stones. Do Mori served francobolli—postage-stamp sandwiches bursting with anchovy and radicchio. And oh, that illicit thrill of Fragolino, the outlawed strawberry wine we drank like liquid contraband—its jammy sweetness a rebellion against EU regulations.

Today’s Venice still hums with cicchetti bars, but the rhythm has changed. The Saturday fish market crowd—their hands still smelling of sea salt as they reached for baccalà mantecato—has thinned. Now we play archaeologists of appetite, decoding the city through its surviving gems.

At Cantina Do Spade, tortellini skewers whisper of 1488, while Osteria al Portego defies logic with wine cheaper than a vaporetto ride, its counter packed with gondoliers sighing over their ombra. Nearby, Bar Alla Toletta serves democracy on toast—€1.50 crostini fueling student debates on Marx and midfielders. Through it all, Gigia reigns—equally at home in frescoed wine bars or sawdust-floored bacari, high-fiving chefs and fishmongers with the same regal paw. Whether nibbling gorgonzola or posing beneath Murano chandeliers, she knows: true Venetian luxury needs no gold leaf—just good company and a stolen bite of someone else’s cicchetto.

The real secret? Watch where the street vendors go when their shifts end. Those vu cumprà hawkers know which unassuming bacaro still pours forbidden Fragolino from unmarked bottles, served with a conspiratorial nod that makes you feel—just for a moment—like you’ve cracked Venice’s secret code.