Thunder and lightning and rain (then baked goods), oh boy!

Crashing thunder, streaks of lightning, pouring rain - all for about an hour and a half in the very early morning hours - before 5:00. It was wild. My first and only thought - it's going to cool things down, thank you, God! And it did. The sun's out now, everything is clean and clear, and it's considerably cooler than it has been. We have now experienced the full range of summer weather, Venetian-style.

We went up to the Ghetto in Cannaregio this morning - on a mission - to Giovanni Volpe. It's the only bakery in Venice that makes traditional Jewish pastries - and matzoh - year 'round. We stocked up - one (or more) of everything. And you see this strudel?



This is not light, flaky, chic-chic strudel. This is STRUDEL. This is the closest I've had to the strudel they make in all the Jewish bakeries in Brooklyn anywhere outside of Brooklyn. What a memory/sensory trip back to small kid time for me!

We spent most of the morning up there poking around. If you don't know about Venice's Jewish Ghetto - and that we get the word "ghetto" from Venice - you might want to do a bit of reading up about it. At the height of it's Jewish population, there were about 5,000 Jews living on the island - yes, it's an island within the islands of the lagoon. Today, there are only about 500 Jews in all of Venice and less than a dozen families live in the area still called the Ghetto. Oh, and since it was Saturday morning, we did see a service taking place, in a "storefront" synagogue, not one of the five big, beautiful ones that are now more museums than places of active worship. It's an interesting story.