Klink on the Canal Grande: a book for the travel season that is as entertaining as it is delicious.
For forty years now, Vincent Klink has been travelling to the region in Italy that has a winged lion as its emblem: Venetia. He loves the Venetian cuisine that goes beyond the clichéd “tomato and mozzarella”. Instead, he focuses on sarde in saor (tiny, sour fried herrings with cooked onion rings), piccione cotto (pigeon) or seppie in umido (octopus). Venice – this city of longing on stilts – is characterised by its cuisine as much as by its impressive, opulent artistic and cultural treasures; in his habitual relaxed and authentic style, Vincent Klink gives us an understanding of this place that goes beyond the romantic Rialto Bridge postcard.
With Goethe and Montaigne in his suitcase, he sets off on a journey from Stuttgart, and travels across the Brenner Pass towards Bolzano and Trento, where he comes across purple-coloured risotto. He takes a small detour to Vicenza and Padua, until he finally lands in the famous St Mark’s Square to enjoy a cornetto for breakfast, actually no, Vincent Klink likes to speak in the plural when it comes to cornetto, and has three cornetti. What follows is an enticing, Klink-like mixture of recipes, descriptions of Venetian walks and trips into the surrounding countryside: a portrait of Venetia as culturally rich as it is culinarily promising.
