Ciccheti - A true taste of Venice

One of the things many people - myself included - want when they travel is to eat in places where local people are eating. These are usually the best places to dine out and it’s always exciting to try local flavours, traditional dishes and mingle among the people who call that place home.

Venice is one of the busiest tourist cities in the world and there are surprisingly few people who actually call the watery city home - less than 60,000. This means it’s easy to get caught up in eating in all the touristy restaurants and not get a true taste of Venice.

Unless, you visit the cicchetti bars that are dotted around the city that is.

Cicchetti (pronounced chiKETtee) are wonderful small appetiser-style nibbles that you’ll see in many of the small pubs and bars throughout the city. These spots are called bacari and are usually little hole-in-the-wall style places with a bar, a couple of tables and people spilling out onto the street talking noisily and gesticulating in a way that only Italians can.

Stroll into a bacari, order a drink first and take a look at the selection of ciccheti that’s on offer. You’ll find that glasses of wine and prosecco in these bars are incredibly cheap and so are the majority of the nibbles on offer.

You’ll find mini sandwiches with a multitude of fillings, fresh fish served on slices of bread, fried breadcrumbs encasing many different types of meats and much more. The signs indicating what everything is are usually in Italian, so part of the fun is trying to guess what things are, whether you’ll like them and ordering them regardless.

You won’t find many bacari in the main tourist parts of Venice and instead should wander away from San Marco and the Rialto Bridge. You won’t have to go too far before you start to find some of these wonderful spots.

Each bacari serves up different ciccheti based on what their specialties are and what’s fresh that day. It’s a fun idea to hop between a few (a Venetian-style bar crawl!) and enjoy some drinks and nibbles along the way. Perfect!