Riva de Biasio: The Butcher's Legend and Fegato alla Veneziana
Why is it significant?
Come out on a stretch of waterfront along the Grand Canal, with a vaporetto stop, a row of plain houses and a wide view across the water to the church of San Marcuola. It looks completely innocent. Venetians, though, will tell you a story about this name that may put you off sausages for a day.
Key Facts
| Place | Riva de Biasio: The Butcher's Legend and Fegato alla Veneziana |
|---|---|
| Address | Riva de Biasio, Santa Croce, 30135 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.44190, 12.32560 |
| Part of Walk | Fish, Wine and Cicchetti: Venice's Rialto Markets and the Bacari of San Polo |
| Generated | Generated |
Come out on a stretch of waterfront along the Grand Canal, with a vaporetto stop, a row of plain houses and a wide view across the water to the church of San Marcuola. It looks completely innocent. Venetians, though, will tell you a story about this name that may put you off sausages for a day.
Legend says that in the sixteenth century a man called Biasio kept a shop here as a luganegher, a sausage maker. His sguazeto, a rich meat stew, was famous across the city, until one day a customer found something in his bowl that should not have been there... a child's finger. Biasio, the story goes, had been putting stolen children into his stew. He was executed, his shop destroyed, and the waterfront has carried his name ever since.
No reliable record proves any of it, and historians suspect a dark fairy tale, perhaps grown out of some real crime. But it tells you how much a Venetian neighbourhood depended on trusting its butchers and cooks. And the old word survives: luganega is still the name of a long, thin sausage in the Veneto.
So let us talk instead about Venice's favourite meat dish, fegato alla veneziana: calf's liver cut into thin strips and cooked quickly with a mountain of onions softened slowly until sweet. The idea of sweetness and liver is ancient. The Italian word for liver, fegato, comes from the Latin ficatum, the liver of animals fattened on figs. The Venetians swapped the figs for onions and kept the sweetness.
Served with soft white polenta, it is the taste of the Venetian home kitchen rather than the restaurant. Now walk west along the waterfront and cross the Grand Canal on the Ponte degli Scalzi by the railway station, turn right along the busy Lista di Spagna, cross the Ponte delle Guglie with its little stone spires, and you will reach the street where Cannaregio does its shopping.