Each year, we take a family vacation to Italy. We usually visit in the summer and use the trip to catch up with family and friends and have our kids spend time with their grandparents. We mixed it up this year and spent March Break in Northen Italy. This trip was a few days in Venice and then a week skiing and hanging out with my wife's family in Cortina d'Ampezzo, a small town in the Italian Dolomites. I started sharing my observations from these trips to Italy with my institutional clients while on the sell side. Feel welcome to hit delete. What follows is mostly nonsense.

 

Venice. I'm not a fan of crowds, so visiting Venice in March worked perfectly for me. The weather was in the mid-teens. I love walkable cities, and there is a certain novelty to seeing rubber boots on table legs in shops near Piazza San Marco to protect them from 'aqua alta' (high water). However, my comments about how affordable it is to eat out in Italy and how modest the wine markups are do not apply to Venice. While there were some signs expressing a dislike for tourists, the Venetians were extremely accommodating this time of year, especially at our hotel (Palazzina Grassi on the Grand Canale) where it felt like the staff had just finished reading Will Guiadara's book Unreasonable Hospitality.

 

Murano. Is a small island in the Venice Lagoon known for the exquisite glasswork of its artisans. In many families the trade has been passed down for generations and it's incredible to see how certain they are in their understanding of how multi-layered glass that's heated to more than a thousand degrees can be manipulated. Murano is a short 'complimentary' water taxi ride from our hotel. We visited the glass factory of Venini, where the kids enjoyed the gallery and watching the master artisans layering glass to create an ornate vase, an intricate goblet, and horses (which they gifted to my girls; I'm writing this on the plane and one horse is still intact; let's see if it makes it 'home'). Be warned, the guides/salespeople were very welcoming, but I'm not sure you can leave the island without buying something from their gallery.

 

Cortina d'Ampezzo. Cortina is a beautiful hamlet in a mountain valley (at about 1,224 meters above sea level) surrounded by five mountains. The city hosted the Winter Olympics in 1956 and will host them again in 2026, explaining the dozen cranes dominating the skyline. It is impressive that you can access all five mountains surrounding the city for a fraction of a day pass at Blue Mountain in Ontario. My highlight was seeing my girls, who had never skied outside of Ontario, on actual mountains and watching their confidence grow over the week. March is starting to get late in Cortina's ski season, but the weather was great and most of the terrain was open. We had fun skiing the slopes that would be sun-kissed in the AM early in the morning and then walking across the street to slopes that don't see the sun until later in the day for lunch and afternoon skiing.

 

Markets and inflation. I mentioned last summer that no one is talking about markets or 'the magnificent seven.' I'll reiterate the comment for this trip. Outside of my podcasts, inboxes, or muted news broadcasts playing in the background, there was no discussion about markets, the "Mag 7", or NVIDIA. The Italians are still complaining about higher prices, but it feels like they have recalibrated and expect year-over-year price increases. This is very different than in North America, where I find people who don't work in finance or markets tend to compare current prices to pre-pandemic prices, so lighter year-over-year inflation is less appreciated because the anchor is a significantly lower pre-pandemic price.  

 

Lighting Round

• The food in the chalets on the mountains in Italy is incredible. The views are pretty good too.
• I've never been in tighter or more poorly designed parking garages than in Venice and Cortina. It was not unusual to have less than six inches of clearance on either side of our car, and passengers would have to get out of it before it was parked.
• There are two competing legends about the origin of my favorite cocktail, The Negroni. One is from Harry's Bar in Venice. Dinner at Harry's was excellent. The Negroni was classic, but it was left wrestling with my lofty expectations. In my opinion, the glass and portion left headroom for improvement. The Negroni at Palazzina Grassi was much better, but I suspect they leaned in on the vermouth and gin.
• Food in Cortina arrives shockingly fast. I couldn't help but think of the Seinfeld episode about this topic most evenings.
• In Italy, hot chocolate is a mug of melted chocolate.
• In some restaurants in Venice and Cortina, it looks like the plexiglass COVID barrier will become a permanent fixture. The barriers are used to increase the density of seating areas. Seating two couples that know each other at a table for four, slide a plexiglass barrier between them.
• I haven't tried many red wines from Alto Adige, Trentino or Fruili, but these lighter reds drank exceptionally well at altitude with the heavier mountain cuisine.

 

I hope you've enjoyed my nonsense. If you'd like to read observations from previous years, you can find them here (2023, 2022-2011). I'm a very guilty vacationer, so I welcome you to reach out to catch up. I hope spring (despite the late March snow in Toronto) is treating you well.

 

All the best.

 

Delli (delli@cibc.com) 

 

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