caramei

Updated: April 30, 2025

As a rule we shared it with only an elderly Englishman and his son who read the Standard in the opposite corner after our race with them to the café, the winners getting the one English paper first and we were seldom intruded upon or interrupted except by the occasional visit of the caramei man with his brass tray of candied fruit, impaled on thin sticks, like little birds on a skewer, which led us into our one extravagance.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell - Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties

And we began to feel apologetic for the dinginess and general down-at-heeledness of Venice which bored the men from Munich to extinction really they were so bored, they said, that all day they found themselves looking forward to the caramei man as the town's one excitement.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell - Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties

The old Englishman and his son put down the Standard and laughed with us. The caramei man went away with an empty tray, I do believe the only time he was ever bought out in his life, and McFarlane treated us all to tamarindo to drink with the fruit, and he wound up his horrible extravagance by buying a copy of the Venetian paper "the boys" used to call the Barabowow.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell - Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties