Seven Sardines, Butterflied: Notes from a Fish Shop in Veneto
A fish shop on the Venetian mainland.
One working day, measured hour by hour.
Seven Sardines, Butterflied is a quiet, unsentimental chronicle of life behind the counter of a neighborhood fish shop in Veneto. From the early morning deliveries to the last customer before closing, the narrator observes colleagues, regulars, passers-by, drunks, widows, caretakers, workers, and the slow choreography of buying, cleaning, weighing, and selling fish.
What emerges is not a portrait of Venice as a postcard, but of its overlooked mainland: Mestre, bars at dawn, traffic circles, supermarkets, housing blocks, and small trades struggling to survive. Fish are gutted, butterflied, washed, arranged on ice; people, meanwhile, reveal themselves in fragments-through habits, silences, obsessions, and minor cruelties.
Written in clear, restrained prose, the book blends memoir, social observation, and quiet philosophical reflection. There is no plot in the traditional sense, only repetition, labor, bodies, time, and the search for "the right amount"-of work, of care, of life.
This is a book about manual labor, attention, and measure.
About what it means to spend a day doing something well, even when no one is watching.
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