Welcome to my first instalment of the little series "Venice Haul" following our weekend in Venice from Nov. 1 - Nov. 3. Coming up soon: makeup haul and travel diary in photos :)

We stayed in a hotel in the area called San Marco. This is the city center and where you can find the Piazza San Marco where the famous Basilica di San Marco is situated. I'll show you photos in my travel diary post.

Anyways, on Saturday afternoon/evening, after our lovely and expensive ride in a gondola, we decided to cross the Ponte di Rialto (the oldest bridge in Venice) from San Marco to the area San Polo.

Here, we found a cute market! That's always a great thing to find :)

We came across this stand with a ton of different pastas - Italian style of course! It was so colorful and pretty, I absolutely had to photograph it.

After walking up the whole street of the market, we decided to turn back towards the bridge. When we passed by the pasta stand for the second time, we decided to buy some pasta and sauces for ourselves, my boyfriend's sister's family and for my parents. This type of gift is a great way of bringing home something traditional from the city and it's practical since they can cook and eat it!

This is what we bought for ourselves:

Farfalle Multicolore pasta // €3.50

Spaghettata alla Puttanesca sauce mixture // €3.50

Pomodori Secchi // €1.50

Holy moly, these 3 items cost a total of €8.50! That's nothing for us, since we're so used to high prices in Switzerland.

The colors of this pasta are so cool! I almost don't want to cook it...just put it on a shelf in the kitchen to stare at :) This pasta is made directly in San Polo, Venice and this package is 250g. The instructions on all 3 products are in Italian as well as in English so that's a big plus!

At first I thought it was such a shame that they didn't have packaged pasta sauce at the stand, until I noticed these little dry mixture packages - you can make sauce with these! We decided to buy the Puttanesca sauce for ourselves, which contains tomato, garlic, black olives, capers, salt, and parsley. Yum! This packet is 80g and the instructions on the back are also in English! All you have to add is water, olive oil and a bit of butter. Sounds pretty fool-proof to me :)

I also chose to bring home a little package of Pomodori Secchi (sun-dried tomatoes). I'm sure these will be delicious since you can even smell them through the packaging. I think you can eat them directly out of the package but on the back there are instructions on how to preserve them: wash the tomatoes, boil them in water (add white vinegar and white wine) for 5 minutes, drain them, put them into jars adding olive oil, garlic, parsley and capers according to taste, and after 15 days you should have a delicious appetizer or side dish to be served with white, boiled meat, ham and seasoned cheeses. That sounds heavenly!

Hope you enjoyed our italian market haul and I'll be back with more Venice posts soon!