Instructions: My many journeys to Italy over the past 20 years could be characterized as pilgrimages rather than simply as vacations or business trips. While I always incorporate excursions to previously unexplored cities and villages, some experiences have become rituals. Among these is a walk through the Rialto market, a high-style food theater that only Venice can provide, where slender barges overflow with goods from the prolific waters and gardens in anticipation of the day.

Food writer Elizabeth David described it this way: The light of a Venetian dawn in early summer - you must be about at 4 oclock in the morning to see the market coming to life - is so limpid and so still that it makes every separate vegetable and fruit and fish luminous with a life of its own, with unnaturally heightened colors and clear stenciled outlines.

Here the cabbages are cobalt blue, the beetroots deep rose, the lettuces clear pure green, sharp as glass. . . In other markets, on other shores, the unfamiliar fishes may be vivid, mysterious, repellent, fascinating and bright with splendid color, only in Venice do they look good enough to eat.

In this rarefied atmosphere, I instantly regretted not leasing a flat last spring so I would have a kitchen in which to concoct culinary experiments. How glorious it would be to stroll the food stalls every morning, impulsively buying whatever caught my eye only to return to a flat and transform the incredible raw ingredients, just as those who live here have done for centuries.

Venetian cuisine is based on immediacy - the purest and freshest products that the surrounding land and sea can provide, prepared with straightforward methods and carried steaming or sizzling to the table for instantaneous enjoyment.

On my last stroll through the Rialto market, I spotted a display of a half-dozen types of asparagus: from plump white and slender, purple-tipped to fat and tender deep emerald stalks and a vibrant sea green variety as thin and delicate and long as wild grass. An enormous bouquet of variegated chartreuse and saffron-orange-tinged fiori di zucca, zucchini blossoms, was artfully placed next to a spray of long-stemmed purple artichokes the size of plums and accompanying heads of crimson-tongued radicchio from Treviso. Mountains of spring peas just plucked from the Chioggia fields were heaped against a wooden crate brimming with funghettini di bosco.

The pageant of seafood under the ancient arched stone porticoes was no less spectacular. Bianchetti, tiny albino anchovies, still wiggled with so much vigor that they shimmered in the Venetian light like whitecaps on the Adriatic. Flats of exotic, rosy creatures called cannocchie, two-headed (fore and aft) shrimp, were laid out head to head in identical rows. Granseola, spider crab, with their vermilion bodies and spindly legs, slow danced in the sea-scented air while jewel-like scallops edged with brilliant coral roe rested, luminescent, on beds of ice.

Venice has become synonymous with the extravagant, the dramatic, the exotic and the refined, from art and architecture to the pleasures of the table. Tables are set with ornate linens and delicate hand-blown glass from Murano. But as a city of merchants, there is something solid here, too. The cuisine is simple and uncomplicated, yet subtle, imaginative and varied in its purity.

A typical Venetian meal starts with cuttlefish, clams the size of a thumbnail, cannocchie, sea snails, crawfish, octopus, miniature scallops and other shellfish whose identities are not familiar outside the Adriatic, all caught that morning, lightly steamed and drizzled with olive oil, a hint of lemon and a sprinkle of minced parsley. Fish - from mullet and John Dory to monkfish and eel - is treated as simply as possible, often grilled whole or baked and served with a wedge of lemon or in saor, sauteed and then marinated with onion, carrot, celery, bay leaf, vinegar and dry white wine and served cold.

Pasta usually takes a back seat to sophisticated incarnations of risotto.

Superfine white polenta is more often used than the yellow variety eaten elsewhere in Italy, and both polenta and rice are sometimes cooked with cuttlefish ink, which adds little taste but turns the dishes black and adds dramatic impact. Rice is combined with everything and anything from the sea or the garden, but the most famous Venetian risotto is risi e bisi, or rice and peas. While it may not sound enticing to those raised on the canned and frozen peas so common in the United States, the dish is a fabulous first course when made with young, tender fresh spring peas.

Fiori di zucca are eaten as much for their vibrant and seductive color as for their delicate flavor and can be found throughout the city served fried, stuffed, used as a shell for assorted fillings as well as candied. Even acacia blossoms, at their peak for only a few short weeks, are turned into fragrant fritters.

Two of the best first courses I ate during my last trip were an incredible salad of paper-thin slices of raw purple artichoke heart and the sweetest, barely steamed tiny shrimp dressed simply with fruity olive oil and lemon, and an equally fabulous salad of similarly dressed succulent crabmeat, finely minced celery, parsley and chives sitting atop a featherweight, crunchy shell of fried fiori de zucca.

The lesson I take away every time I visit Venice and its magical market is to live and cook in the moment. Let the markets offerings inspire your daily menu.

Be discriminating. Expect - and insist on - the best products from your grocer.

You may not be able to find baby shrimp netted that morning, purple artichokes delicate enough to eat raw, or newborn zucchini blossoms at your local grocery, but if you keep suggesting and encouraging, eventually your grocer may expand his or her buying habits. In the meantime, seek out the freshest, most pristine seasonal ingredients you can find. Buon appetito!

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