In the canals, too much mud can be a problem, but one doesn’t see it until the extreme low tides of mid-winter. When anyone asks me how deep are the canals, I usually ask “You mean at high tide? Or low tide?” The height of the water changes, but over time so does the height of the mud.
You could call it the lagoon’s base layer. There are places where there’s too much mud, mainly in the canals; it accumulates and creates problems for boats when the tide is low and, equally important, problems for buildings whose drains it has blocked, and so we have to take it away.
But there is an equal and opposite problem of there not being enough mud in places around the lagoon, where dredging has been heavy or, more frequently, where the motondoso (waves from motorboats) has loosened the soil, and the tide and waves have washed it out to sea. Waves that demolish the wetland marshes (barene) or, on the other hand, fill up channels, have been known for years to be wrecking the lagoon’s wrinkly underwater shape, smoothing it out and slowly turning it into a sort of bay of the sea. Bays of the sea are an entirely different ecosystem from lagoons, but no matter! Motors are indispensable for keeping the city going, and the lagoon is just going to have to suck up (so to speak) the consequences.
At water-level you may notice only water, but the lagoon is full of mud.
The 17th-century Venetians knew the lagoon dynamics intimately. Their survival depended on it. Fears of the lagoon silting up from the several rivers that flowed into it led them to an epic undertaking: From 1600-1604 they cut the river Po to divert it southward into the Adriatic.
In 1993 it was decided to redistribute the quantities of mud in the city and lagoon: Simple, logical, effective, positive. Dredging proceeded and the mud was deposited in various locations where it was useful, or at least not problematic. In fact, moving mud around is far from a recent phenomenon — it’s been done many times over the centuries resulting in consolidations, expansions, and entire new islands. This assortment of maps showing the Morphological Evolution of the Lagoon of Venice from the XVI Century till today is very interesting. In the 20th century Tronchetto and Sacca Sessola, to name only two, rose from the lagoon bottom created with dredgings.
And so, in the fullness of time, the dredges were at work outside our door in 2021, and they were at it again just two months ago. All seemed to be going well, but suddenly we read that things have taken an unexpected turn. The mud is unusable!
The dredger the first day of work thought it was a good idea to tie his behemoth to one of our little pilings to resist the weight of the mud he’s pulling up. He was wrong. But you can appreciate something about the mud here: It’s tenacious. Once it grabs onto something, it really doesn’t intend to let go. This went on for hours, the modest pole yanked sideways, as you can see; it simply couldn’t be dislodged, although it’s now a bit shaky. The next day he moored the monster to the metal ring on the street, and we’re trying to help our piling begin to trust people again.
The headlines have been blunt: “Unusable muds, the lagoon in crisis, the dredging has been stopped in the lagoon.” “The new Protocollo of 2023 for the sediments dug in the canals doesn’t work anymore because the parameters of ecotoxicity are too rigid.” “First they were considered clean and good for reconstructing the barene. But no more: Now there’s a risk of blocking also the dredging of the most polluted.”
This problem has come up literally in mid-dredge. It’s a little awkward to discover that the Protocollo of 2023 is invalid when the barges are full of mud, so now what? Is there a Plan B? “Strictly speaking, we don’t have one,” to quote CIA operative Gust Avrokotos in the film “Charlie Wilson’s War.” “But we’re working on it.”
So what changed all of a sudden? It’s that, as the headline noted, the standards are suddenly stricter as to what mud is classified as “ecotoxic” (either biological or chemical) and therefore where it can be dumped. (Don’t write in, I know that everything is chemical, looking at the universe. We’re roughly distinguishing here between chromium and E. coli.)
Nobody’s surprised to hear that there are toxic substances in the lagoon — just look at the Industrial Zone shoreline and draw your own conclusions. A few years ago the University of Padova and Ca’ Foscari in Venice studied some mollusks taken from the channel bordering the mainland. Researchers found that the bivalves contained a quantity of poisonous substances 120 times higher than in the rest of the lagoon.
So here we are. Where will the mud go?
Men used to do this with shovels. Not underwater, of course.
All muds are not created equal. Category A, the cleanest kind, is safe to put under the water, so it can be used “nourish” the shrinking barene. Other muds, the more toxic Category B and C, can’t be put back into the lagoon, no matter how worthy the reasons, and have to be banished to the Tresse island. And God forbid all these muds should become mixed together. Burning the mud is an interesting proposal, but it’s hard to agree on where to put the ash.
Also, the Tresse at the moment is running out of space. There have already been discussions about enlarging it, but quantity and quality, as often happens, are in conflict. Decisions lag. Bureaucratic, legal, logistical issues keep bumping into each other. Cost must be in there too, somewhere. The Morphological Plan of the lagoon was shot down in 2022 and nothing has been heard of it since.
The Isola delle Tresse began in the 1930’s as Storage Tanks island, and was expanded in 1993 with a million cubic meters of mud and other material dredged for the benefit of the Port of Venice. This raised the island by nine meters (30 feet) and doubled it in size. Now it has been proposed to deposit as much as an additional four million cubic meters of mud, which would raise the island as high as 13 meters (43 feet). May I take just a moment to recall that when UNESCO designated Venice as a World Heritage Site in 1987 it also included the lagoon? Toxic mud doesn’t sound very World Heritage Sitey.
So, back to the dredging at hand: After weeks of hardy gouging and hauling, the mud’s permission to land, so to speak, has been revoked. The Department of You Should Have Seen This Coming isn’t answering its phone.
The barene (semi-solid mud) are beautiful and crucial to the whole ecosystem. But motondoso, or waves caused by the anarchy of motorboats, slices away at their soft soil. This goes on all year long, but especially in the summer. Note the distance between the wooden piling and the islet. They used to be much closer together. Shrinking barene aren’t good for the health of the lagoon as a whole.Of course the plant roots help stabilize the soil, but they only go down so far. Soon the upper layer will collapse and slide into the water, filling up the channel. We need the barene and we also need the channels, but they do not play well together. Eventually there will be too much mud in the channel, and not enough island, and dredging will be called for. And perhaps expansion afterward. Not literally inconceivable.To resist the waves gnawing at the barene, various defenses have been tried. Above is somebody’s idea of a breakwater. The barena is clearly not reacting as the planners intended. You can see here why it was hoped that the latest batches of dredged mud could enlarge shrinking bits of land, because more and/or larger barene would be a great thing for the ecosystem. Even if you don’t care about the ecosystem — I don’t judge — more barene would serve as barriers to slow the incoming tide, the way they always did before motondoso began to tear them apart.This construction is not destined to last long; the team behind this project seems not to have observed what happens to wooden pilings in the water.The lagoon loses 600,000 cubic meters of sediments every year, leaving an increasing wasteland behind. You can easily see the difference between the lagoon north of Malamocco (divided by the Canale dei Petroli, about which more below), and the southern lagoon. If too much mud in one place is a problem, too little mud in another isn’t any better. Fewer barene and fewer channels mean the water can rampage around and carry even more mud away with the tide, or deposit it unhelpfully elsewhere.1901. We see lots of squiggly channels back then (which, like the barene, slowed down the tide, and the dislodging of sediments). You also see that the shoreline was squishier and more ragged, providing more space for the water to come and go, moving more slowly in the process. But too many channels were doomed, like the little one circled in red above.1932. Look at the little channel (ghebo, in Venetian) circled in red again. You see that natural processes have caused it to begin to fill in, but it was still in good shape at least ten years later because Lino remembers it well. His father would take him out fishing in their little boat and they rowed along this canal on their way to the best spot to “dig” for canestrelli, or little lagoon scallops (Aequipecten opercularis). Note: The different colors indicate varying depths of the water. You’ll see that change over the decades too.
In the Thirties the Industrial Zone was being built; for Venice’s post-war economy it seemed like the greatest plan ever, and in many ways it was. In their great days (now past), the chemical refineries here were the largest in Italy. Oil and chemical industries require raw materials, and those require ships, and ships require reliable channels for passage. That broad, curving channel marked in yellow on the map above that enters the lagoon from Malamocco does not look like anything a big ship would want to navigate, and of course ships also need a waterway to reach the mainland port area. And so the Canale dei Petroli (“petroleum canal,” in honor of the expected tankers) was planned.
1970. The triumph of the shipping. The broad, curvy yellow channel (which also slowed the force of the tide) was bypassed in 1964-1968 by the digging of the channel that is straight as an airport runway: The Canale dei Petroli. The resulting tons of mud went to the shoreline, reshaping it by the formation of three longish islands (generically called casse dicolmata) that were created along the flank of the mainland. They were intended as the land for the Third Industrial Zone, which was never built. Left to their own devices, they’ve become a sort of oasis, especially for birds.Dredging the Canale dei Petroli created a channel 18 meters (60 feet) deep, 15 km (9 miles) long and 200 meters (656 feet) wide. If you had wanted to suck the sediments out of the lagoon, you could hardly have done better. But the wakes of the cargo ships also stir up the sediments and they don’t all reach the sea. Result: More dredging is needed periodically as the channel proceeds to silt up. Further result: The tide entered faster and with more force than ever before, and before you could say “Worst flood in Venice’s history, November 4, 1966” the city went under. Venetians weren’t slow to see a connection between the canal and the flood, but what was done was done.And this is more or less the situation today.Moving mud means moving water. These maps were made in 2009, so the situation may well have changed yet again since then. Looking at you, effects of MOSE. (On the right panel: This map was assembled for study use of the Committee of Public Health of Venice, from the pages published on the site https://www.istitutoveneto.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/IDPagina/1. Credit and rights to this work belong to Diego Tiozzo Netti. The indications of the tidal flows are by Umberto Sartori.)
We’re looking at tide patterns, otherwise known as the hydrostatic equilibrium of the tides in the lagoon over many centuries.
LEFT PANEL: The solid red lines show the tidal pathway from the inlet at San Nicolo’. The solid green is the water entering from Malamocco (Alberoni). The thin blue line across the center of the lagoon emphasizes what we can see where the arrows meet, the point where the two incoming tides form the spartiacque, or “division of the waters.” The dotted red lines show tidal flow before the landfills created by the Austro-Hungarians (who left in 1866) and Fascists (1922-1943). The dotted green lines show the tide before the landfills made by the post-war “democratic-clientele governments.” The dotted dark-blue lines are the principal zones of sediment deposits, which makes sense considering the movement of the tides.
RIGHT PANEL: The pattern of the rising tide in 2009. The solid red line shows the pattern of the tide entering the lagoon from the inlet at San Nicolo’. The solid green line shows the tide entering from Malamocco (and, obviously, along the track of the Canale dei Petroli.) This graphic shows the effect of losing the mudbanks, natural channels and barene, smoothing out the lagoon bottom that used to be naturally uneven and knobbly.
I think the tides and the mud matter more to many other creatures than they do to mere humans. This barena that was built next to the Certosa island is a haven for flamingoes, Eurasian oystercatchers, egrets, herons, common shelducks, and the now-ubiquitous sacred ibis. And undoubtedly more that I haven’t discovered yet.The ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus) love the mud.Snowy egrets (Egretta thula) don’t particularly care about mud, per se, but they like the easy fishing when the water is shallow.Curlews (Numenius americanis) absolutely love the mud, digging up worms and other little submerged treats.The plover (Pluvialis squatarola) is another huge fan of mud.The oystercatcher (Haematopus ostralegus) is really beautiful, unless you’re an oyster, obviously. They also wade around looking for mussels and earthworms.The grey heron (Ardea cinerea) is the apex wader. Evidently he’ll eat almost anything.Here the lagoon bottom is fairly firm when it’s exposed at low tide, but if you walk into the water you will sink into squishy mud up to your ankles. Pause to admire the tracks of the birds who have traversed this territory, snacking to their heart’s content.
The important thing is that the lagoon bottom isn’t perfectly flat.This is evidently the perfect place for a feast. The shore is littered with clam and oyster shells, the casings of creatures that need the mud to live.The mud doesn’t just feed the birds. There are indeed oysters in the lagoon and they are delectable. Lino spent one Christmas Eve afternoon out in the lagoon and brought home a batch of these for our dinner. These three clutched together, though, seem to have formed a sort of Wagnerian pact or something.We sometimes find scallops, even though they’re not as plentiful as when Lino was a boy and would go home with a bucketful.That was a good day out — lots of different types of clams (and this isn’t all of them, by any means). They may be pondering how unmuddy the world has suddenly become.Regard the mud. The waves from some passing boats clearly show that the mudbank is just below the surface.You see water, I see mud. The surface is smoother where the water is shallower as the tide rises or falls. If you’re out rowing and you see this, you have only yourself to blame if you run aground. You were warned.
If you want a lagoon, you have to want mud. Otherwise you might just as well look at your bathtub.
The title says “ahead” but in fact I’m going to take you back a few years, well within living memory, to the epoch when you traveled by train and the train traveled by coal. I mean steam.
Venice’s fascinating past isn’t limited to Carnival and Casanova; there are plenty of people (Lino, for example) who still vividly remember when the mighty steam locomotives ruled the rails, and the Santa Lucia terminal was at work, day and night, with the coming and going of these behemoths. (Spoiler alert: Lino’s father was a macchinista, or train driver, so I am relying on Lino for some information.)
My curiosity awoke some time ago, when we were passing through Castelfranco Veneto on the train and Lino casually pointed out this rusty derelict beside the station tracks.
“See that?” he asked. “That was what they used to fill the steam trains’ tanks with water.” A monster faucet, in other words.Compared to Castelfranco, the city of Feltre has a much keener appreciation of its old train relics.Like animals, the locomotives needed food (coal) and water. These were often, though not always, carried in a tender, the vehicle attached to the engine. “Acqua” is water and “carbone” is coal. Excuse me if you figured that out. The water was topped up at important stops along the way by means of the trackside apparatus shown above. One source states that a roundtrip (distance not specified!) locomotive in the Thirties consumed 771 pounds/350 kilos of coal and 528 gallons/2000 liters of water, transporting a maximum of 80 passengers.
Let’s say trains don’t interest you much. But you might be surprised to see how many traces remain around the area of the station, if you know what you’re looking at.
First, a bit of background.
This is the church of Santa Lucia; it stood for centuries on the Grand Canal until it was inconveniently in the way of the structure that was needed by the trains. It was demolished between 1861-1863. The church of the Scalzi is still in place, a few steps further on. (Francesco Guardi, c. 1780).Perhaps not the most memorable facade of the many Venetian churches, but it was fine until it wasn’t. But at least the name “Santa Lucia” was preserved in the name of the station.The train station looked like this from the 1860s to the 1940’s. After the Second World War the project was to build today’s station. When he was a boy Lino knew the area as one big construction site as this station came down and the new one emerged.Now we have this. Although today’s station was designed in the Thirties (this is evident), it was built in 1952.
So much for setting the scene. Back to the trains themselves.
Let’s imagine we’re in the Venice station on any ordinary day back in the first half of the 20th century. It was full of colossi like these. In fact, for several generations there wasn’t anything else.
I am not a train connoisseur, but I know massive when I see it. This locomotive steamed into the Santa Lucia station the night of October 29, 2021, as the “Train of Memory,” retracing the route of the coffin of the Unknown Soldier to Rome a century earlier.This wouldn’t have impressed anybody back in the day. It was normal. And really noisy, too, between blasts of steam and assorted screeching whistles. And let’s not forget the mayhem of the crowds when the families were leaving for their summer holiday in the mountains. The trains were so full that sometimes people were passing their kids into the carriages by the windows. Not made up. My source was one of those kids.Steam trains were still normal in Venice in 1973, here arriving at Santa Lucia (Wikipedia, not credited). The last steam locomotive in Italy was decommissioned in 1976. It operated a daily passenger service and some freight services on the Udine-Cervignano route (in Friuli). Since 2008 some steam locomotives are back in service, but only for historical trains on special occasions.This was the engine that Lino’s father drove (that is him in the photo.) His usual route was up the Valsugana, from Venice to Trento and, obviously, back again. But he could also work the shifts required to reposition the locomotives and/or carriages into the configurations needed for the next day’s trains. That went on all night; his shift went from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM. Note that this train didn’t use a tender for the water and coal, which went into the black box just in front of him. (Do not ask for details; I don’t have them.) The first passenger carriage is clearly right behind him.
So where did all this maneuvering of the rolling stock take place? As close to the station as the water allowed.
The red lines are bridges, yellow are where tracks were or bits still are; green is where the trains were reshuffled. Ignore Tronchetto, for the purposes of this discussion; it wasn’t built until the 1960’s.A military photograph c. 1915 shows the area marked in green above when it was full of trains. The station is on the right side of the frame, and the bridge to the mainland is in the upper right. Those long lines that look like perforations are trains-in-waiting. The central area was used for the locomotives. (Available from Il Cantuccio del Collezionista https://ilcantucciodelcollezionista.it/index.html)A detail of the photograph, just to make those little dots clearer. I repeat: Each of those is a train carriage. Perhaps not as impressive as Milan or Rome, but frankly they made better use of their limited space here in Venice than I’ve ever been able to do at home.This is the deposito, or train-sorting area, today. We discovered this morning that the tracks strewn around for years, if not ages, are being removed. I imagine it will create more parking space.A better view of the tracks on the left (drawn in yellow on the map) leading toward the Marittima.Leftover tracks that were easier to just pave over than remove.This bridge connected the station area to the right with the train yard. Fun fact: Decades ago the rectangular space just to the right of the bridge was used as a pool by the Rari Nantes swimming club. There was a similar setup along the Zattere for swimming in the Giudecca Canal. Not made up.The same bridge seen in real life. The Santa Lucia station (with red train) is just on the other side of the Grand Canal.One of the perks of working for the railway was the allotment of coal you were given for your own use, and it was distributed in the area on the right side of the bridge. The railway workers would come in their (or someone’s) boat — rowed, no motors — and tie up five or six deep parallel to the embankment when they went to collect it. One reason for doing it there may have been because the station where the freight trains were handled was on that side.This was the building where the organizing of the freight train maneuvering was done.Freight trains carrying fruit and vegetables would slide onto the special tracks along the waterfront facing Piazzale Roma.The trains stopped along the edge of the embankment and off-loaded the fruit/veg onto boats (again, not motorboats, but big boats such as caorlinas or battellos that were rowed) that took the produce to the neighborhood vendors. The building served as a warehouse for whatever had not been taken away that day.The railway bridge connecting the station to the deposito seen from the water.That’s a serious underbelly. It would have to look like this if it was going to support countless tons of iron machinery 24 hours a day.
Let’s shift our attention to the tracks that carried the freight trains to and from the waterfront at the Marittima area (Santa Marta and San Basilio).
This bridge enabled the freight trains to cross from the yard down to the Marittima.Here is a look at the bridge indicated on the map just above. We’re heading toward Santa Marta. The top bridge carries the little “People Mover” train that connects Piazzale Roma on the left to the parking area at Tronchetto (and until just a few years ago, to the cruise-ship Venice Passenger Terminal, now empty and useless). The middle bridge is a simple footbridge for the people going from their parked cars to the city. And the third bridge carried the freight trains to San Basilio.A closer look at the ex-railway bridge, as we proceed toward Santa Marta. The flat roofs are part of the Venice Passenger Terminal complex at Tronchetto.The same bridge as seen when going toward Piazzale Roma.A general view of the Santa Marta waterfront, where the tracks used to be. A group of the houses to the left of the University IUAV were built expressly for the families of the train workers. The only catch was that when the worker died, the family had to move out. Logical! And awful!Flanking the Scomenzera canal, the tracks are just behind that transparent wall.That zone behind the wall is something of a railway graveyard.But when the trains were working, the tracks just snaked their way around the church of Santa Marta.This was Santa Marta when the trains and the port were working at full capacity (c. 1930).
The warehouses and offices at San Basilio are now almost entirely dedicated to non-maritime pursuits.Lino’s father’s official train-driver’s watch is still running. The plastic case was crucial protection from the coal dust blowing everywhere.This is the watch in its natural state.The caption says this scene was at the station, but Lino says it was in the deposito area where the trains were assembled. The process of electrification has begun, as the cables show. I’m not romanticizing anything. Just saying that the trains were a huge part of Venetian life.
I don’t know whether they calculate according to volume or weight. Either way, to borrow a phrase, they’re gonna need a bigger boat. I mean cart.
Of course you have thousands of things to do in preparing for the upcoming holidays, and they will be tiring and inconvenient (I’m guessing). But your day is going to have trouble squeezing more than average sympathy from me because I this morning I got a glimpse of the letter-carrier’s day.
Do the words “weighty, awkward, cumbersome” added to ” a couple of awful bridges” bring Christmas cheer to your spirit? Not mine. This vehicle wonderfully shows the determination of the Italian postal system and its foot soldiers to get the serum to Nome. Sorry, I mean the mail — or your Amazon orders — to you. It reminds me of those fabulous motorbikes, the ones that buzz around Naples loaded with entire families, their sports gear (surfboards, lacrosse racquets, five-person tents), domestic animals, the Supreme Court, the 66th Armor Regiment, and so forth, as if it were nothing.
I used to admire the trash collectors, and I still do. But the letter-carriers have taken the game up to the Expert level.
One might categorize this construction as either a work of art or engineering. There could be anything here. Ernest Hemingway’s lost suitcase of short stories, or the solution to the Zodiac Code, or the Seven Cities of Cibola. Who would know? The letter-carrier was at the far end of the calle slipping an envelope into a letterbox. All I can say is that he must have a brain that goes into extra dimensions, because his route must be designed to a diabolical degree. Imagine arriving at an address and discovering that the item you need is on the very bottom underneath everything.It occurs to me that his trolley has evolved in somewhat the same way of the average newsstand here. There are certainly some newspapers wedged into this pandemonium of paper, but as you see, the owner’s survival clearly no longer depends on the sale of newspapers.
Your neighbors annoy you? Be glad you don’t live on the Street of the Bombardiers.
Well, she doesn’t do EVERYTHING. But Santa Barbara carries quite the sanctified payload, meaning no disrespect. I first made her acquaintance because she is patron saint and protector, among many other things, of the Italian Navy, and I have enjoyed the regata organized in her honor over the past 20-some years. As noted here and here. Now I discover she’s everywhere, even up to and including your hospital bed.
A quick review of her responsibilities, apart from the Navy, which would be a full-time job for most people/saints, reveals the special attention she gives to: Miners, firefighters, tunnelers, artillerymen, armorers, fireworks manufacturers, chemical engineers, prisoners (see: tunnelers?), and protection from lightning. Although they do not celebrate her special day, she is also the patron saint of the US Navy and Marine Corps Aviation Ordnancemen. As I summarize it in my own mind, protection against anything that goes boom. Hence lightning.
But these very specific dangers don’t stop with mere explosives. Barbara also offers protection from sudden death. Diseases that strike and escalate suddenly and are “intense to the point of lethality” are called fulminant (in Venetian, matches are called fulminanti, just to maintain the theme of flame). And while a number of diseases can appear in fulminant form, the worst for Venice was the plague.
Which brings me to the street of the bombardiers. If you turn down this short, narrow and dark street you will find not one, but two tablets carved in relief honoring Santa Barbara. I have not yet discovered if this street is so named because it was the site of their scuola — I can only hope it wasn’t the site of their storeroom. But where I went for bombs I discovered pestilence.
Morning is the only time you can make sense of this small masterpiece on what is a very gloomy street. We can discern a few of her typical symbols (three-windowed tower, where her cruel father imprisoned her for her faith; the palm frond indicating her martyrdom, beheaded by the aforementioned cruel father; the arrow representing lightning, as in the lightning that struck her cruel father dead). But the date above it surprised me: 1575, the year of one of Venice’s two worst plagues, the one that inspired the construction of the church of the Redentore on the Giudecca. Between 1575 and 1576 some 46,000 people died, almost 30 percent of the entire population.Barbara earned a second tablet just a few steps further on down the street. No date on this one, so perhaps it was intended as a salute to the bombardiers rather than the plague victims. As for the depiction, I realize that the centuries have worn this away, and that nobody knows what she looked like because nobody can swear that she ever even existed. I can only say I’m sorry that the bigger tablet gives her a head that looks like Emperor Constantine on a beat-up coin, and this version brings the Elephant Man to mind. But no matter. If you’re a saint, nobody cares about these things. The point is what you can do, not how you do your hair. Non-saints could also keep this in mind.And then you exit by the sotoportego of the bombardiers and you’re back under the watchful eye of whichever saint you adhere to.
Turning from Barbara’s concern for disease and back to conflagration, consider the problem of gunpowder. It was kept in the Arsenale until two disastrous explosions (all it took was a spark!) — in 1476 and then 1509 — made it clear that it belonged out on some nearby islands instead. One still bears the name Sant’ Angelo delle Polvere (Saint Angelo of the Powder). On August 29, 1689, lightning struck the magazine there and 800 barrels of gunpowder exploded.
Faith in Santa Barbara remained firm, however, meaning no disrespect. Despite certain small derelictions of duty, as noted above, until the invention of the lightning rod in 1752 she was the best everyone could do.
Fun fact: The gunpowder storeroom on warships is called the santabarbara. Is that a somebody’s idea of a dare?
The chapel of Santa Barbara is on the island of Burano, next door to the church of San Martino. (The chapel is the beige building dead ahead in the sunlight.) They say that her relics are kept here. You might think that there would be ceremonies on her feast day (December 4), but no. Until either plague or gunpowder strikes, it appears they want to leave her in peace.
“The sacred remains of Santa Barbara virgin and martyr of Nicomedia donated by the devotion/reverence of Giovanni son of Doge Pietro Orseolo II and for about a millennium in temples of the lagoon of Rialto of Torcello and of Burano. Conserved and venerated in this chapel restored by the Comune perpetuate the light of heroic faith.” The discharged Venetian sappers remembering the work of their member Vittorio Maraffi in the redemption of this building. These stones positioned by their hands are devotedly consecrated to the Patron of the corps. The kalends of October 1957 Reconstructed by the Section of Veteran Combatants of Venice 1998. The “kalends” was the first day of each month of the Roman calendar and is a very elegant/archaic way of citing a date. However, there is a common expression here when you want to predict that something will never happen — you say it will occur on the calende greche, or Greek calends, which on the Greek calendar don’t exist.
