The makeup artist's bag contained the day's call sheet, which listed everything in the world.

Every person who has come here in the last hundred years — and there have been a lot — has almost certainly said that the city looks like a stage set. This realization comes immediately after noticing there are canals instead of streets.

And if they haven’t said it, they’ve thought it.

Attention: You are now entering the film sector, in which you can't or must do everything as per the list: Entrance forbidden to unauthorized people; Danger: 380 volts; Danger; Forbidden to smoke or use open flame; Danger of falling; Material falling from above (as opposed to from below); High-tension electric cables; Machinery in movement. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Venice makes the most of its stage-setness by offering itself as the location for at least a few segments of plenty of movies.  Since I’ve been here I’ve come across bits underway of “The Italian Job,” “Casino Royale,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “Casanova,” “The Tourist,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and a French feature named “Les Enfants du Siecle.”  There may have been more.  This is yet another way in which Venice resembles New York, including the fact that Venetians acknowledge all the fuss only in relation to how much inconvenience it causes them personally.

Evidently there are enough incentives to induce film companies to work here to offset the logistic challenges imposed by canals, tiny streets, lots of bridges, and skillions of people. I myself would hate to have to organize a film shoot — it’s hard enough organizing an ordinary day.

The latest movie to have cluttered the streets and canals with equipment and crew is called “Effie,” a biopic about the life of Effie Ruskin.  It stars Dakota Fanning, a large number of non-Hollywood luminaries such as Emma Thompson and Derek Jacobi, and an Italian god in human form named Riccardo Scamarcio.

We were there as part of a group of members of Arzana‘, an association (of which Lino is a founding member) dedicated to the conservation of old Venetian boats of every sort.  Whenever a film needs boats, the boats also need rowers, so anybody who applied and was chosen by the film company got a chance to participate in film-making for at least a day.

Lino and I went to the office, filled out the forms, got our portraits snapped, and waited to be called.  He went three times, and I went twice.

So I urge you to see this film (it will be out in June 2012), because if nothing else interests you, you could peer in the darkness at the screen trying to discern a feminine figure in fusty nineteenth-century garb rowing a boat who could be me.  I’m merely a human in human form, but I had a fantastic time as an extra.

Good thing I’m relegated to the background, though, because while the long skirts made me feel swell, the bonnet and slicked-back hair, all perfectly accurate, made me look like a Victorian cross between the Witch of Endor and Baba Yaga.  If I’d been born in Effie’s time they’d have killed me in my cradle.

Lino didn’t come out much better.  What with him and his cloth cap, high collar and muttonchop whiskers, and me with my shawl and apron and hat, we looked like a pair of Dickensian hobbits.

This is a view of the confusion on land.

And a view of the confusion on the water on an ordinary working morning. The outliers stopped traffic at the crucial moments, otherwise the canal went back to being everybody's waterway. Four regular gondolas, one member of the Querini rowing club out for a spin, somebody in a motorboat. The boat with the camera crew is hugging the left wall; the actors in the gondola are hugging the right.

I had two days on duty.  Most of the first day was spent watching the six hours or so of activity involved in shooting two minutes of film.  We stood in the sun and ate loads of the free sandwiches the help was carrying around and watched an amazing amount of activity which seemed to happen without anyone telling anyone else what to do.  Then we went inside and ate lunch.

At 3:00 Lino and I went to be dressed and titivated.  When that was done, we climbed into a small mascareta and took up our positions on a stretch of small canal.  By now it was 6:00 PM and getting dark, but lights were blazing everywhere.

There was a camera on a crane, a camera on a boat, and this one, braced atop a bridge.

Our task, once the cameras started rolling, was to row very slowly along a snippet of canal only about 200 feet long (67 meters), which we accomplished in about a minute and a half.  Also being rowed along the canal, in one or the other direction, was a battella and two gondolas, both replicas of the 17th-century version.  One of the gondolas carried Effie and her husband, John Ruskin.  By the look of things they were not happy.  ”There was,” as Dorothy Parker once wrote, “a silence with things going on in it.”

We repeated this slow row many times.  I felt fine, except for my feet, which aren’t used to wearing shoes with heels (my costume included thin-soled mid-heel boots they’d given me to wear, even though nobody, not even me, ever saw my feet). The air wasn’t especially cold — thankfully, there was no wind — and God knows I wasn’t hungry.

At 10:00 PM it was quitting time.  We changed our clothes in record time (the costume crew standing by to help), the makeup girl took off my hat and ripped out the 3,491 bobby pins which she had rammed into my skull to anchor my hairpiece, and we ran downstairs to the boats. Now we had to really row, to get them all back to the boathouse and tied up for the night.

Rowing at night is bewitching.  There is almost no traffic, so you can actually hear the water murmuring under your boat; the distances and proportions are mysteriously transformed, and the combined effect is impossible to resist. There we were, sliding along the black glistening water flanked by prodigious palaces, virtually alone (I ignored the lone vaporetto), in a universe created by giants. And it belonged only to us. I’m not going to pretend these things don’t affect me, even after all this time. “My God,” I thought, “I’m rowing up the Grand Canal.”

Lino isn’t impervious to this allure, either; he said practically the same thing, and he’s been doing this all his life.  Because there is no way to resist the sorcery of this city at night.

During the day, the city just lies there and dispenses, in a bored sort of way, a steady supply of small doses of beauty and splendor, just enough to make people want to take lots of pictures.  But at night, she hurls caution and hauteur aside and utterly swamps you in a deluge of grandeur and seduction.

It was getting on toward midnight, but we didn’t want it ever to end.

Two days later, we were out in force on the Grand Canal doing a modified isn’t-the-city-busy sort of rowing around.  It was sunny and warm, which is pleasant but sort of inane, and we got almost no food.  You see how demanding I’m getting to be?  And we didn’t row all that much, either.

We finished before sundown and the boats were back in their stalls before dark. No magic this time.  But just as they say you can get so accustomed to chocolate that it just doesn’t do anything for you anymore, the same must be true of rowing at night.  If we did it all the time, I suppose it would become boring.

I’m ready for the next film, whatever it might be.  They can call me anytime — and I don’t care if they make me look like a mutant psychopathic canal-dredger.

A view of the stage, so to speak: that strip of canal heading down toward San Marco. The actors are in a gondola near the next bridge, where the motorboat with the camera is idling, transmitting images to the screen on the shore.

This is how the scene appears in Movie World.

Dakota Fanning and the rest of the actors got a break to come in and warm up.

Riccardo Scamarcio gets a touch-up, which I'd never have guessed he needed anywhere.

This is the scene that required a hundred takes, I don't know why: Dakota Fanning as Effie Ruskin decides on a carefree impulse to try rowing herself.

And for some reason Scamarcio makes the same attempt.

The Grand Canal shortly after dawn, as we row our old boats to the day's shoot. Perhaps not quite as dramatic as at midnight, the canal still looks amazing. I'm giving you this view because you'd probably never see the Grand Canal so empty (it was a holiday). I wouldn't have either, if I hadn't had to get up and go to work.

Venice, starring me is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

Last Saturday I went to watch one of my favorite Venetian rowing races: The regata of Santa Barbara, an annual contest on six-oar caorlinas organized by the discharged sailors’ association in honor of Saint Barbara, patron saint of seamen and, by extension, of the Navy.

The only hint at 10:00 AM that something unusual might be imminent was the lone red buoy, fixed in front of the Arsenal to mark the finish line.

For every Regata Storica, there must be ten races held every month here (I’m making this number up — maybe it’s more), winter or summer, by rowing clubs, gondoliers, and assorted groups of every sort.  And don’t think that just because there isn’t any prize money that these races aren’t fought to the finish.

Technically, Saint Barbara’s day is December 4, but Saturday was more convenient for everybody and no doubt the good saint took it in stride. After all, her bones supposedly lay in a cupboard somewhere on Murano for about 400 years, so she’s fully aware of the prevailing attitude toward time here.

The crew of each boat was composed of four gondoliers who had done their (formerly compulsive) military service in the Navy, plus one boy from the Scuola Navale Militare F. Morosini, where Lino teaches rowing. For the first time in 15 years, there was also one fireman.

A statue of Saint Barbara is often found at the entrance to mines -- here in a lead mine at Pian dei Resinelli in Lombardy.

The firemen weren’t there to quell any spontaneous combustion; Saint Barbara is their patron saint too.  Generally speaking, she is assigned to watch over anyone who is dealing — intentionally or not — with things that go “boom.” If there are explosives, fire, or lightning involved, or the threat of sudden, violent, incendiary death, she is your go-to saint, and specifically protects sailors, firemen, artillerymen, miners, sappers, road-builders, geologists, mountaineers, petroleum workers, and the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Aviation ordnancemen.  Also bell-ringers and architects — maybe there’s a link to high towers with no lightning rod.  This list is not exhaustive, by the way, I just decided to stop.

Trivia alert:  A powder-magazine or other storage area containing explosives is often referred to as the “santabarbara.”

It rained and fogged.  This is typical.  There have been times in the past 15 years when the sun beamed down on victors and vanquished alike but usually there’s water. Perhaps this is a helpful gesture from the saint, who abhors fire.

Getting the boats --not to mention the rowers -- ready, in the canal that leads to the Arsenal.

There were all the usual components:  Competitors who have known each other since before they were born, the benediction of the boats, the traditional pennants for the first four boats to cross the finish line, and other prizes offered by sponsors (Pasta Zara sent everyone home with a neat box containing two kilos of pasta), bottles of wine, even small trophies of Murano glass, presumably not in memory of Saint Barbara’s sojourn on the island.

There were assorted dignitaries, including an admiral, some of whom gave impromptu speeches into a microphone which could have used a dash of nitroglycerine to wake it up. Nobody listens anyway. The speeches were, also according to tradition, too long, too rambling, and often more than a little bit too self-congratulatory.  I will not name names but I know who they were.

The prizes were given, the photos were snapped, then everybody headed for the buffet.  As I have often mentioned, “Every psalm ends with the Gloria,” as they say here, and every event ends with food and drink.

And tradition requires — or maybe Saint Barbara requires, she being an extremely practical saint, it seems to me — that there should be pasta e fagioli. Not only at this race, but at 98 percent of amateur races here. Pasta and beans are hot, filling, delicious, hugely good for you and  can be made in massive batches reasonably far in advance.  Trivia alert:  Beans such as the borlotti used around here contain more protein than red meat, though I don’t think anybody cares.

So carry your bottle of Beano and dig in. Or plan to spend the rest of the day outdoors, in the fresh air.  For a gondolier, that’s obviously no problem. They often go back for seconds.

The boats head out onto the playing field, so to speak. These guys look like the ones to beat. Too bad they finished 8th -- next to last.

The boats line up to be blessed by Padre Manuel Paganuzzi, the chaplain at the Scuola Navale, and the rowers respond with the traditional salute, or "alzaremi." The man in the bow of the pink boat is cheating by not reversing his oar. Saint Barbara punished him: they finished dead last.

Crossing the finish line, each crew is expected to repeat the "alzaremi." As you can see, this tradition appears to be degenerating toward the "optional" category.

The judges take a minute to make sure they got the order of finish right.

Everybody immediately starts to remove all their stuff -- only the shell of the boat will go back to the city boathouse.

This young man – I’m assuming he practices yoga when he’s not rowing --is removing the platform on which he was standing. Each rower has one, but they belong to the boat. He's probably going to remove the wooden strips he had nailed to its underside.

The boats are stripped and all the speeches are finally over . On to the prize-giving, the perfect moment for the rain to start.

Third-year cadet Luca Merola displays his first-place red pennant, the perfect gift for today, his 18th birthday.

We eat! There’s enough pasta e fagioli to feed three battleships. The plastic bowls are also part of the tradition; weakened by the scalding heat of the contents and the weight of the jumbo portion, they sag dangerously and you burn your hands trying to hold them. It would depress me if this, for some reason, were not to happen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I would be calling this the Ship of Fools if somebody else hadn't already come up with the phrase. In this minuscule motorboat we have: five of the six rowers of the red boat, who finished fourth (note rolled-up pennant), five oars, the paioli, or floorboards of the caorlina, a case of wine, and the corrugated fiberglass used to protect the boat from the rain. I'd say they're ready to head for the Bay of Biscay, if they don't encounter any waves. And if nobody breathes.

And the event ends as it began: fog, silence, and space. It's as if nothing had ever happened.

Racing Saint Barbara is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

Would you like to know how to say “So big your mind vaporizes in front of it” in Turkish?

Answer: “Bogazici.”

In English it’s “Bosphorus,” which is actually Greek, but whatever you want to call it, you’ll say it standing at attention.

And we were out there on July 17, four of us from Venice and four Turkish men, in two gondolas, rowing across it.

Even from space the Bosphorus looks impressive, especially that little dog-leg to the left up there. That must be highly entertaining to the captains and pilots aboard the 55,000-some vessels that transit each year.

So what’s so big about it?  In normal human terms, the world’s narrowest strait used for international navigation isn’t all that big. It’s about 31 km/17 nautical miles long and its maximum width is 3,329 meters/1.7 nautical miles and its minimum width is a mere 704 meters/.38 nautical miles. But unless you need to pilot a tanker of liquefied natural gas or something, these numbers don’t tell you its true dimensions.

When you row out onto it in a four-oar gondola, the whole concept of size suddenly multiplies in every direction.  I knew there were currents and vortexes and so on, though Lino in the stern knew how to deal with them so I, rowing in the bow, didn’t pay much attention.  But I didn’t know then that the Black Sea to the north and the Sea of Marmara to the south flow toward each other with differing densities, which forms an underwater river in the Bosphorus which, if it were on the surface, would be the sixth largest river (in volume, I presume) on earth.

It’s probably better I didn’t know that.

Carbing up before our first expedition onto the Bosphorus. The boats are waiting for us five minutes away, but we seem to be in no hurry.

What I did feel was not only the mass of water under us, I felt the mass of history bearing down on this strip of sea which by now is so heavy there ought to be a black hole there instead of mere water. It’s not every day I get to row around in front of a Turkish fortress built in 1451 to enable the Ottoman assault which conquered Constantinople in 1453.

And just for the record, Lino told me later than when we rowed out there, he had a lump in his throat, for the very same reasons I was listening to my brain spinning its wheels saying “I cannot believe I’m out here doing this.”  The fact that he could get emotional is a great thing — and that he could be dealing with the throat-lump while also keeping track of the vortexes is even better.

Gondolas on the Bosphorus — how weird is that? Despite the fact that, somewhere back in history, there were plenty of boats our size being rowed all around here, we were thrillingly tiny.  Under the soaring Fatih Sultan Mehmet suspension bridge the passing ocean-going tugboat and the double-decker tourist boats and the random tanker, all of which seemed to have three-million-horsepower motors and created waves the size of Quonset huts, made rowing a fairly unusual thing to be doing out here.  Possibly the people aboard the aforementioned craft thought so too, though I’m not sure we even showed up on their radar. Certainly the tourists were excited to see us, waving and snapping pictures, though only God knows what they were thinking as we passed.  They certainly weren’t thinking about the massive wake they were leaving behind them.                                                                                                                                                              

So we were there just to be weird?  Mais non, mon capitaine. Thanks to the collaboration of His Excellency Gianpaolo Scarante, the Italian Ambassador to Turkey, we were invited to be the opening number in the spectacle of the Bosphorus Cross Continental, an annual event organized by the Turkish Olympic Committee, the only swimming event in the world which involves two continents.

Some 1,200 swimmers plunge into the water like penguins off an ice floe from a dock on the Asian shore of Istanbul and swim to the European side, a distance of some 6 km/3.8 miles, with the bonus of having to turn around and do the last stretch against the current.

But Venetian boats in Istanbul?  Of course there were plenty here when it was Byzantium, and plenty even after it became Constantinople.  But given much of the history between Venice and Turkey, it was a very cool thing to be there all together — two Venetians and two Turks per boat — with absolutely no ulterior motive, like buying, selling, or slaying.

This map shows the path the swimmers follow. We started below the bridge at the top, at the little protuberance on the Asian shore called Kandilli, and finished somewhat above the next, a distance of about three kilometers/1.8 miles. It turned out to be not quite as easy as that might sound -- heat, breeze, and a gondola that seemed to weigh about as much as the USS New Hampshire made this little adventure a real calorie-incinerator.

Traffic is blocked for four hours to smooth the stage for the mob of Australian-crawlers (and the small pod of dolphins we saw arcing around the finish line).  If delivery of your new plasma TV is held up, maybe you could blame it on this.  In any case, we also benefited handsomely from this blockade, benefited, that is, until about ten minutes from the finish line, when two double-decker tourist boats carrying the swimmers upstream passed by.  The swimmers waved at our brilliant strangeness and beauty but didn’t notice the wake. Our gondola stolidly took the three or four walls of water head-on — womp, womp, womp — but it isn’t good for the boat and it really slowed us down.  When you’re panting to reach the finish line, hot and sweaty, being slowed down is intensely annoying. Still, compared to the gymkhana of yesterday, with waves from everywhere, it wasn’t so bad.

Lino’s and I, with Ata and Samet on the red-and-green gondola, finished second.  I don’t say we lost, nor do I say the blue gondola won, because the boats were totally mismatched in several technical but telling details.  Also, it wasn’t supposed to be a genuine race; Ata and Samet, and Burak and Mehmet, had only tried Venetian rowing twice in their lives, on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. It’s just that the desire to see no one in front of them overcame the sporting good sense of our adversaries.  I didn’t care if they came in first.  I did care that they did it by five or six boat-lengths.

Say what you will, I do not consider this a scene of effulgent sportsmanship. Courtesy Olympic Committee of Turkey

So what could be next?  I’d be perfectly happy if we were to be able to do this again next year. Otherwise, unless we find a way to tackle the Bering Strait, or maybe the Strait of Malacca, I’m going to leave this experience in lonely splendor at the top of a list of one, labeled “If this doesn’t astound you, you must be completely missing your astound-o-meter.”

“]

The wave may be gone but the effect lingers briefly. Courtesy Olympic Committee of Turkey

(L to r): Erla Zwingle, Lino Farnea, Ata Sukuroglu, Samet Baki Uctepe of the red/green gondola. Burak Dilsiz, Mehmet Gokhun Karagoz, Cesare Peris, Dino Righetto of the blue gondola; H.E. Gianpaolo Scarante, Italian Ambassador to Turkey. We had no idea that at this very moment, the winner of the swimming competition had just reached the finish line -- and a Turk, as it happened -- an 18-year-old named Hasan Emre Musluoglu. And the Olympic Committee organizers did not give the tiniest sign of interrupting our little moment of glory until all the prizes were given and the snaps taken. There are extreme sports, and sometimes there is extreme sportsmanship, not to mention world-class class. I'm going to have to start learning Turkish. Courtesy Olympic Committee of Turkey.

A more informal lineup: The two crews before our first session.

Turkish Delight: Gondolas on the Bosphorus is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

I have been very lax in updating our assorted adventures in assorted boats, and I apologize, but adventuring does take so much time and energy.

But I promise to give you a full account sometime next week — not long after our return from our next adventure.

Hint: Both adventures involve going to Turkey with two gondolas.  And rowing them there, obviously.  With four Turkish men (not so obviously, but the world is an amazing place and anyway, the Turks had just as many galleys as Venice did, in the old days, which by itself means they also had rowers, even if a lot of them were Christian slaves.  Sorry, but there it is).

Both adventures require a huge shout-out to His Excellency Gianpaolo Scarante, the Italian Ambassador to Turkey, and his wife, Barbara, who raises the concept of “indefatigable” beyond any known scale of measurement. They are the reason we’re there, so I want to do my very best.

In late May, we went to a city named Eskesehir, which I discovered is a very important place indeed, not least for its being the homeland of meerschaum. (I’d never given much thought to meerschaum mines, but they’re all around that part of Turkey.)  We rowed our two gondolas on the Porsuk river in a pair of races with the Turkish rowers.

In Eskesehir, the first race mixed the crews, as you can immediately detect here. The second race pitted a Venetian crew against a Turkish crew. A good time was had by all.

Now we’re headed to Istanbul, to row our gondolas across the Bosphorus.  (I love saying that — it’s like saying “I’ll walk across the parking lot to the dry cleaner.”)  We’ll be gone till the 19th; the event itself is on July 17, and is part of a very large and important amateur open-water swimming race called the “Bosphorus Cross-Continental Competition.” The swimmers start from the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus and finish on the European side.  So will we, but an hour earlier.

We’re due to form up, as we did in May, with two Turks and two Venetians per boat (I’m operating under a Venetian alias, as you know), and race 2000 meters across the mythical strait between Kuleli and Kurucesme.  I’m acting as if I know what that means; even though I’ve located them on the map, the scope of all this still hasn’t really reached me.

I do know that the fact that this is the first year of gondola participation, with Turkish rowers, has created no little enthusiasm — they are planning to install GPS’s on the gondolas so the race can be broadcast live on national Turkish television.

So there will be silence in BlogWorld here until I get back. Probably followed by a tremendous racket.

Turkey: Going once, going twice… is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

In my last post on the Vogalonga (though I suppose it would be more accurate to say that this is my last) I acknowledged the lack of any photographic evidence of our excellent — and rapid — circuit of the northern lagoon.

As I had hoped, a kind soul did in fact take some pictures of us, and that kind soul knew some friends of ours, who sent them along. Perhaps there are more such souls out there, but I don’t know them or their friends.  So here’s a big shout-out to the club Voga Fortuna Berlin, and Sandra, who chose to work the camera rather than the oar.

Here we are returning to the club to get our numbered bib. If you ask where are all the hordes of rowers waiting for the starting cannon to fire, I can tell you they're behind us. Where most of them stayed all morning. The crew this year was a sort of mixed fishfry. (L to r): Sandro Graffi, his 12-year-old son Davide, 14-year-old Filippo Novello, Antonio Borgo, me, and Mike O'Toole, a/k/a/ "Otolini," master and commander of Gondola Getaway in Long Beach, California. Lino is sitting on his starboard side, as navigator and co-pilot, though he rarely intervened.

And our return, down the incredibly spacious Cannaregio Canal. Somewhere around Murano we reshuffled the squad: Antonio is now in the bow and Sandro is at #4. Lino has moved from the stern to sit in the bow, which was undoubtedly more comfortable but which reversed his view of the proceedings. What you can't hear, unfortunately, is all of us saying some variation on "Holy Sacrament, I can't believe how few people are here. I'm never going back to the old way."

Vogalonga photo op is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

Considering how well my personal Vogalonga went this year (along with my six boatmates), it’s taken me this much time to find anything to say about it other than that.

Also, I have no photographs whatsoever of us, for one reason which explains both these little paragraphs. We didn’t start in the Bacino of San Marco.

A glimpse of the Bacino of San Marco on or about the start this year, which we didn't see. This image is even more beautiful for that very reason. (Thanks to the unnamed photographer who took this picture, which I found on the web.)

The tradition in any boat I’ve been in that includes Lino (all but one — the first year — of the 16 editions I’ve joined) is that we start in the Bacino of San Marco when the cannon fires and all the bells ring.  It’s thrilling and I love this moment, which is all too brief because we then commence rowing, along with a mass of boats surrounding us like migrating krill.

This means that while we have the chance to savor the richness of the moment — boats, cannon, bells — the krill create many well-known problems along the way. Such as at what I think of as the “death corner,” the first turn at the point of Sant’ Elena, where any number of non-Venetian rowers suddenly discover some problem which they hadn’t planned on facing — such as a tricky current, or some boats around them also having problems, or, I don’t know, existential lack of nerve, like cragfast climbers.  You can expect to see at least one capsized vessel here, and a batch of confusion from the mass of boats trying to avoid it.

Then there are the snaky curves along the flank of Sant’ Erasmo, also excellent territory for making miscalculations of available space, relative speeds, and wind direction and force.

Then, of course, there is the every-year-more-difficult (I meant to say “ghastly” but changed my mind) passage into and through the Cannaregio Canal, where inexperience, fatigue, and lack of common sense create packs of boats like Arctic ice.

This year we didn’t have any of that — I mean, ANY of that — for one surprising reason.  We forgot our boat’s number, without which the boat can’t be checked at various points along the way and hence acknowledged as officially doing the course.

So when the cannon/bells/confusion began at 9:00 AM, we were back at the boat club behind Sant’ Elena digging the numbered bib out of Lino’s locker.

Which meant that we joined the scrum after the “death corner,” and — this was unexpected — in some way near the head of the herd.  Please note that this does not mean we started early, as some unsporting people tend to do.  We slipped into the traffic stream at 9:10, roughly the same time it would have been for us at that point even if we’d started in the usual place.

The result of all this being that not only did we cover the entire course in record time without even breaking a sweat (three hours — unheard of), we were able to do it in unearthly tranquillity.  Yes, there were other boats, but noticeably fewer at that stage.  We slithered along Sant’ Erasmo as if there wasn’t anybody else around, and we entered the Cannaregio Canal (over which I always see an invisible sign saying “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”) as if it were a normal day, only better: The reasonable number of boats ahead of us were proceeding in a reasonable way at a reasonable speed and behaving, well, reasonably.  I had never imagined I could see such a thing.

The only flaw in the ointment, as a friend of mine used to say, was that we were also ahead of the photographers.  We missed the departure, which is always good for spectacular pictures, and we missed the mass return, ditto.

So unless some unknown photographer makes him- or herself known, I’m just going to have to keep my memories dusted and polished, because there isn’t anything else I have to show for this event.

It was so wonderful that I’m already trying to think of ways to convince the crew to leave before 9:00 next year.  If all goes well, I’ll be able soon to report that we finished the course before the others had even started it.

Crazy?  Unsporting?  Simply wrong? Yes indeed.  But now the rot has set in.

Voga-not-so-longa is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

The results of the two elections held among the gondoliers have come in and now the pope can sleep easier knowing who exactly is going to be rowing him from one shore to the other next Sunday. (One of them won’t be Charon.  I presume.)

One can hope that the pope's voyage across the Grand Canal won't bear any resemblance to this little jaunt. ("Charon Carries Souls Across the River Styx," by Alexander Litovchenko.)

And the winners are: Franco and Bruno Dei Rossi, nicknamed “Strigheta” (not much of a surprise there, they were at the head of the pack several days ago), and one each of the two famous battling pairs of racers: From the “Vignottini,” Igor Vignotto; from the other, Giampaolo D’Este.

Comments in the Gazzettino on this outcome were as sardonic as they were swift:

“This is splendid news.  In the end, love always triumphs.”

“Since when have gondoliers all become basibanchi (these are those obsessively pious people who are always in church)?  Is this the miracle we’ve been waiting for from Giovanni Paolo II?” (who was beatified yesterday, first step on the road to official sainthood).

“Given the well-known diplomatic refinement among these four, it makes one wonder …  if they can manage not to swear at each other for ten minutes.  It wouldn’t be so bad even if it were to happen. Venice couldn’t present itself worse than what it is, even if it wanted to.”

So everyone has finally calmed down?  I know one person who hasn’t: Lino. He is all of the following: Astonished, infuriated, and offended, genuine, incandescent emotions far removed from the Lilliputian self-serving quibbling that has distinguished this whole affair.

Why is Lino so angry?  Because of all the people mooted for the Papal Row, he regards Igor Vignotto as the last — actually, far behind the last — gondolier who deserves this honor.

Yes, we remember in the end that rowing the pope is, in fact, an honor, and not just another gig.  I realize that “honor” is a word that rarely — well, never — seems to find a seat on the bus of normal conversation regarding gondoliers, but a papal visit is a noteworthy exception and the men who row him ought to have consciences which have been washed at least on the “delicate” cycle.

Igor and Giampaolo have two things in common.  One is that they  both row in the bow of the gondolino, which means that they, at least technically, can’t be considered guilty of all the skulduggery which has led to the current bitterness because they aren’t the ones responsible for steering the boat.  All they’re doing up there in the front is rowing their brains out.

Their other link, unfortunately, is that they both were banished from racing for the entire 2008 season because of their respective crimes in 2007.

In the case of Giampaolo, he was found guilty of having threatened a race judge with serious bodily harm, his way of asserting his innocence regarding an infraction during a race for which the judge had punished him.  The infraction is one thing, but stating in the hearing of many people that he would be prepared to settle the score by attacking the judge physically is, as they say here, “another pair of sleeves.” Also, there’s a rule against it.

Giampaolo D'Este.

I note that he only said he wanted to do it, he didn’t actually hurt anybody. This is a good thing, because while privacy laws make it difficult to discover his exact height and weight (I could probably do it eventually, but time is short), I can say that he appears to correspond to the stature of a two-year-old grizzly.  One of his nicknames is “The Giant.”  But rules are rules, even for midgets, and we can’t have racers going around volunteering to bash the judges.

But Igor’s case was worse, because what he did not only offended the rules and the judges, but all the other racers — those present as well as the hundreds stretching back into history — and the entire world of racing and, in a sense, the city of Venice itself.

It happened at the end of the culminating race of the Regata Storica three years ago (September 2007), in what then was a notorious altercation but which now seems to have been totally forgotten (which also adds to Lino’s indignation),

It’s true that the race had been unusually fierce, even by the standards of the searing rivalry pitting him and his cousin against the D’Este-Tezzat pair, and it’s true that the finish was so close that the judges had to check the video to determine the winner. But when Igor heard that they had given him second place, he kind of lost his mind.

Igor Vignotto exultant after passing D'Este to win the race at Murano in 2009, the year they both returned from exile.

Not only did he engage in a volcanic exchange with the mayor, Igor grabbed the prize pennants and threw them  into the Grand Canal.

Not just the two pennants destined for him and his cousin, but all eight pennants waiting to be awarded to the rowers of the first four boats to finish.

Of the many things which, in the view of various people, would have been much better thrown into the water (the “Boy with the Frog” being one of them), pennants have never, and should never, be treated in this manner. Set aside the fact that not all of them got fished out in time; or the fact that those that were fished out were essentially D.O.A., thanks to the salt water. It’s not even a question of whether the city made replacements.  It’s not even a question.  He shouldn’t have done it, and however good it may have made him feel at the moment, that’s how bad it made everybody else feel.

Not much is sacred to your average Venetian racer, but the prize pennant comes pretty close. Red for first place, white for second, green for third, blue for fourth. The remaining five teams just have to smile and look ahead to next time.

So when Lino heard that Igor was one of the Papal Rowers, it was Too Much, even in a city where things that are Too Much happen every day.

Bruno Dei Rossi "Strigheta," the only man ever to have won all the official races, rowing in the bow or the stern.

First a rower allows himself to essentially spit in the collective eye of the city, the race, the other racers, and history, and now he gets a reward?  Of all the people who could have been chosen, they chose a person who had committed an outrage that had never been committed by anyone, not even “Mad Dog” Sullivan.  And, strange to say, so far Lino is the only person who has expressed any opinion on this.

There’s a sprightly ditty in  the second act of “The Gondoliers,” by Gilbert and Sullivan.  It’s called “Here we are at the risk of our lives.”

Franco Dei Rossi "Strigheta." Oddly, for two such great racers, his seasons rowing with his brother were not their best.

I think it should be played in the background all day next Sunday.

Papal visit finale: The Gondoliers is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

Perhaps your local gazette hasn’t mentioned it yet, but Pope Benedict XVI is planning a big trip soon. He’ll be touring Northeast Italy, and will be in or around Venice on May 7 and 8.

"King Henri III of France visiting Venice in 1574, escorted by Doge Alvise Mocenigo and met by the Patriarch Giovanni Trevisan," by Andrea Micheli "Vicentino." This is the kind of welcome everyone had come to expect.

Venice has a long and prodigious history of state visits — King Henry III of France and Poland, in 1574, was one of the more famous guests, just one of a seemingly infinite procession of princes, ambassadors, potentates, emperors and, of course, popes coming to see the sights, visit the doge, and usually ask for some favor, like money or soldiers. Reading the list of deluxe visitors over the centuries gives the impression that the main business of Venice was hosting foreign notables, while other activities such as running an empire filled the random empty moments, kind of like a hobby.

Yet His Imminence has aroused not only joy and excitement among the faithful, but tension and recrimination and a series of increasingly regrettable remarks among the city’s gondoliers concerning who is going to get to row him the approximately five minutes it takes to row from San Marco to the church of the Salute, and in what boat. By a mystic coincidence, gondoliers are also known as pope (POH-peh), because they row on the stern (poppa) of the gondola. I have no idea what this might portend.

"The reception of Cardinal Cesar d'Estrees 1726," by Luca Carlevaris. Just all part of a normal day.

Don’t suppose that the battle to transport the pontiff is any particular evidence that gondoliers are so pious. A pious gondolier would be a distant cousin to a pious illegal-clam fisherman, or a pious doctor of a cycling champion.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, just kind of unusual. But they do like to be the center of attention and, in fact, they’re used to being regarded as some sort of star.  At least to the damsels they may be so fortunate as to row around the canals.

Popes aren’t supposed to cause dissension, they’re supposed to resolve it. But Benedict has unwittingly set off a sort of collective seizure.

Pope John Paul II being rowed in the city's balotina by four "re del remo" in 1985; high astern is the legendary Gigio "Strigheta."

First: Luciano Pelliccioli, vice-president of the gondola station heads (and a gondolier) offered to join Aldo Reato, president of the gondola station heads (and a gondolier) to row His Sanctity in Luciano’s extremely elaborate and glamorous gondola.

No!! The cry went up.  Why should those two men profit by their position and crowd out equally (I mean, more) deserving gondoliers?  Why, indeed?

Furthermore!! Champion racer Roberto Busetto, never at a loss for an opinion (he isn’t a gondolier, but that’s a detail), objected on the grounds that if Luciano should ever think of selling his gondola, he could easily make a huge profit by marketing it as the gondola that had carried the pope.  Busetto gets five bonus points for crassness, though that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

Anyway, Luciano withdrew his offer of his gondola and himself.  Reato also withdrew, but the incessant calls have continued. There are 425 gondoliers and by now probably each of the remaining 423 has called him at least once.  Some of them have fantastic reasons to be chosen: “Padre Pio came to me in a dream and said you should pick me,” said one.  Another person suggested Giorgia Boscolo, the first woman gondolier.  That idea burnt up on reentry into reality.

Then somebody suggested the “Strigheta” brothers, Franco and Bruno, sons and heirs (and gondoliers) of one of the greatest racers/gondoliers of all time, Albino “Gigio” Dei Rossi, known as “Strigheta.” (He rowed not only one, but four popes in his day.) They’re loaded with credentials and nobody hates them, which helps.

Then somebody suggested a four-rower gondola, rowed by the current racing champions, the Vignottini and D’Este and Tezzat. I think the idea was that rowing the pope could somehow magically bring peace to these two savagely feuding pairs, though somebody else opined that it wasn’t appropriate to expect the Holy Father to resolve every little neighborhood squabble. In any case, the four men have declared their willingness to row the Pontifex Maximus together, which is already a big step forward.

Then somebody asked: Why should it be a gondola?  Excellent question, considering that the city of Venice owns a more capacious gondola-type boat called a balotina, on which Pope John Paul II was borne along the Grand Canal in 1985.

Then some daring person suggested using the “disdotona,” or 18-oar gondola, which belongs to the Querini rowing club, and which in my opinion is not only the most spectacular boat in the city, by far, but would provide 18 men the chance to Row for Holiness.

Naturally, this idea got nowhere, because nobody thought one club should be given preference over another.  We’ve all got great boats, the thinking goes — why them and not us?

Even when it's not doing anything, the "disdotona" is impressive. I think the pope would look splendid seated in the bow, what with the velvet drapery trailing in the water and all.

I’m surprised nobody has yet suggested using the “Serenissima,” the huge decorated bissona with a raised stern, making the pope easy to see plus providing space for his entourage and some trumpeters, if that seemed appropriate.  But so far no mention of this little coracle.

Which brought up the next question: Why should the rowers be gondoliers? Another useful point.  In the olden days, a visiting potentate — such as John Paul II — would be rowed by the necessary number of “re del remo,” men who had won the Regata Storica five years in succession.  There aren’t many of them, because it’s fiendishly hard to do.  That would instantly reduce the number of candidates to something manageable.

And by now there has been at least one practical joke.  Someone purporting to be Aldo Reato (president of the gondola station heads) called the Gazzettino and said the matter had been settled: Luciano’s fancy gondola was going to be used after all, rowed by Franco Girardello, a retired gondolier who goes by the nickname “Magna e dormi” (eat and sleep). This fantasy was quickly dispelled by all concerned except the anonymous prankster.

The "Serenissima" was born for this kind of event. Odd that so far nobody has suggested it.

The most recent bulletin is that the matter will be put to a secret vote among the gondoliers.  The mind rather reels.  Busetto thinks the papal gondola is going to cost the moon at resale?  How much is a gondolier’s vote going to be worth, at this point?  No checks, no credit cards.

Comments from bemused readers of the Gazzettino run from “The pope doesn’t care who rows him” to “What a farce” to”Actually, Padre Pio came to ME in a dream and said I should do it.”

A certain Riccardo made the following suggestion:

“Requirements for candidacy:

Never to have blasphemed; Never to have used foul language; Never to have spoken in a coarse tone of voice.  In the case of more than one valid candidate (doubtful), preference will be given to the one who has a good knowledge of the principles of Catholicism, and/or who has read at least one of the 16 chapters of the Gospel of St. Mark, patron saint of our city.”

This pastoral visit has been in the planning stages for at least three months — probably more — and yet here we are, at the last minute, dealing with the frenzied bleating of the flock.

Meaning no disrespect, I think it would have been better for everybody if they had given a crash course in rowing to a Rastafarian and a dervish. I can’t think of a gondolier who could possibly be cooler than that.

Papal visit leads to gondolier smackdown is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

We’ve been having fog of various densities and persistence over the past – I’d have to check, it seems like a month or so.  Or year.  A long time, anyway.  And the predictions are for more.

“How romantic,” I hear you thinking.  And I agree.  Fog can be hauntingly lovely here, all drifting shapes and softening colors and the complete evaporation of the horizon.

What you can't make out in this picture, along with most of via Garibaldi, are two special fog components: A tenacious southwest wind to sharpen the vapor's edge on your skin, and the many different sizes of drops which fall against your face as you walk.

But if you need to move beyond the visual and into the practical, fog can be a pain in the gizzard. Acqua alta may get all the emotional publicity, but I can tell you that acqua from above, in the form of atmospheric condensation, can be just as inconvenient. I suppose nobody makes the same sort of fuss about it because fog doesn’t come into your house.  Or shop.

The vaporetto stop. Not a very promising panorama.

Example: Yesterday morning I was forced to abandon my plan to go to Torcello to meet somebody for an interview (assuming I do, or do not, succeed in re-scheduling said meeting, I will explain who, what and why in another post).

Like many plans — Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, say, or New Coke — it looked perfect on paper. Take the #52 vaporetto at 8:10 to the Fondamente Nove, change to the LN line at 8:40, change to the Torcello line at 9:35, and faster than you can recite the Gettysburg Address, I’d be there. Actually, you’d have to recite it 36 times; door to door requires an hour and a half, but I don’t mind.  It’s a beautiful trip, assuming you can see where you’re going.

There's a church over there with a big bell tower. Trust me.

But once again, I discovered — standing there without a Plan B — that the real problem isn’t the fog itself, but the way the ACTV, the transport company, deals with it.  The ACTV seems to have wandered beyond a reasonable concern for public safety and into the realm of phobia: “An irrational, intense, and persistent fear of certain situations, activities, things, animals, or people.”  I don’t think the ACTV has a fear of animals. Otherwise, fog fits the phobic bill. The solution? According to the dictionary, “The main symptom of this disorder is the excessive and unreasonable desire to avoid the feared stimulus.”  In this case, fog.

But the ACTV exists to be outdoors. Much as it might wish the case to be otherwise, it can’t function anywhere else.  And more to the point, by now almost all the boats have radar.  Yet it seems that the the more radar the company installs, the less willing the company is to trust it.

May I note that there were a good number of people out rowing in the fog yesterday morning, on their way to a boating event at Rialto.   I myself have been out rowing in the lagoon with a compass, as has Lino, as have plenty of people.  Lino rowed home one time in a fog so thick he couldn’t see the bow of his boat.  Just to give you some idea of what is, in fact, feasible.

The board continued to display the vaporetto numbers and their expected arrival times. I stood there and watched the times change as no vehicles passed. When Venice finally sinks beneath the waves, all that will be visible above the surface will be the angel atop the belltower of San Marco, and a board on which the vaporetto departure times will continue to advance.

In yesterday’s case, all the vaporettos were, as usual, re-routed up and down the Grand Canal, even those — like the one I wanted — which normally circumnavigate the city’s perimeter.  If I’d known in time that the fog was that thick out in the lagoon (as it wasn’t, outside our hovel), I wouldn’t have walked all the way over to the vaporetto stop at San Pietro di Castello.  Because once I realized that the boat wasn’t coming, it was too late to activate the most reasonable solution: Walking to the Fondamente Nove to get the boat to Burano.  Although there again, even if service were maintained to the outer reaches of the lagoon, it would almost certainly have been on a limited schedule. Like, say, once an hour.

Pause for the sound of the perfect plan drifting out to sea, and the first stifled shriek of the day.

Fog does show the spiderwebs to their best advantage. There is that.

I can’t understand several things. If the boats have radar, why does it not inspire confidence in its operators? And more to the point, if the vaporetto captains can manage to navigate along the shoreline and up the Grand Canal, with or without radar, why could they not, by the same token, circumnavigate the city?  The route outside takes them just as close to the shoreline as it does inside — in other words, whichever route they take, they’re not exactly out on the high seas, but within eyeshot of any palaces or pilings or any other landmark that they need to keep track of.

Once again, my sense of logic has run aground in a falling tide on the mudbanks of municipal management.

But one last question: If the city (and by extension, its transport company) is so willing to confront a temporary meteorological situation (fog) with the attitude, “Suck it up, people,” why has it not been willing to confront another temporary meteorological situation (acqua alta) with the same panache?

Answers do suggest themselves, but they are cynical answers, composed of bitter little thoughts about human nature.  Best to leave them unexpressed.

If you've ever wondered what "It is what it is" might look like, this is an excellent illustration. All those women have long since accepted the fact that their laundry is going to be wetter by noon than it was when they hung it out.

Note to people flying, not floating, yesterday. I’m sorry if your flight was delayed.  I realize that flying in fog is stupid and dangerous. But slowly driving a boat in fog, hugging the shoreline, isn’t.

But as I say, if you don't have to drive or fly in it, the fog does have a certain fascination.

Fogging up is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

So we have all somehow managed to hack our way out of the calorie-entangled canebrake of the holidays, and you might suppose that now we would all return to our lairs for three months of hibernation before thinking about going out and rowing around.

Maybe some people hibernate, but for the past 33 years, the rowing club “Voga Veneta Mestre” has rousted everyone who is roustable to come out on the earliest possible Sunday in January to form a boat procession, or corteo, in the Grand Canal.  This undertaking is known by the homespun title of the Prima Vogada dell’Anno, or  the first row of the year.

A snippet of rainbow as we all wait to get going: Blue and white of the Settemari club, blue and gold of the Voga Veneta Lido, red and white of the Club Ponte dei Sartori.

Of course people already have been rowing this year, your correspondent included. But the motivation for this event isn’t merely rowing, but rowing with the purpose of Doing a Good Deed. The corteo ends at the nursing home at San Lorenzo, behind the church of San Giorgio dei Greci, where the Mestre club prepares a festive sort of party/lunch/scrum, cooking a vat of pasta e fagioli, bringing useful gifts, and providing plenty of loud and cheerful talking and singing to entertain the inmates — sorry, I meant residents.

Quadruple parking as the early-arrivers wait for everybody else: purple and white of the club San Polo dei Nomboli, blue and orange of Voga Veneta Mestre, and a random blue-garbed man from the Querini.

I have only gone once to this climactic phase of the morning.  We usually just keep rowing in order to make it home at a decent hour, so I can’t tell you much about the denouement.

But I can tell you that I think the Prima Vogada dell’Anno is one of the best little boating exploits in the whole year because it has absolutely no public relations value whatever, no touristic or fancy-poster or let’s-find-a-sponsor or we-have-no-money or who-shot-John or any other of the aspects that often begrime waterborne events here. There are just too dang many situations in which floating Venetians  are used as decoration to provide some kind of folkloristic color to somebody else’s hoedown. And God forbid that the event should be televised — then they tell you where you have to go and how long to stay there, even if you had come with the quaint notion of being a participant and not merely some kind of anonymous oar-carrier.

So the great thing here is that it’s Just Us Folks, and if the weather is raw and foggy, which it was on Sunday and still is today (the foghorns are blowing as I write), all the better.  There are fewer people out to snap pictures, and the fog makes all the colors of the boats and their rowers’ track suits really come alive.

A simple sandolo from San Polo dei Nomboli standing by, hanging onto us. As you see, the Christmas Forcola has finally gotten out of the house and back to work.

So the boats gather, in the usual disorderly way, between the train station and Piazzale Roma. Rowers wave to each other, call out mildly rude comments, check their cell phones for messages, and so on till the caravan moves out at 10:00.

There is relatively little traffic at that time on a fuzzy winter Sunday morning, so we have the Grand Canal pretty much  to ourselves.

Wherever we are at the beginning is not usually where we are at the end.  Lino likes to be near the front of any corteo, and rarely resists the temptation to perform all kinds of tiny, deft and seemingly impossible maneuvers to sneak past the other boats one by one and get ahead.

Gianni Bullo in the bow of his caorlina before the start. Perhaps he's rethinking his repertoire. ("Should I start with 'Un Bel Di?' Nah, let's just see what happens.")

I’ll never forget how vastly he entertained himself one night a few years ago in a corteo for Carnival. The boats were all kind of mashed together in the semi-dark and we found ourselves wedged in behind a gondola of the Francescana club, rowed by four men. Giorgio Fasan was standing on the stern; he, like Lino on our 8-oar gondola, was the captain and steersman of the boat. At that time he was already very old but he was still as irrepressible as, I gather, he had always been, and still just as capable.

And we're off. Generally speaking. No rush.

Lino, as always, was so perfectly in control of our boat, and so alert to everything and everyone around him (it’s long since become instinctive), that he decided to break the monotony by annoying Giorgio.  So we inched up behind Giorgio’s gondola, and with an imperceptible push on his oar Lino gave his gondola a little nudge against the stern.

Normally everybody tries to avoid touching, knocking against, running into, or otherwise coming into contact with other boats. Which means Giorgio wasn’t expecting his boat to move for any reason other than whatever he or his crew were doing. Lino’s little push, however, made his gondola unexpectedly begin to veer off-course, to the right.

"Mestrina," the 14-oar gondola and flagship of the Voga Veneta Mestre fleet, moves to the head of the corteo, as is only right and proper.

Therefore Giorgio’s natural reaction was to start yelling at the man rowing in the prow, who he assumed was to blame for this deviation by having given a stroke that was just a little too hard.

“Why are you rowing?” he shouted.  ”Can’t you see we don’t want to go right?  Tira acqua!”  (A counter-stroke that would have corrected the situation.)

I bet Lino nudged that gondola at least five times, just to watch Giorgio get more flustered and more mad — and of course, to listen to the exchanges between Giorgio and his supposedly incompetent but completely innocent crew member, which became increasingly warm.

Lino thought it was hilarious and I did too, I have to admit.  Childish?  Sure.  But I also thought it was pretty cool that he was able to pull it off, and it was so much the sort of thing I could imagine them all doing when they were all canal-rats together that I knew it wasn’t malicious.  Giorgio never did figure out what had happened.  He’s been rowing angels around the heavenly canals for several years now, but I bet he’s still blaming that guy in the bow.

Nothing like that happened on Sunday, though.  People stuck to the business at hand, Lino included, though after we passed under the Rialto Bridge, Gianni Bullo, in the bow of a caorlina from the Canottieri Mestre, suffered some sort of attack of euphoria (“rapture of the Rialto”?), and began singing snatches of a song, or maybe several.  Maybe he thought other people would join in — it happens sometimes, which is really nice. He was happy, though, and that’s something that always sounds good, though in his case it sounded better from a distance.

Me, I was savoring the boat-music, the sound of us swooshing along, and the boats around us also swooshing, each producing its own special swoosh-notes according to the size and shape and weight of the boat, not to mention the size, shape and weight of its rowers.  For once the main sound in the Grand Canal was not the snarling of taxi and barge and vaporetto motors, but just the water and the oars and the air combining in their own rhythmic, convivial, completely unorchestrated a cappella chorus.

I don’t think these guys, including Gianni Bullo, could possibly sing any song at the nursing home that would be more wonderful than that.

Coming out of the Grand Canal into the Bacino of San Marco, the boats tend to wander away from each other, becoming less of a procession and more of a small herd.

The “First Row of the Year” is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up