Archive for Nature
First Day of Spring in Venice
Posted by: | CommentsThere ought to be a special Venetian handshake, or greeting, or food (what? no special food??) to mark this little anniversary.
But I did hear something that sounded like a mystic knock at the year’s door, loud enough to be heard but perhaps not enough to be noticed.
The knock that struck ever so faintly on the old cochlea was delivered at the Rialto market. (You see? Of course food belongs in the picture. I was only testing you.)
These are carletti, and their moment is so fleeting you might not even see them the day you go to the market. Lino forages for them along the lagoon shoreline, and if you don't get them at just the right moment, whatever their parent plant may be will develop them into something inedible. They aren't cultivated anywhere; these little bouquets were picked by somebody, leaf by leaf.
Bruscandoli, or wild hops, stay in the market longer than the carletti. Both of these plants make an excellent risotto -- that appears to be their main mission in life.
Instead of an occult greeting, there is an assortment of poetry passed on by the ancients to acknowledge the moment. Once again, it comes from the fathomless store of balladry that Lino memorized as a lad. If his teachers had had any notion that his brain was going to retain all this material far, far into the distant decades — maybe even forever — they might have wondered if it would have been better to have him memorize something else. Like algorithms, or the names of the then-68 member countries of the UN, or all the books of the Bible.
But poetry seems to have turned out to work better, because how often in any day or occasion would it be necessary, or even appreciated, to burst out with all the books of the Bible? Poetry, however, is always the Right Thing to say.
In exactly the same place (and perhaps bucket) where you can buy calicanthus in December, peach blossoms appear for a brief period in early spring.
So this morning, like every March 21, was marked by a spontaneous recitation of the vernal poesy of Giovanni Pascoli and Angiolo Silvio Novaro. Read these to the mental music of blackbirds cantillating in the dawn, and the sound of the truck delivering the branches of peach blossoms from Sicily.
If I had time, I would research the reasons for selling peach blossoms, and not apple or apricot or almond or any other flowering tree. I myself would like to know the reasons, but for now I can only say that these are here because that’s what people do. ”People” meaning the growers, sellers, and buyers. So don’t come asking for pear or loquat blossoms or any other frippery.
Valentino, by Giovanni Pascoli. Lino launches into it like greeting an old friend: ”Oh! Valentino vestito di nuovo/come le brocche dei biancospini!/Solo, ai piedini provato dal rovo/porti la pelle de’ tuoi piedini…”
Biancospino, or common hawthorn, is one of the first heralds of spring.
Then there are lines he doesn’t remember so I’ll skip those, then the conclusion and the link to March: “… e venne/Marzo, e tu magro contadinello/restasti a mezzo…ma nudi i piedi, come un uccello:/come l’uccello venuto dal mare,/che tra il ciliegio salta, e non sa/ch’oltre il beccare, il cantare, l’amare/ci sia qualch’altra felicita’.”
Valentino is a poor country boy whose widowed mother survives by selling the eggs from their chickens. Winter is brutally hard and he has outgrown the shoes she made for him. The poet compares his bare feet to those of a bird. But then in March come the first signs of spring, and he concludes, “like a bird that came from the sea, that leaps in the cherry tree, and doesn’t know that other than to eat, to sing, to love, there could be any other happiness.”
The second of these classics is a little paean to the soft rain of March, which makes the plants begin to bloom.
Che dice la pioggerellina di marzo? by Angiolo Silvio Novaro:
Che dice la pioggerellina di marzo/che picchia argentina/Sui tegoli vecchi/Del tetto, sui bruscoli secchi/Dell’orto, sul fico e sul moro/Ornati di gemmule d’oro?”
“What says the misty rain of March/that strikes silvery/On the old tiles/Of the roof, on the dry motes/Of the garden, on the fig and on the mulberry/Adorned with buds of gold?”
He goes on to say that winter is past, tomorrow spring will come out, trimmed with buds and frills,with bright sun, fresh violets, the beating of birds’ wings, nests, cries, swallows, and the stars of almond, white… The entire team, in other words, plus cheerleaders.
All this sounds much better in Italian, but in any language these poems and their ilk amount to a deep sigh of relief. Sometimes it’s not so much that spring is here, but that winter is gone. Less winter, more spring. If that doesn’t call for a poem, you may have a soul made of styrofoam.
No offense.
"Quando la rosa mete spin/xe bon el go' e el passarin." When the rose begins to bud, the go' and the passarini are good. In other words, to everything there is a season, and March is the moment for these creatures.
The passarini are looking good.
Another day, another mollusk
Posted by: | CommentsWe went out rowing the other afternoon, which is always a good thing but not exactly news. Other people might have been unenthusiastic — and in fact, we didn’t see anybody else out — but we don’t wait for the weather to sing its little Lorelei song. That’s a waste of valuable time especially in March, what with Lorelei being so skittish. We just go.
A nondescript March afternoon, soon to become much more descript with the gathering of the oysters.
For a while, the most notable thing about the excursion was the faintly hazy, vague color scheme of the part of the lagoon where we like to go. Then the breeze began to get to me. It wasn’t so strong, but it was raw and insistent, which began to be annoying, like a crying baby in the apartment at the end of the hall. Part of the effect of the crying baby, as with the wind, is that there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it. Things I can’t do anything about really, really annoy me. Just so you know.
But the situation became much more interesting when we ran the boat onto the exposed mudbank — the tide was out — so Lino could go exploring. I would have gone too, but wasn’t wearing shoes that would have made even the slightest effort to resist the squishy, waterlogged terrain.
And what he found were oysters. I knew they were out there because he’s brought them home before. Lagoon oysters on the half-shell were our antipasto for Christmas Eve dinner a few years ago, and they are delectable, not too large, not too small, and faintly sweet. One source states that this breed is known for its “unique tannic seawater flavor…and [is] considered excellent for eating raw on the half shell.” As I said.
To be precise, these unsung lagoon creatures are known elsewhere as the highly prized Belon oyster, the stuff of high-wattage chefs and cultivated feeders. Here, nobody cares about them anymore. Even less than not caring, nobody seems to even know they exist. Here the restaurants are fixated on clams…clams…clams…clams, like a stuck culinary record.
These animals (Ostrea edulis) go by various names, from the clearly appropriate "mud oyster" to the much"European flat oyster" to the much more glamorous Belon oyster. Too bad about the lone canestrello, or "lid scallop," that was forced to come along. Lino would gladly have brought a batch of friends for him, if he'd found them.
Oysters were once as common in the market as clams. A particularly Venetian habit, more firmly rooted than kudzu, is to exclaim “Ostrega!” (OSS-tre-gah) which means “oyster” in Venetian. (Italian: ostrica). It’s an all-purpose term that would instantly reveal you to be Venetian anywhere in Italy; in fact, it carries amusing overtones of charming quaintness to anyone not from here. It is one of those clever next-to words (like “hello” instead of “hell”) that people employ to avoid using a really serious and socially inadmissible word — in this case, “ostia,” which is the Communion wafer. Ostrega is close enough to get your meaning across without offense.
“Ostrega” is a flexible word which, depending on your tone of voice, can express a variously emphatic reaction from astonishment to agreement, disbelief, displeasure, wonder, delight, and so on. ”Ostregheta” (OSS-tre-GHE-ta, or “little oyster”) is a gentler variation. I have a Venetian friend who will sometimes say “OO-strega,” which I think is adorable. I keep meaning to ask him if he invented this.
On the building at the corner of Campo San Pantalon is a small stone tablet where fish used to be sold. One of several that remain from the Venetian Republic, it shows a list of the fish for sale and the legal minimum size.
Back to the oysters themselves. One of the clauses in the numberless regulations governing fishermen (which began to be documented in 1270), as stipulated in 1765, stated that ”To only the fishermen who personally exercise the laborious toil of fishing, should remain the usual freedom to go to the neighborhoods selling fish at retail such as eels, flounder, mullet, sardines….cuttlefish, clams and oysters in the permitted times.”
Another plaque with fish and sizes is in Campo Santa Margherita, here pleasantly accompanied by three stands selling fish.
But now, as with so many things (such as papaline), they have fallen out of favor and I’m not sure anyone can say why. There seem to be fashions in fish. It can’t be because oysters are difficult to collect, because they’re generally easier than clams. Clams lurk beneath the sediments, but oysters — like canestrelli — are often found lying there on the muddy/sandy bottom, right out in the open, not even trying to hide. You can just pick them up, like Lino does, though back when they had commercial value men would take them by means of a cassa da ostreghe, more simply known as an ostregher (oss-treh-GHEHR).
A bragozzo in the lagoon, with an ostregher attached to each mast. (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venezia.)
An ostregher was a sort of baggy net weighted with a strip of iron which was tied to the stern of your boat, and which you would drag along the bottom as you rowed or sailed. Something similar, called a “cassa da canestreli” or “scassa diavolo” was used to take canestrelli (Pecten opercularis), as Lino often did when he was a lad; he sometimes shows me where, along the edges of the Canale del Orfanello stretching from the Bacino of San Marco toward the island of San Servolo. Or in the Canale del Orfano, from San Servolo to the island of La Grazia. Lots of people did this, just for themselves. Even now, a few people might still joke, when the vehicle you’re in (say, the vaporetto) is slowing down for no apparent reason: “Are they dragging a cassa da canestreli?” I imagine that most youngsters have no idea what they’re talking about.
All the fish go by their Venetian names here; the ostrega is second from the bottom, with minimum length of 5 cm (1.9 inches).
Then the city outlawed this technique as damaging to the lagoon. You might say this was a good thing — it’s certainly fine as a concept, like peace on earth — except that it wasn’t damaging, and if it were, why was this method outlawed while illegal clamming continues, night and day, by people using a mechanized version of basically the same technique, leaving utterly barren, completely devastated tracts of lagoon behind?
Lino happily returned to the boat with a bag containing a batch of oysters and a lone canestrelo which he couldn’t resist.
All now frozen solid, awaiting their moment of glory in Lino’s next fish soup.
It turned out to have been, as the saying goes, an excellent day to die. For the oysters, I mean.
March 5 in Venetian history (ours)
Posted by: | CommentsSince I’ve been here, all sorts of dates have become staples of my annual pilgrimage through the months — dates which never had any significance for me because they didn’t have anything to do with me. Like most dates, today excepted.
Take May 5. No, I don’t mean Cinco di Mayo. It’s not Florence Nightingale’s birthday. Not the first publication of Don Quixote. Not the invention of WD-40. All events worth observing but they don’t have much to do with Venice.
Death mask of Napoleon (Library Company of Philadelphia).
May 5, just so you know, was the Death of Napoleon. In case this still doesn’t matter to you, your city probably wasn’t starved, raped, mutilated, and then sold into slavery. Probably. So anyway, May 5 is, in fact, a day worth remembering, however briefly.
But, I hear you cry, this is March, not May. I realize that. I just wanted to say that March 5, which comes to nobody’s mind except Lino’s (and now mine), claims just as important a place in my calendrical memory. And I wasn’t even there.
March 5, as Lino tells me every year (“Who knows why this date has remained so fixed in my mind?” he asked this morning), was the Battle of the Great Frozen Eel.
On the night between March 4 and 5, he went out in the lagoon to fish.
“There was hoarfrost in the bottom of my boat,” he starts out, to set the scene, and to point out how cold it was. March is famous for pulling tricks like that — it snowed here day before yesterday.
Neither sleet nor snow nor fog nor gloom of night stays the letter carriers, and should the gondoliers be less than they?
He fishes for a couple of hours out in the lagoon. ”I got all kinds of great stuff,” he says (I’m freely translating). ”Seppie. Passarini [European flounder]. And an eel.”
The fact of there being an eel isn’t so remarkable — the lagoon version has a lovely pale-green belly — but considering that he fishes with a trident, they’re pretty tricky to spear. So this was a sort of bonus.
All the fish are tossed into a big bin. He continues fishing. It continues to be really cold.
Finally he rows home, lugs the bin upstairs and dumps the contents into the kitchen sink.
The eel makes a clunk. It’s frozen solid in the curled-up shape it was forced to assume in the bin. “That didn’t happen to the passarini,” Lino adds, ”but the eel was hard as stone. So I began to run tepid water on it to soften it up.”
“All of a sudden” — (I love this part, it’s like a fairy tale when the witch or prince or stolen baby appears) — “all of a sudden, I see its gills begin to move.” He makes a slowly-moving-gills motion with his hand.
“My God! It was still alive!” Astonishing, if you believed, as I — and obviously Lino — would have, that freezing would kill a creature. But the gills were definitely moving. And shortly thereafter, the rest of the eel was also moving. A lot.
“You should have seen what that eel was doing in the sink,” Lino goes on. Naturally it’s slithering like crazy, trying to get out, but naturally it is failing. And naturally Lino is trying to grab it, but it cleverly has a slippery skin to prevent that.
“Finally I took a dishtowel and grabbed it using that,” he says. ”It still wasn’t easy. I managed to pin it down and made a couple of cuts” (in whatever part of the body was convenient). Then, when it began to slow down, he continued with the usual procedure of dispatching and cleaning eel, which I will not describe to you. Anybody who wants to know can write to me.
So remember March 5, sacred to the memory of the gallant eel who didn’t realize he was better off frozen hard as stone.
March blows into Venice
Posted by: | CommentsWe were all peacefully plodding along toward spring when March burst through the door. Did the famous month come in like a lion? More like a pack of enraged jaguars.
On Monday night (February 28) the wind began to pick up. A very special wind, the bora, blowing from the northeast with gusts up to 54 km/h (33 mph).
At Sant' Elena, looking toward the Lido.
This went on all day and night for the following two days — as I write, the wind is finally subsiding to a polite 20 km/h (12 mph).
The scirocco, the fetid breath of the southeast, can impel acqua alta, but if you stand sideways to the bora it will blow your brain out of your skull. Not that you’ll be needing your brain at that point, because the survival instinct will have taken over the controls.
We could hear the powerful roaring noise with the door and windows shut. Women didn’t hang out their laundry, which told me more than even the messages being tapped out on our window by the desperate Venetian blinds. Normally you’d like a real breeze because it gives you a boost in the drying-laundry department, but here your housewife would have risked either seeing her underwear being ripped out of the clothespins and soaring away toward Sardinia, or clinging to the clothesline while being rent to rags, like a flag in a hurricane.
For me, not seeing laundry is more ominous than the dog that didn’t bark in the night.
The bora making its point along the Fondamente Nove.
But while all this is very exciting for Venice (well, for me, though it’s certainly not the first bora I’ve experienced), it set a record for Trieste, the city as famous for its wind as Venice is for its canals. They haven’t had a zephyr like this since 1954.
The Triestines endured this bora with gusts up to 163 km/h (101 mph). This is a speed which isn’t even on the Beaufort scale, and creates more damage and danger than 76 acqua altas put together. Some people in Trieste were literally blown over, suffering serious head injuries. The houses and trees went through something of the same thing. It’s quite a place where the weather person can breathe a sigh when he tells the viewers that the wind is dropping and that now it’s only at 70 km/h (43 mph).
Here is a view of the bora in Trieste at 150 km/h. This occurred in 2005, but it gives some idea of what 163 km/h might look like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itcaETv705Y&playnext=1&list=PL35DE065227480E8F
Interesting fact that sounds like folklore, except that I can confirm that it’s true: No matter how many days the bora may last, it always ends on an odd-numbered day. Like today. Strange, I know.
I stayed home and made my once-a-year batch of galani, to gorge on today (“Fat Thursday”). They didn’t come out as well as they did last year, and I am convinced that I changed nothing. Of course we’re eating them, but they fall short of sublime, which is disappointing. If I’m going to eat slivers of fat and sugar, they ought to be at least irresistible.
The galani this year. Next year, even better.
Call me deranged, but I’m blaming the bora. Cold high pressure from Russia meeting warm low pressure from the southwest right over our little hovel. I’m just glad that the roof tiles didn’t get blown away. Though I suppose I could have glued some galani on in their place.
Fogging up
Posted by: | CommentsWe’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.
Venetians in wonderland
Posted by: | CommentsIt snowed yesterday, which was about time, considering that the rest of Europe and even large parts of Italy have already had far more than their share.
This time it wasn't fog that was obscuring the Minoan Lines ferry's 2:00 PM departure for Greece. It was snow blowing in every direction.
I realize thousands, maybe millions, of people would be happier never to see snow again; Italy in the past two days has been overwhelmed by the white stuff and its icy relatives, which have blocked trains, closed airports, inflicted autostrada catastrophes involving heavy tractor trailers (one monster rig went sideways on one of the main north-south superhighways, not only preventing motorists from moving forward but also making it impossible for the snowplows to get through), and stranded travelers everywhere who finally were put up overnight in assorted improvised shelters because they couldn’t move in any direction and the temperature was sinking steadily below freezing.
Treat these strips as you would any untamed creature: keep your eyes open and pretend you don't care. They can sense fear.
Still, even if vehicles in my world aren’t hindered much by snow, walking presents its own hazards. Traversing the space between two points here will inevitably require crossing a bridge. The bridges do not get shoveled and salted in a timely fashion, and the edge of each step of each bridge was helpfully bordered by some long-ago brilliant engineer with a strip of cream-colored Istrian stone (to resist wear? to clearly demarcate where the step ends?), and when this stone freezes it becomes one of the most treacherous substances on earth. Little old people dragging their wheeled shopping carts put many of their 206 bones at risk on the way home. And by the way, I too could slip and fall.
But I don’t care. Snow here is as magical as anywhere else, and watching little kids discover the myriad wonders of making and launching snowballs just makes it even better. The laughter, the occasional scream, a couple of gamboling dogs who can’t resist barking,the air which when the sun comes out is absolutely fizzy: I’ll take this as a great Christmas scene any day over ten shopping malls playing freeze-dried carols.
Sorry for all you holiday travelers, but I hope it snows again. And again.
The morning after is a great time to start doing things with the snow -- I mean, apart from shoveling it. A grandfather on the island of Sant' Erasmo created this with the sporadic help of his very small grandson.
