If you should happen to hear a loud rasping sound, it’s not a swarm of locusts warming up for mating season. It’s Venetian merchants rubbing their hands together. It’s Carnival time again!
The first weekend has just passed, but it seems to have gotten off to a curiously restrained start. The Gazzettino says there were 75,000 people, which is more than I’d want to spend a weekend with, but fewer than the 100,000 they report from pre-Covid days.
The novelty of an evening boat parade in the Grand Canal , a monster show on what appears to be a disguised dredge being pushed along by motor (the oars were fake — no wait, the oars were real, but the rowers were fake) did not enthuse the Venetians. It was a massive floating Las Vegas.
The boat parade the next morning, by Venetians who were rowing, was shorter than in past years, and there were fewer boats, as well. There were objections and protests about that, too, because truncating the trajectory meant that the mob scene that was so festive in the Cannaregio Canal was reduced to a simple mini-mob in the Erbaria at Rialto. Naturally all the merchants along the Cannaregio Canal have made their voices heard. Their palms are no longer rasping.
The uber-traditional “Flight of the Colombina” over Piazza San Marco was not held. Some explanation about the piazza being all torn up for the high-water-defenses work does not convince me, nor many others, either, but in any case no Colombina flew. Not Las Vegas-y enough? It used to be one of the major draws of the entire festival. Just more things I don’t understand.
No matter. We’ve got Carnival down here in via Garibaldi and environs, and that’s plenty entertaining for me. It’s wonderful how you can dress little kids up as anything and yet they still know exactly who they are. Some of them are pretending, but none of them is as good at it as some adults I know.
My thoughts are going no deeper. You can certainly upholster yourself as Giacomo Casanova, if that’s your thing. My own Carnival is kids, galani and frittelle.
As everyone knows, April 25 is a big date on the Venetian calendar: Not only is it the Feast of San Marco, but also Liberation Day, commemorating the end of World War II.
Seeing that San Marco gets precedence, having been around for some years before World War II, I like to focus on that part of the big day. And arguably the most important element is the long-stemmed red rose known as a “bocciolo” in Italian, and “bocolo” (BOH-ko-lo) in Venetian.
It’s simple: Any and every Venetian man gives a bocolo to the dearest ladies in his life, from wife to mother to sister to whoever else really matters to him. Or they just stick to mother and wife.
We went out early in our little boat to row around the city for a while, and the first step — literally, as we have to cross a bridge to get to the boat — was to buy a rose from the young man prowling on the bridge with a fistful of roses. Lino planned to give me a much more glamorous bocolo a little later, but it was unthinkable to appear in Venice in a roseless boat.
So until we finally reached the florist nearest to our hovel, we rowed around the city on a sampierota proudly bearing its very own bocolo, totally in tune with the day.
P.S.: Any reader who wants to chance his or her arm in plotting our route based on the photos is very welcome to let me know where we went. It’s just a game — if I’d wanted to make it really difficult, I’d have showed mainly reflections and walls.
When last we spoke, Venice was on the verge of its annual celebration of the feast of the Redentore (held last Sunday). By now the festa has come and gone, but this year the difference between the two was minimal. “Reduced form” is the boilerplate description, but if you reduce something past a certain point it just isn’t it anymore.
We did not have fireworks, as all the world knows. Without fireworks, I discovered, the festa can’t achieve liftoff. Yes, people did come to Venice — according to La Nuova Venezia, 108 tables had been reserved for the usual dinners outside (68 of them along the fondamenta of the Giudecca), and a total of some 15,000 people came to join the Venetians making some sort of merry. Fifteen thousand may sound good compared to nothing (let us cast our minds back to the desolation of the total lockdown), but it represented less than a fifth of the number that crammed the city last year. I used to hate the cramming, but without it the evening felt strangely deflated. No, actually, it felt partially deflated, which is not much better.
Seeing that we did not go roaming the city in search of entertainment, I only know what I saw in our little lobe of land, or what the newspaper reports. It says that there were people eating outside around the city, along fondamente big or small, or in their boats tied up in the Grand Canal or some other major waterways. That sounds nice.
To warm the general atmosphere to an even happier level, four large boats bearing a total of some 30 Venetian musicians moved around the Grand Canal, the Giudecca Canal and the Bacino of San Marco. Floating music has a long tradition in this festival, although in recent years it has been co-opted by the big party boats blaring music at levels that would pulverize a small planet. It must have been wonderful to have a bouncier, smaller sort of soundtrack as the evening drew on (for the record, the participants were Batisto Coco, Josmil Neris and Laguna Swing, Pitura Stail and Ska-j). All these groups are on YouTube, and here is a small clip that shows how little it took — at least, compared to the labor and cost of a 30-minute fireworks display — to get the party going.
It looks really sweet and I send huge compliments to the organizers, etc. Unhappily for us, none of these boats made it down as far as via Garibaldi — or at least not during the brief period I was roaming the waterfront. So if this sort of thing is ever organized again (and I hope it will be, though probably everyone will want fireworks again), the landlubbers need to lub somewhere further afield.
So I can only report on Redentore as observed south of the Arsenal and north of Sant’ Elena. But I will throw in some of the races held on Sunday afternoon, and a glimpse of the Patriarch going to mass, if that will help liven things up. We’ll hope for better and happier things next year.
This just in: The bridge is already under construction, and I’m sure the fireworks are already on the way, but like a launch at Cape Canaveral, mayor Luigi Brugnaro has scrubbed the mission.
This year, there will be no fireworks for the Redentore (July 19). No fireworks, no party boats, no “notte famosissima.” It’s a blow, but there were already signs that caution was going to rule, beginning with the new regulation that spaces along the fondamente were going to be assigned only by booking. But in the end, it was obvious that safe social distancing was going to be impossible to plan, much less maintain, on water or on land.
Here is the mayor’s announcement (translated by me):
“I do not have good news. I have been awake all night, but unfortunately I’m forced to tell you that we are annulling the fireworks for the Redentore. I can’t bring myself to make it work, I have tried everything. In conscience I just don’t feel like it, for me it’s the most beautiful festa of the year. We set up an incredible system for booking for the boats, we even invented a series of plans for limiting the flow. It’s my decision, I take responsibility for it, but I cannot bring the city to risk it. This is a safe city.”
No news at this moment as to whether the races will be held on Sunday afternoon, or the mass.