Venice used to be famous for cats, but they have somehow relinquished their mythic stature. When I came to Venice back in 1804, there were still scattered outposts where old ladies would leave food for the stray cats, near makeshift little huts. Now the only place I can be sure of seeing a feline is either roaming the cloister at the city hospital, or on or near a few windowsills in the neighborhood. The once-abundant freelancing cats have been rounded up and stowed in a pound on the Lido.

Instead of cats, there are dogs.

Arguably the most famous Venetian dog, here waiting for Saint Augustine to finish having his vision and do something fun. (Vittore Carpaccio).

When Lino was a lad, families were still large and didn’t have extra food to waste on a dog  just to play with.  The only dogs who were given room and board had to work for it, like retrievers or hounds.  No need for a guard dog, that’s what grandmothers are for. Or, as Lino put it, “What was there for a dog to guard?  Most people didn’t even have tears to cry with.”

Nor was there extra money to spend on trips to the vet, not to mention the wardrobe.  Now not only are there dogs everywhere, many of them dress better than I do, though they tend to belong to people (often, but not always, women) who confuse them with human children.  I once saw a woman on the vaporetto, holding her dog on her lap, cradling it like a baby. No, the dog wasn’t sick.  I can’t remember if it was wearing a bonnet.

Probably the second-most famous dogs, in another painting by Carpaccio. This is a detail from a picture depicting the menfolk out hunting in the lagoon; hence, these ladies are waiting for them to return. Evidently even playing with the pets palls after a while -- everyone here is immobilized by boredom.

I amuse myself by tracking the changing fashions in the world of Fido and Rex (though here people tend to like the name Bobi).  Like other fashions, it’s hard to discover a reason for it, but evidently either you can get tired of a dog faster than your nose-ring or skateboard, or you just really need to be like everybody else. Or you didn’t care about your dog in the first place.

First, there were Afghan hounds. It seems strange now, but this is true.  Then all of a sudden everybody had boxers. They traded these in for beagles.  Then came a rash of Jack Russell terriers.  Now that I think of it, it’s been a while since I saw a beagle — they used to be everywhere.  And the Jack Russells are mysteriously fading away too.

Now we have a mixed bag, with a few of the above (not the Afghans, those are long gone), joined by a few French bulldogs, an English bulldog, a couple of Rottweilers, Golden Retrievers, Labradors, a batch of Shih Tzus, assorted terriers, and a smattering of spaniels of various sorts.  There are also plenty of mutts, I’m glad to note.  They never go out of style.

There is an organization which seeks homes for abandoned dogs, and their notices taped on municipal surfaces are very touching and very repetitive.  There is a photo of the dog, of course, with its name and a paragraph describing its sad past — and some of these dogs have been through torture — and a description of the dog and its character.  This is the repetitive part.  You’d be amazed how many dogs are “sweet.”  Hulking, tiny, old, blind, their primary trait is sweetness.  This is wonderful, especially if true, but it does make all these animals sound like animated stuffed toys.  If you want to sell an apartment in Venice, the crucial word is “luminoso” (full of light).  If you want to donate a dog, you’ve got to call it sweet.  I realize that “cranky, demanding, and incontinent” won’t inspire many offers, but still.

Detail from "The Entourage of Cleopatra" by Giambattista Tiepolo.

This passion for dogs is far from being some new aberration, at least according to centuries of Venetian art.  It’s pretty clear that the patricians have always been dog-crazy.  Look at any number of Venetian paintings, even at random, and you’ll see that where two or more are gathered together, there will be at least one dog.

When I go to a museum or church or palace here, I don’t admire the brushwork or the color scheme, I play Find the Dog. It’s a very satisfying game because you know there is at least one, and often more.  It’s like a treasure hunt.

Someone might tell me that the dogs are there in their purely symbolic capacity, like other animals in European art such as peacocks or bees. Dogs, as we all know, typically represent fidelity, obedience, protection, courage and vigilance. All excellent traits which would be valued here, as anywhere. Scholarly sources don’t mention its symbolizing sweetness but they are obviously not well informed.

But by the way most dogs are depicted, they don’t seem symbolic at all.  Most of them have got more personality than many of the people around them — just like now.

"The Dinner at Emmaus," by Paolo Veronese. The grownups can eat and talk all night if they want, the kids have got the dogs to play with.

"Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet," by Tintoretto.

"The Last Supper," by Tintoretto (detail).

What started me on all these ruminations is the fact that, for however much the dog might be adored here, it remains the quintessential insult-figure.  ”I cani di ta morti” (your beloved deceased family members are dogs) is absolutely the worst thing you can say to a person here, so bad that you don’t say it unless you intend to make that person your enemy forever.

This is occasionally modified to “ti ta morti,” which I think means that you have left a small window open for future reconciliation. Or at least haven’t branded yourself as irredeemably vulgar.

You can substitute “porceli” (pigs) for dogs, which is the only way you can make the insult worse.

This dog seemed perfectly happy in this position.

You don’t have to say it to the person, you can also merely say it about the person.  ”Why did your boss make you work last Sunday?”  ”Because she’s got morti cani.”   If the situation warrants it but I don’t want to utter the death blow, I soften it by merely referring to the person and his or her behavior as having or being M.C.  In any form, it’s such a useful expression that I wish there were a corresponding phrase in English, but I haven’t found it, or managed to invent it, yet.

"The Happy Union" from "Four Allegories" by Paolo Veronese.

I will have to pursue further research on the subject of insults because I am under the impression that the main force of the phrase doesn’t come from the dogs, but the fact that the insult is aimed at your family.  In Rome, the corresponding vilification is “i mortacci tua” — again, an imprecation against your dead relatives.

Your typical insulting Anglo-Saxon doesn’t tend to invoke either death (unless it’s yours) or your relatives (unless it’s your mama).  Therefore death and your family status appear to carry a freight of meaning here which must come from some extremely deep Mediterranean source.  Perhaps the Phoenicians devised it, along with the alphabet.

I sometimes wonder what dogs say about each other.  ”Your dead relatives are humans,” probably.

Stay on the safe side and don’t ever refer to dogs or people in the same sentence. Especially not if you observe how much the animal and its owner resemble each other.

"Danae," by Tintoretto.

"Boy with Dogs in a Landscape," by Titian.

"Cupid with Dogs," by Paolo Veronese. I think it would be more accurate to call it "Dogs with Cupid." Or maybe he could have just left Cupid out of it altogether.

Venice goes to the dogs is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

This splended relief carving crowns the main entrance to the church of San Giuseppe (Saint Joseph) in Castello. There are two especially good things here: First, Saint Joseph is, as always, in the background -- even on a church dedicated to him. He must have been a remarkable person. Second, the three shepherds are as accurate as artist Giulio dal Moro (early 1500's) could make them. The first one, kneeling, not only has a small barrel attached to his belt (brandy?), but his upraised right hand is holding sheep-shears.

Venice at Christmas – it sounds as if the entire city ought to be refulgent with gleaming and sparkling, as if every fragment of its shattered splendor should come together and shine in an unearthly and glorious way.

Yes, it does seem that it ought to be that way.

Instead, scattered efforts at decoration all around the city make bright flickers, some bigger, some smaller, that don’t come together in any coherent way. Venice is littered with Nativity scenes, in paintings, in sculpture, not to mention other aspects of the Christmas story — the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Flight into Egypt, and even the Massacre of the Innocents –yet the general attitude toward Christmas is not excessively devout.  It remains essentially a domestic holiday and I suppose that ought to translate, if depicted accurately today, into scenes of Mary in the kitchen wrestling with something heavy in the oven while Baby Jesus is busy trying to teach the cat how to swim, or of them looking desperately, not for a room at the inn, but for a place to park at the mall. Meaning no disrespect.

Puntually on December 1, the Christmas mailbox gets installed outside the tobacco/lottery/toy shop.

Little old people, as everywhere, are being wrangled into some extended-family configuration; and the children are, I think, essentially like children everywhere — eyes and spirits fixed, not on the Star, but on the imminent deluge of presents. And not brought by kings or wise men, but laid on by squadrons of adoring relatives, even in times like these.

Perhaps there are gala balls being held in palaces, but my sense is that anybody with a palace is probably already at Cortina.

Still, the framework remains the same, at least in our little hovel: Christmas Eve means risotto of go’ and roasted eel, the ripping open of the presents, midnight mass, the singing of “You Descend from Heaven,”  and slicing the panettone at midnight and popping the prosecco.

Christmas Day means the big mass at San Marco, some fabulous meaty lunch, then either sleeping on the sofa or visiting relatives, then more eating, and more sleeping.

The day after Christmas — the feast of Santo Stefano — is another holiday.  More gorging on food, this time with all of Lino’s family.

One quaint aspect of this holiday is that there are no newspapers for two days because the journalists and editors and printers don’t work  on Christmas Eve and Christmas. This is an antiquated practice that is even more exotic than bearing in the boar’s-head and drinking wassail.  Newspapers in the rest of the world come out as usual, but here, for some reason (and I do not believe it’s because the entire category wants to spend two whole days in church) the newspaper-producers just don’t work on Christmas.

To which I say: Who notices or cares?  The broadcast journalists are working as usual, and the news continues to flow to us in an unbroken stream via the television and the Internet.  But somehow print journalists feel themselves to be special, which, I presume, is fostered and sustained by the unions.  And then they complain that readership is falling.

But this is normal.

This homemade Nativity scene was created by the family on Sant' Erasmo where we go to buy our vegetables. Who says there were no apples and squash in the stable?

What is going to be abnormal this year for the holidays is: Minimal garbage collection.  Of any sort, whether recyclable (there’s a weekly schedule for the different types of material) or otherwise (clam shells, coffee grounds, orange peels, fishbones, half-eaten cupcakes, wine bottles, etc.).  And this will last for two days: Christmas Day, and Santo Stefano.

Two days with no garbage collection — this is a startling innovation in the festal folkways, especially in a city which purports to be world-class, or somewhere near it, and during a period which could be described as garbage-intensive.

The Gazzettino conveys the explanation given by the garbage company, which is nothing more than an arm of the city government with a different name: The garbage collectors are all going to be too busy keeping the streets clean to have time also to collect the bags which are daily left outside the doors of houses and shops.

The very best part is that, given this fact, the garbage company respectfully requests the good citizens to refrain from putting their bags of refuse outside for two days.  So the streets can be neat and tidy. And the interiors of the houses and stores can become kitchen middens.

This is only moderately annoying to us, but for families with children, it’s inconceivable.  I can tell you right now, sitting here with my eyes closed, that the streets are going to be FULL of bags of garbage.  Or maybe there will be a mass reversion to the Old Way, which involves a big splash.

To review: We are requested to not clutter the streets because the trash-teams are going to be busy keeping the streets clean.  But if we’re not putting out trash, why do the streets need to be cleaned? It’s like the definition of chutzpah: First you kill your parents, then you plead for clemency from the court because you’re an orphan.

I tell you, sometimes life in the most beautiful in the world makes my head hurt.

But let us return to the reason for the season, as they say.  Here is a small assortment of glimpses of Venice preparing for Christmas.  But of course, the most beautiful scenes of all are arranged and decorated and illuminated where you’ll never see them: In each person’s heart.  Compared to which glass angels and marzipan cake and all the strings of lights ever plugged in are as nothing.

Out on the eastern edge of Venice, the furthest bit of inhabited land, someone has chosen to put up a little lighted sleigh with one reindeer.

I'm still mystified by whatever is hanging on the fence below the sleigh, but it does seem merry and bright. Could it be an illuminated poinsettia?

The boathouse of the Generali insurance company's rowing club always has a Nativity scene of some sort. This year they made it float on the canal -- beautiful and evocative, though the waves from the endlessly passing motorboats during the day make it toss like a ship in a storm.

An enterprising bakery and pastry shop hollowed out a chocolate panettone and put in little figurines of Mary, Joseph and Jesus made of marzipan.

They also added a small light to represent the star. But if marzipan can be made to resemble real fruit and fish and so on, why did they make the Holy Family look as if it were carved out of soap? Lino says they already did plenty to make it look like this, and I should just zip it.

One of the innumerable variations on the Christmas cake. However they decorate it, the sentiment is always happily the same.

The Nativity scene in a hut in via Garibaldi has all the necessary components, down to the empty manger. In a startling flash of logic, the Baby Jesus isn't installed until Christmas Day.

The glow of Christmas on via Garibaldi, silently and majestically and completely upstaged by the moon. And to all a good night.

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

Each day in each week in the so-called most beautiful city in the world often feels like a loaded coal cart which I am pulling along a rusty track.  Instead of coal, however, which hasn’t been burned here for quite a few decades, my daily cart, so to speak, is loaded with the same detritus of which life is composed pretty much everywhere: appointments, shopping, cleaning, public transportation challenges, all enlivened by the occasional strike which makes the usual inconveniences even more complex and invigorating.

Still, I’d rather be here than in Fargo or Yazoo City.

While I’m hauling the daily freight, though, there is a steady supply of tiny events throughout the day, running on a sort of parallel track, which form their own little train of entertainment.  I’ve finished with this metaphor now.

For example: Last Sunday morning I was walking across a nearby small campo which I was surprised to see embellished by an unusual arrangement of objects.  It wasn’t a relic of the recently-closed Biennale (though it made a lot more sense than many of  the putative works of art I’d seen).  It was a token of the vox populi, or rather, the vox of one person, crying in the wilderness, a person who had suddenly snapped.

Little blue plastic bags and a strip of white paper. If you recognize the bags, you can guess what the paper's for. Spontaneous denunciations show up on walls and doors, decrying some behavior which has become intolerable. But this is the first time I've seen a sign on the ground.

The bags -- by now a neighborhood staple, though they're not always blue -- contain dog poop. If you think this is gross, you should know there are still plenty of people who deny that their dog ever eliminates. But this person has had enough: "Disgusting pigs," the writer begins: "Pick up your dogs' poop. Uncouth pigs."

Another voice recently made itself heard on the neighborhood notice-board at the Giardini vaporetto stop.  This board, like all of them, is entirely improvised, a sort of stationary town crier which serves an obviously useful purpose, despite the fact that it is pretty much illegal.

Augusto Salvadori, the previous sub-mayor for tourism, as well as the self-appointed arbiter of decorum, civic uplift and general improvement of tone, made a stab at abolishing these little outposts by threatening to fine anybody who dared to tape or glue their humble advertisement on any public surface. Seeing that these notices always carry a phone number, this threat could have been scary, except that the snarling tiger had no fangs or claws, otherwise known as the power of enforcement.  So the notices continue to bloom and, in my view, continue to serve a useful purpose. I happened to find a good, inexpensive seamstress this way, and I’ve also got the number of a computer geek stashed somewhere, which I took down off a strip of paper near the San Pietro vaporetto stop. So I’m glad they’re still there, even if they are ugly.

But the other day I came across a notice advertising a room for rent. This in itself isn’t noteworthy; since the city is awash in budget-restricted residents of every sort, from students to Eastern European women working as caretakers, accommodations are always eagerly sought — more eagerly sought than offered, may I say.

But this particular notice, on second reading, carried an unpleasantly different connotation.

It said:  ”Fifty-year-old will share with a girl or working woman an apartment which is sunny, near the Santa Marta vaporetto stop, a single bed in a small room available.  The house is composed of an eat-in kitchen, small living room and two rooms of which one is occupied.  Contact Francesco (followed by his cell phone number).”

I spent a lively five minutes telling Lino what I thought of a man offering his extra room explicitly to a female, and no nitpicking about age.  My reaction could be summed up in one word:  ”Swine.”

Today, to my surprise, I came across the same skeezy announcement taped up at the vaporetto stop by the hospital.  Why was I surprised?  He must have put these up all over town.  What struck me was that someone had written on it my very own thought: “Porco.”  Pig. It made me feel a bond with someone I’ll never know. Maybe there are people all over the city who have thought, or written, this opinion.  We should form a club.

But all the surprises aren’t so rank.  There was a beautiful little bonus on the other side of the bridge as we left early this morning: A boat piled with fish.

Maybe you don’t care about fish, but any sign that somebody has gone out in the lagoon and come back with something finny is a great thing.  It used to be as normal as learning how to swim by hanging onto your mother’s washboard in the canal (not made up).  Now people go buy salmon and lobster at the fishmarket.  You’ve heard this rant before.

They were grey mullet, which I’ve caught myself; sometimes an especially exuberant one jumps into the boat.  But this was quite a haul, and there must have been at least 50 of these creatures all tangled up in a heap of net, against which most of them were still fighting, except for their brothers who had long since suffocated underneath everything.

The few people who were out at 7:00 stopped, or at least slowed, to have a look.  As a sign of the continuing deterioration of culture here, one woman asked if they were sea bass – this, in a neighborhood where people once knew their fish better than the multiplication table.

Another young woman’s sole remark was, “I wouldn’t take them if you gave them to me.”  This is guaranteed to hit one of Lino’s most exposed nerves.  “She grew up eating LOBSTER,’  he hissed sarcastically to me. People used to thank God on their knees for food, not to mention fresh fish; the idea that you could reject such bounty really fries his ganglia.

A little girl walked by on her way to school, with her little brother.  She paused to look at this mound of goodness, then stretched out her closed umbrella and pushed the tip gently against the cheek of one fish.  Then she turned to walk away.  Her little brother thought it was funny.  “What if the fish ate your umbrella?” he asked her, laughing.  Maybe he had imagined the fish suddenly rearing up, like Jaws, swallowing her and her umbrella whole, never to be seen again. She didn’t reply.

If you pay attention, you will always see something beautiful.  Perhaps you don’t think that beauty could qualify as unexpected here, but there are so many different kinds, at so many different moments, that some of them are bound to surprise you.  Like the mountains at sunrise.

No more need be said.

The unexpected is always expected is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

This minuscule bulletin is for anyone who might think that the most troublesome water in Venice is in the canals.

Actually, it’s in the air.

After about ten days of rain and mist, in varying proportions, with random interludes of damp, persistent wind, my sinuses feel like the average compressed-air can.  Just think — if I could breathe, I could blast the dust out of my computer all by myself.

Who — I hear you ask — cares?

I mention it because it leads us to an infinitesimal aspect of life in the most-beautiful-city-in-the-world.  Laundry.  The fate of wet laundry in what amounts to a World Heritage Site aquarium.

Two nights ago, I slipped between clean sheets which I had wishfully thought were dry, but discovered had retained the subtlest possible essence of humidity, just enough to make me feel like a very old loggerhead sea turtle lying on the wet sand waiting to lay my eggs.  I snapped. It was time to launch the death rays.

So I washed several hundred pounds of garments and towels and other heavy stuff, jammed it into the rolling suitcase, and hauled it to the laundromat on the Lido, where four big dryers were waiting for me.

Actually, only three were waiting, because someone had gotten there before me. I sorted my raiment into them, dropped in the coins and hit the highest temperature possible.  I think it was close to “incinerate.”  At one euro ($1.37) for ten minutes, it wasn’t exactly a deal, but this was no time to haggle.

In the hour I was there, three other people came in, lugging various huge containers of damp laundry.

Apparently everybody had had the same idea.

Only in winter does the absurdity strike you of photographing laundry drying in the middle of water.

After three sessions, I took out the heaviest item, a waffle-weave cotton blanket. It was hot and totally dry, exquisitely dry, irresistibly dry. I could barely resist the temptation to put it back for another ten minutes just to imagine myself becoming one with the transcendent dryness of it.  If you had offered me a box of Teuscher truffles — or even white truffles from Alba – at that moment, or maybe six 0.03-carat rubies, I couldn’t have concentrated long enough to decide.

It was like an oasis in the desert, only backwards.

When I left, it had started to rain again.

Another side of waterworld is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

It’s been raining since last night and will continue at least past lunchtime, and a spectacular bora has kept the blinds rattling all day.  Gusts up to 30 mph (50 k/h).  In pipe-replacement-street-tearing-up-crew language this translates as “Day off.”

The silence is eerie.  It’s like the silence of the songbirds.  I can’t say I miss their racket, in the sense that I wish I were hearing it right now, but it is strangely unsettling.

Yesterday the concert was especially intense.  To the usual hammering and clunking and yelling they added sneezing, hawking, spitting, and belching.  One of them occasionally even sang a little.

Lino says they must have been feeling the impending drastic change in the weather, like horses before an earthquake.

As if that weren’t good enough, some kind of supervisor came to review their work — I think that’s what he was doing — which provided a bellowing voice louder than theirs.  He wasn’t happy about something.  I couldn’t understand what, but I gathered that their performance evaluation was being summarized in one particularly ugly phrase which he repeated at least 723 times.

Or maybe he was commenting on the way they had concluded their work on the little street stretching from our front door to the main thoroughfare.  It now lists, like a clumsily loaded boat.  In fact, the first thing Lino said when we walked down it was: “They could at least have made it level.”

You may think I'm the one who's listing to port, but I intentially included the door at the end of the tunnel to give some notion of relative horizonality.

So now when we leave the house, we list to starboard, and coming home, we list to port.  What is unfortunate is that it slopes toward our hovel, meaning the rainwater will slide toward our foundations, if we have any.  There are two drains, which is good, and after all, I realize that rainwater shouldn’t be sliding away from them.  So all I have to do is keep them unclogged.  Since nobody else does.

Does the quality of life in every city come down to drains?

The paving news is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

At first glance, it might in fact seem that the fabled Large Malus domestica (pop. 8,175,133 and growing) would have nothing at all in common with the equally fabled Most Serene Republic (at the moment down to 60,052 and shrinking).

On the other hand, this glance, from the doorkeeper at the Porta della Carta of the Doge's Palace, says "I see you, but you look just like everybody else until you say or do something that requires me to react." This would be Venetian, where one of the major energy-saving tactics is not merely turning off the lights in empty rooms, but not responding until you actually have to. Otherwise you'll never make it to closing time

But I have always felt right at home here, because — as I tell the person, startling her or him even more — there is an amazing number of ways in which Venice and New York appear to be like those twins that get separated five minutes after birth and years later turn up to have both married women named Clotilde on the same day and have vacation cabins on Lake Muskoka.

Speaking of twins, I’ve never quite understood that whole business of twinning cities. Not because I don’t grasp that both partners desire thereby to undertake commercial adventures together, but because the partnerships often seem so odd.

The other places are frequently the same grade of innocuous as the one you’re entering, which makes sense, I suppose.  I mean, you’d never see “Toad Suck/Beijing.” Naturally there are exceptions to what seems like an obvious rule; Rome/Paris makes sense, but Rome/Multan, Pakistan is a bit more obscure. Or there are less glamorous but equally curious combinations (Seattle/Tashkent), on down to the level of Torviscosa/Champ-sur-Drac. Well, as long as they’re happy.

Venice has formally twinned itself with 15 cities; the link is fairly clear with St. Petersburg (seaport cities with canals), though the link with Islamabad is a bit harder to discern. It might have been clever (only to me, of course) to have twinned Venice with every town named Venice, or which bills itself as “the Venice of” wherever it is.

There are 19 “Venice of the North”s, and a remarkable amount of  so-called “Venice of the such-and-such” strewn around the world at other compass points:  South (Johannesburg; Tawi-Tawi island), East (Alappuzha, India; Bangkok; Melaka River, Malaysia), China (Wuzhen), and so on. There are four American towns named Venice, one each in Florida, California, Illinois, Utah. (Venetia, Pennsylvania, doesn’t count, though I give it special points for historical interest. ) Surprisingly, there are many more towns in the US named Verona.

Back to the Ur-Venice and its resemblance to New York. I’ve made a little hobby of collecting points of similarity, as I come across them, and in no particular order, here are some of the most obvious examples:

* They are both seaport cities.

* They are (or have been) economic colossi. The wealth of Venice was something inconceivable today, unless we’re thinking of that tiny top percentage of people who own everything. Not long ago an Indian tycoon staged his daughter’s wedding here; it went on for three days and cost, it was reported, something like 10 million euros ($14 million).  He would have fit right in with the Pisanis and Corners (and Rockefellers and Carnegies.)

* They both have a long history of many coexisting (more or less happily) ethnic communities.

* Housing/real estate is a major issue, both regarding cost (exorbitant) and space (cramped). In either city you can as safely launch a conversation with a stranger on the problems of housing as you can on the weather.

* They are both populated by complainers; not the ordinary type, but those special inhabitants who belong to the category in which, according to the famous quip about New Yorkers, “Everybody mutinies but nobody deserts.”

"Dez (heart) Ruez I love you for all of my life." The sentiment is universal and, regrettably, so is the urge to express it in a form that's really, really hard to remove. I have no doubt that they have long since broken up, married other people, and gotten divorced by now. But it is a sign of normal life in cities large and small, watery or not.

* Everybody notices each other and plenty of things about each other, though it may not seem so.  The minute you step into the subway train, everybody will have evaluated you in a hundred instant ways, starting with your potential for being dangerous and ending (perhaps) with your choice of shoes.  I thought I was invisible here in the early days, which Lino thought was hilarious.  I’d only been here a week when he said, “Everybody already knows everything about you.”  I let that slide, till one day I ran into one of the few people I knew, who lived far away on the Giudecca.  ”I saw you rowing in the caorlina last Saturday afternoon,” he told me.  It seemed like a friendly remark, except that having been seen by somebody I hadn’t seen at all gave me a tiny shudder.  And made me realize that nobody is invisible here, and never has been.

* Pride: New Yorkers refer to themselves as living in “The City”; no need for further identification.  With many more centuries of experience at this, Venetians by now don’t even do that.  It’s so obvious that being Venetian is the best that there is no need to mention it.

I realized this the day I struck up a conversation in Rimini with a couple who said they were from Venice.  I asked the normal follow-up question: “Oh? Where do you live?” (As in: Cannaregio, Campo  Ruga, near the Accademia, etc.)  A split second of hesitation, and the wife answered, “We live in Castelfranco Veneto.” Castelfranco Veneto is a small town (pop. 33,707) 40 miles/64 km from Venice.

Here’s the thing: I knew they didn’t live in Venice by the faintly self-satisfied way in which they had said it.  People in Venice don’t say it that way, just as New Yorkers don’t brag about living in New York.  If you live there, you already know you’re in the best place in the world; there’s no need to rivet exclamation points all around it.

* They’re not for everybody. This is the strongest link of all between the two cities.  Living in either city is a vocation, a calling, a challenge, a Zen conundrum. Living here, as in New York, requires a complex combination of skills (physical, emotional, intellectual) and predilections (history, humor, remembering the names of people’s children) that frankly don’t suit everybody.

Guys like Queequeg here are one of the main forces that keep Venice going. I'm sure he has a brother or a cousin in New York, with or without tattoos and tank top. Attitude is the tie that binds.

“It’s great to visit, but I could never live here,” almost everybody says about New York. I’ve almost never heard it said of Venice, though it’s not unusual to hear someone say “It must be so wonderful to live here.”  Tourists have been so brainwashed by publicity and postcards that they don’t believe it’s real and don’t even want it to be. And they’re here for so short a time, they don’t usually have the chance to be disillusioned, unless something bad happens.

That, probably, is one of the main mileposts at which Venice and New York diverge.  Things go wrong in New York (barring homicide, etc.) and visitors regard it as either inevitable or picturesque, the stuff of stories forever.  If something goes wrong here, people get mad, as if they’d been baited-and-switched.

No bait here.

These friends could easily be standing on a corner in New York, except that here they're probably not talking about the point spread, but what to have for lunch.

Venice meets New York 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

However you  may have been observing the past six weeks of penitence, Easter is now steaming into port with the pilot onboard and will be here in three days.

Special Spring Bonus: Click here (11042001) if you would like to hear a small soundtrack of the blackbird chorus outside the window every morning before dawn.

Older Venetians remember a bit of rhyming versification which highlighted each Sunday of Lent by attaching it to one of the miracles of Jesus.

I have no information whatever on how this started, who came up with it, or anything else other than its now-fading existence.  By doing some random research (fancy way of saying “asking around”), I discover that children are no longer taught this bit of lore.  In fact, so far I haven’t been able to nab anyone of any age in this neighborhood who’s ever heard of it, so perhaps it’s a relic of life in long-ago Dorsoduro.

Therefore this missive may be one of the few places to acknowledge this fragment of tradition before the last traces are gone.

It goes like this:  Uta, Muta, Cananela/Pane e Pesce, Lazarela/ Oliva/Pasqua Fioriva.

It is pronounced:  OO-ta, MOO-ta, Canna-NAY-a/ PAN-eh eh PEH-sheh, YA-za-RAY-ah/oh-YEE-va/PAS-kwa fyoh-REE-va.

The significance of these gnomic utterances is as follows:

Uta:  I don’t know.  This is a bad start, but I am still researching this curious word by means of any elderly Venetians and/or priests I can find.  It hasn’t been easy, which only proves that this verseology is on its last legs. Perhaps “uta” refers to one of the many healing miracles: bleeding, or blindness, or demon-possession, or paralysis, or dropsy. You can take your pick until further notice.

Muta: The healing of the man mute from birth (Mark 7: 31-37).

Jesus and the Samaritan woman in a window at Bolton Priory (photo by Lawrence OP).

Cananela: My sainted sister-in-law (age 82) maintains that this refers to the meeting of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4: 4-26). She is very firm on that, even though it wasn’t technically a miracle, but seeing as the reading for the Third Sunday is, in fact, that passage, I think we can consider the matter settled.

Pane e Pesce: “Bread and fish,” clearly a reference to the Feeding of the Multitude (Matthew 14: 13-21; Mark 6: 31-44; Luke 9: 10-17; John 6: 5-15; Mark 8: 1-9; Matthew 15: 32-39).

Lazarela: The resurrection of Lazarus (John 11: 1-46).  Makes a nice rhyme.  Also worth remembering for its own self.

The raising of Lazarus, in a mosaic of the basilica of Sant' Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (6th c. AD).

Oliva: “Olive.”  Although here, as in many other places, they call the Sunday before Easter “Palm Sunday” (Mark 11: 1-11; Matthew 21: 1-11; Luke 19: 28-44; John 12: 12-19), or “Domenica delle Palme,” the fronds distributed in church aren’t palm, but olive.  This is very lovely, considering the ancient link between the olive branch and peace, and the various Gospel accounts only agree on the fact that clothes were spread on the ground before Jesus’ feet. Obviously nobody has ever thought of calling it “Clothes Sunday,” so I’m just going to leave that alone.  We get olive twigs, take it or leave it.  In Latvia they use pussy willows.

At the entrance to the church of San Francesco di Paola (as in most, if not all, the other churches here), olive branches are set out in two forms: wild and natural, or small and packaged. One keeps the branch till next Palm Sunday; in the old days, to treat a really serious wound or illness you would have burned the branch and used the ashes as prescribed by your neighborhood wonderworker.

 

This is the convenient packet which fits easily into your purse, glove compartment, or wherever you feel it belongs.

The first Palm Sunday procession, containing all the important details, as depicted in the basilica of San Marco.

 

A central arch in the basilica of San Marco shows the most concise illustrations imaginable of the Easter story, from trial to crucifixion. In the center is the crowning moment, without which there would be no Easter: The empty tomb.

Pasqua Fioriva: “Easter Bloomed.”  That certainly needs no exegesis. (Matthew 27: 27-56; Luke 23: 26-49; John 19: 16-37).

"Flowering Easter" is represented in our neighborhood by a veritable mob of blooming botanicals. Here, redbud ("Judas tree") and laurel.

The wisteria is totally out of control.

What the sea pines may lack in color they certainly make up for with pollen.

A bit of meteorological magic holds that “Se piove sulle olive/ Non piove sui vovi” (If it rains on the olives, it won’t rain on the eggs). Meaning that if it rains on Palm (excuse me, Olive) Sunday, it won’t rain on Easter.  Much as it distresses me to give any credence to this sort of thing, I have seen it turn out to be true something like 95 percent of the time.  I can’t explain it.

And what would Easter be without cute animals and chocolate?

Our neighborhood is a veritable Easter menagerie. Here, an existentialist Easter bunny who looks apprehensive and somehow estranged from his fellow furry harbingers.

The Ur-hen, the prototype of Paschal poultry. Now we know where all those eggs come from.

Children nowadays don't know how lucky they are. When I was a kid, Easter frogs hadn't been invented. I think frogs themselves hadn't been invented.

I discern a link between milk chocolate and an Easter cow. But what is an Easter squirrel bringing to the table? Easter acorns?

I wonder how many Venetian children risk being traumatized by devil-spawn Persian-green rabbits clutching their tiny progeny?

Let's get back to something we can all agree on: Chocolate. And no squabbling over "dark" versus "milk." The Ur-hen is ambidextrous. Anyway, there are enough sugar-flowers here to send everybody into shock.

Easter in Venice breathing down our necks is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

Even if you were to speak Venetian, you may have occasionally overheard an expression being used that expressed almost nothing to you:

“No ti xe gnanca sangue da papalina.” (No tee zeh NYANG-ka sang-way da papa-EE-na.)

It literally means “You (or he, or they) don’t have even as much blood as a papalina.”  It figuratively means, “There’s essentially no connection between us” — referring to relatives who are along the line of being a second cousin twice removed of the aunt of your stepsister.  The underlying concept is that a papalina is so small that it contains perhaps two drops of blood, if that much.

So what, I hear you cry, is a papalina?

It’s a fish.  It’s a member of the sardine family, and in English it’s called a sprat. If you like sardines (fresh, I mean, not canned), you will almost certainly love its modest but abundant little relative, if you can find it.

Because now that so many people have switched from the finny food of their childhoods to the fancy fins of today, it’s not easy to find papaline (the plural) in the fish market.  They might occasionally be lying there on some intrepid vendor’s long icy counter, between their more glamorous cousins, the bigger sardines and the smaller sardoni, or anchovies.  And besides being good, and good for you, they’re delightfully inexpensive.  Mainly because hardly anybody wants them.

I’m writing this today because Lino’s quest was rewarded yesterday and he came home with a pound of the little critters. Lunch that day was an unprogrammed gorgefest.

These are papaline. Each is about three inches long and provides two enthusiastic mouthfuls. In our case, very enthusiastic.

There is only one truly correct way to eat them, and that is grilled.  (You can do whatever you want, obviously — I’m just telling you.) And not merely grilled — you must eat them when they come right off the grill.  Or, as the Venetians say, “a scotadeo” (ah scotta-DAY-oh).  Literally “burning your fingers.”

Funny, they don’t say “scorching your tongue” or “searing your lips.” Venetians obviously reject the Japanese concept that if it’s too hot to hold (they’re referring to a cup of tea), it’s too hot to eat.

Unfortunately, the only place you’re ever likely to have the chance to incinerate your fingerprints will be at somebody’s house, or a picnic/party of some kind.  You might find a few thrown anonymously into a mixed fishfry or even platter of mixed grilled fish at a restaurant.  But it’s Not the Same.

There’s another comment which invokes this member of the Clupeidae family. It’s something only Lino says, and it comes from his heart: “You grew up eating papaline.”

He will utter this in an accusing way to the air as we pass the guilty individual. Sometimes he goes on, “You’ve forgotten when your nose ran all the time and you wiped it on your sleeve because you didn’t have a handkerchief.” Lino still sees some of this category of person around the neighborhood. “We were kids together,” Lino will tell me. “Now they’re eating LOBSTER and SOLE. But what can you say? They grew up eating papaline.”

He says this with a delicate blend of disdain and regret, because whoever he may be referring to has progressed far — too far — beyond his or her hardscrabble childhood, a life in which cheap fish and several tons of polenta were about all there was to keep you going till tomorrow.

Forgetting when you ate papaline means you’ve abandoned your roots, gotten above yourself, become mutton dressed as lamb. Rejecting papaline is the tertiary stage of voluntarily transforming yourself into something that may be real, but it’s phony.  Kind of like Formica that looks like wood. It doesn’t have anything to do with how you dress, because there are plenty of people even in this neighborhood who have banished as many tokens of their past as they can.  Their wives even have coats of some kind of fur. So it’s not about appearances, essentially, but attitude.

You get a pass because you never ate them in the first place, so you’re okay  But if you should ever have the chance, I advise you to take it.  Because in their own little way, the papaline are another Disappearing Venetian, like the itinerant knife-and-scissors grinder.

But tasting better.

Venetian papa who? is a post from: Venice: I am not making this up

(To anyone who has just read the previous version, I apologize for sending it out before it was ready.  You will have noticed its ragged edges.  This is the version you’re supposed to read; please forget the other.)

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking of what immediately precedes a flushing sound.

This is a trick photo because it only looks like something that ought to smell. But it doesn't, or at least not much, and definitely not the way you probably expect. I just wanted to set the mood.

For an astonishing number of people, this is the only odor that Venice brings to mind.  But it’s not so simple.  In fact, the aforementioned aroma is not all that frequent anymore, even at low tide, thanks to long and patient dredging of the canals, and the installation of septic tanks in most public buildings and many private ones.  So let us not become fixated on biological byproducts.

While we're on the subject, however, this innocent-looking tube will be giving off a stronger odor than five average canals. It is the conduit of the contents of some septic tank. Happily, it's a job that doesn't take long.

The tube leads to a "honey-boat," which carries the material to the water-treatment plant. This smell is one of the few things I've never heard somebody complain about. If they're past 60, they may be remembering how home sanitation worked when they were children, which was a lot more direct.

Furthermore, I invite you to consider some of the daily smells in your average mainland city: The perfume of imperfectly combusted diesel wafting from buses waiting at traffic lights, for instance, or your overflowing dumpster under the sun.   I’m not saying I prefer the stench of sewage – there, I said it – I’m just saying there is no city that smells entirely of lavender potpourri.

And another thing. Before someone Beyond the Bridge starts imagining what the objectionable smells might be out here, they ought to include in that list the much more frequent AND PREVENTABLE odor that too many people — tourists or otherwise — emit from their underarms on crowded vaporettos and buses in the summer.  The fact that many of them (usually men, sorry) are clinging for support to something overhead just makes it worse. Often their shirts have no sleeves.

Continuing our sensual tour of Venice — or, as I think of it, enjoying Venice with your eyes closed — I’m going to state that smell may well be the sense that gives me the most pleasure here.  A random walk with your nose attuned will almost certainly awaken you to either an activity, or a product, or a season, or a plant, or something defying categorization that is something that makes Venice beautiful.

Clean laundry. I realize that anyone just walking around the city isn’t likely to be able to inhale this exquisite aroma (though one blithe spirit in Cannaregio was recently discovered at night stealing somebody’s laundry off the line, for reasons that were never very clear.)  But if you are here in the summer and in a position to wash some piece of fabric and hang it out to dry, you’ll have the pleasure of inhaling the air of Venice toasted by the sun.  There is no product you can put in a clothes dryer that could ever match the perfume created by the sun and the breeze, not even if it were something labeled “Venetian Sun and Breeze.”

Yes, it’s tiresome to have to calculate the time needed to dry your clothes outside on the line, especially because that time may not be quite enough to get the job done. Then you have a little psychological struggle to decide whether that sheet is really dry, or if you just wish, really hard, that it were, because it has to be.  But those are details.  This is one of the best smells in the world and I suppose one of the few Venetian ones you could replicate wherever you live, if your neighbors didn’t care, which they probably do.

One excellent reason to go out for a walk before dawn is to be able, in certain streets, to smell the bread coming out of the oven.

Fresh bread. If you have never, or not for a long time, walked into or past a bakery really early in the morning, when large batches of bread have just been taken out of the ovens, you might think that this is just another aroma, one of those few that humans are able to detect. (Bloodhounds, if you care, have noses that are ten- to one hundred million times more sensitive than a human’s. And bears are seven times more sensitive than bloodhounds.  Just to give some perspective.)  Is it the yeast?  The flour? The profound need of nourishment that our primitive organism requires? Warm bread.  The limbic system rejoices even if you don’t happen to be hungry.

There are 33 streets in Venice either named “baker,” “bakery” or “bakeries” (forner, forno, forni), the word denoting strictly bread, as opposed to eclairs or cake or muffins or anything else. (When I try to imagine what an average neighborhood in Venice smelled like in the year 1200 — apart from whatever the horses, humans, and roaming pigs contributed — I have to imagine the waftage from that many bakeries.  Not  so bad.) When First Crusader Godfreyof Bouillon set about founding the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, he promised the Venetians that in exchange for their help in his little effort, in every city they conquered their merchants would have their own neighborhood containing “A street, a square, a church, a bath, and a bakery.”  All the essentials, though I’d have started the list with a bakery.

One of my earliest encounters with this celestial aroma and its effect on me was in the dark of a winter dawn, when we were out rowing.  We were headed south along the lagoon shore of the Lido, toward Malamocco, and my attention was mainly on the fact that there was so much fog that I could barely see where we were going.  Suddenly I found myself in an invisible billow of warm-bread smell, drifting from a bakery somewhere behind the trees.  It was beyond magical.  And then it was gone, and we were back in the chilly, gunmetal gray world.

“Our daily bread” — it still means something here.

Pastry.  Walk past certain corners early in the morning — especially Sunday morning — and you will pass through a delectable little cloud composed of the smell of warm butter and sugar.  Come to think of it, I never notice any vanilla or almond or cinnamon tones, though you would expect them.  It’s essentially just butter and caramelizing sugar that are doing the work and the aroma is as gorgeous as a bouquet of peonies.  On a humbler note, you have an even better chance of smelling hot croissants just out of the oven of many bars and cafes — sweet, buttery, crusty.  (I maintain that “crusty” is a smell.) Hardly anybody makes their own anymore; they buy them frozen.  But the smell is delectable just the same.

Anything burning. Obviously I’m not referring to houses or boats here, though I think an incinerated plastic-resin boat (which I’ve seen from afar) must emit a smell that’s truly scary.  And harmful.

Then there is the smoke from the motors on boats.  This is, if possible, even more vile.  There’s more of it, and it seems to contain 97 extra poisonous ingredients.  Cruddy little boats backing up, big bruising barges stopping suddenly with a roar of the retro-rockets, and an assortment of geriatric motors belonging to men who grew up with the notion that it needs to “warm up” for ten or 15 minutes before departure.  Like the old black and white TVs.

You have to imagine greasy gray smoke roiling around this object, which is also roaring away like a mammoth trapped in a tar pit.

And there are motors which have been removed from their boats.  The man who lives across the street (about six feet away), conducted a late-autumn ritual the other day by putting his outboard motor onto a sort of metal trolley so he could clean it out by combusting all its fuel before putting it away for the winter.  So the motor stood there for a good 20 minutes, roaring, excreting thick grey smoke.  Of course this is against the law.  I closed the windows.

I’ve often mentioned the allure of distant woodsmoke (another smoky smell that doesn’t make any fireman feel warm and cozy).  I’m really thinking about food.

The aroma of cooking comestibles could be pork ribs over charcoal (at several saint’s-day festivals), or a batch of chestnuts (Lino does this at home, though I don’t detect anyone else doing it), or anything fishy –seppoline  or grey  mullet or sardines on the skillet.  I’ve developed sufficiently to be able to tell the difference  if I’m downwind of some intrepid cook.  Mostly that would be Lino.  I think people generally boil or bake fish because of the smell, though sometimes I walk through the cloud of somebody else’s imminent lunch or dinner.

This lady sells roasted chestnuts for a few weeks in the fall at the Lido, at the vaporetto stop. It's like the olfactory opening day of autumn.

When Lino was a lad, the smell of fish of any sort crisping up on a sheet of hot metal was one of the most normal smells around, so normal that people probably didn’t even notice it.  Now it’s something that inspires comment, via voices like the ones I heard out the bedroom window from people passing in the street as we were scorching a batch of the little critters.  If the people are past a certain age, their comments will be smoking with appreciation and desire.  If not, the heck with them. Our onlycontribution to good will among men is to avoid cooking them when people have hung their laundry out to dry just above us, because we open the windows and much as I love fish, even I wouldn’t want my underwear to smell like foodsmoke.

The fish smells vary by season. Seppie (cuttlefish) are in the fall (migrating adults) and spring (their babies).  Baby seppie (seppoline), as opposed to bass or shrimp, have some extra element that comes out on the griddle, maybe because they don’t have scales.  I don’t know.  It’s a slightly acrid, slightly salty, slightly bitter scent. It’s a fragrance that seems to connote a party, or at least a small but chaotic family gathering.

This long stretch of jasmine has such a powerful perfume that even though you love it at the beginning, after several weeks you can't wait for it to be gone. And it doesn't leave quickly, or willingly. By the time it's gone, you're saying "Thank God."

Flowers.  In April and May Venetian flora goes berserk. Festoons of wisteria, then the magnolia blossoms, then dense bushes of jasmine andpittosporum  saturate the air with a fragrance so powerful it verges on nauseating.  (I said “verges.”)

Followed immediately, in early June, by the flowering of the lime, or linden, trees. I never knew this smell before coming here, and it is absolutely the most wonderful plant-perfume here (exception made for  calicanthus).

I don’t need to see the linden blossoms, it’s enough for me to inhale their perfume, an exquisite mingling of delicate, not-too-sweet, utterly seductive elements.  Somebody knows what they are and what they’re called, but I’m not interested.  I just want to breathe it all in while I can. It doesn’t last as long as I’d like it to — maybe ten days.  I’d willingly shift some of the time the jasmine hangs around and give it to the lime trees.

The lovely, creamy little blossoms of the pittosporum are actually lovely, creamy little perfume bombs. One is enough, no matter how much you may love it.

This is a lime-tree in bloom. I wish you could smell it. If I even tried to describe it, I'd destroy it.

It had been so hot for so long that the rain had hardly begun to fall before we were walking through a Turkish bath.

Rain.  The summer sun beats down on the  masegni, or paving stones, day after day, and nobody notices until it rains.  Especially if the rain isn’t very hard or heavy, the superheated blocks of trachyte release a mist of steam (usually invisible, though not always) that smells of equal parts water and stone.  It smells of cool, it smells of relaxation.  It must stimulate that little part of the brain that responds to the word “oasis” or “waterfall.”

Fog definitely has its own smell. It’s something sharply clean and faintly metallic, something resembling wet iron. Being hot augments the rain smell; being cold augment

Coffee. In the 17th century, an Arab judge, Hadjibun di Medina, was instructed by the Ottoman sultan to settle some social controversy concerning the benefits of coffee.  (There was one intrepid subject who felt about coffee the way I feel about smoke, which created some temporary controversy.)  The good Hadjibun issued this statement:  “Oh you men of open mind, drink coffee and don’t pay any attention to the detractors who with denigrate it with brazen lies.  Drink it generously because its aroma banishes worries, and its fire reduces to ashes the turbid thoughts produced by daily life.”

As my thoughts are dangerously prone to becoming turbid it’s a good thing there’s so much good java around.  Even a whiff as I pass certain cafes on my daily rounds is an ethereal encouragement.  Which keeps me going till I pass the next cafe.

It's worth a trip to Sant' Erasmo for their patron saint's festival in June just for the charcoaled ribs.

Calicanthus, in the market at Rialto before Christmas. Heavenly.

The nose now knows that Carnival is on the way. Our friend Dino Righetto had just made a houseful of frittelle, which were even better than the warm-oil-and-sugar aroma which will probably stick to the upholstery till Easter.

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