natural functions

We know these little horrors all too well, from sports events to any other mass gathering.  Temporary “porta-potties” are absolutely great when you’re desperate and there is nothing else.  That’s about the only great thing about them.  Here large numbers of the typical “chemical toilets” are being unloaded a few steps beyond the finish line of the annual Venice Marathon.  They are there for the obvious needs of thousands of runners just minutes after they arrive.  And yet, there are none conveniently placed for the spectators.  That seems wrong to me, now that I think about it.
But then again, useful as they are, it would deface the landscape to have them around all the time.
What if there were a public toilet permanently available? One that wasn’t a pungent plastic box?  I wasn’t asking myself that question when I was crossing the canal in front of the Arsenal a few weeks ago, but then I saw this kiosk beside the Naval Museum.  What ho, I thought.  Do I see the letters WC?
I do indeed, and the red hints that it is being used.   The experimental loo arrived on February 10, in the throes of Carnival, and installed most conveniently on the fondamenta along which many spectators heading to the show at the Arsenal were bound to be walking.  That extra spritz or beer?  Normally you would have had to plan ahead to deal with the result, because there are very few bars along the way (maybe you don’t know this yet, dear visitor, but you might soon).  This seems very civilized.  The kiosk will be here for two weeks, or till Feb. 24.  Or perhaps Feb. 29.  In any case, a very short time.  Disclaimer: Hygien Venezia does not know me and I have no interest in being known by them.  Just providing information here.

This is a simple tale composed of two parts.  (A) What we need and (B) how hard it can be to obtain it because of (C) (my error, the tale has three parts) other people.  To demonstrate I take the situation of the new experimental temporary chemical toilet (A) near the Arsenal and (C) the city of Venice, some city councillors of.

People need places to relieve themselves, we’ll start there.  On the whole, visitors manage the situation by stopping at bars/cafe’s, buying something, and using the facilities.  But sometimes bars/cafe’s are closed.  Sometimes they are crowded.  Sometimes the WC is mysteriously out of service.  And sometimes the owners have to crack down on tourists who show up in groups of which one person buys a coffee and all the rest use the bathroom, as we call it in the US.  Not made up.  So one person is relieved, so to speak, and his or her nine friends have to start looking for a toilet somewhere else, or buy a coffee, which is clearly something they were hoping to avoid.

Impatient and drunk males at big gatherings at night have no problem at all:  Find the nearest wall.  Vertical structures exert an atavistic allure to men.  Ladies, you’re on your own, as usual.  But there are small side streets — I’m thinking of offshoots of Campo Santa Margherita — whose residents have been driven to install a gate to prevent revelers from using the street to resolve the situation.

Yes, this conveniently dark passageway was a public toilet, according to the public. Perfect, until the repulsed residents fought back with the gate.

At night these side streets seemed perfect for personal usage; I mean, nobody was using them to go anywhere. Except home, as it turned out.  Dog poop is bad enough, but good grief, people.  Note that there is a canal only a few steps farther along.  Just, you know, saying.
Before there were gates there were these, possibly the first attempt at a public deterrent.  A closer look at the lower area where the walls meet gives an idea of why this construction was installed.  Useful, but only up to a point. My theory is that anyone who was sufficiently far gone wouldn’t mind (or notice) his shoes getting wet. There are many of these around (I don’t know who thought them up, or paid for them).
You might have thought that the little shrine (“capitello”) to Saint Anthony of Padua might have given the person in need the idea to find another corner. Evidently not.
But why are we talking about deterrents? Let’s get back to options for aiding those in need. There used to be plenty of pissoirs in Venice, or vespasiani, in Italian.  The etymology of the name is simple: The Roman emperor Vespasian placed a tax on urine collection because the liquid’s ammonia was necessary for several activities, such as leather tanning.  The Venetian vespasians  were usually near an osteria, places where wine consumption carried consequences. This wall near the church of San Sebastiano bears its scars proudly.
Needs no explanation, it all seems pretty simple to me.
The vestigial water pipe.  Typically the wall here was covered by a marble slab (more resistant than brick, by far) down which a stream of water constantly ran, and out the drain.
This is the little street leading to Lino’s family home (visible at the far end).  The curve accommodated a vespasiano that was concealed by a slim wall open at both ends, hence no door, hence always available.  Nobody thought anything of walking past its perfume a thousand times a day.  Most osterias didn’t have their own toilets, so the public went in public.  Unhappily for Lino’s oldest brother, his apartment was just above an osteria that did have a primitive toilet.  Great for the customers, not great for the brother.  He and his wife got used to it?  Only up to a point.  They kept the overlooking window closed.  Especially in summer.
A small street flanking the Lutheran church at the Campo Santi Apostoli.  On the wall supporting the abandoned mattress there are signs of the vespasiano that was. Lino remembers it, so we’re not talking about ancient history.
Maybe when you get bored with looking at palaces you could start looking for the remnants of these once-useful things. I mean the vespasiano, not the mattress.  By the way, if people were cool with pissoirs all over town, what’s so bad about kiosks?
I’m referring to kiosks that look like the one by Hygien Venezia down by the Arsenal.  You notice it has been designed to be accessible to people in wheelchairs. (There’s also a ramp at the door.)  Electricity is supplied by a battery maintained by solar panels.

But the choice is not kiosks or nothing.  There are permanent public loos in Venice.  But there aren’t very many, their hours vary WIDELY — 8:00 AM to 8:30 PM is rational, so is 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, but 11:00 AM to 4:30 PM or 10 AM – 7:30 PM is not. And they aren’t always open.  The WC by the Piazza San Marco is scheduled to open at 9:30 AM, and when I passed by at a very reasonable 10:45 AM it was shut up tight.  These hours undoubtedly reflect the convenience of the staff, and not the public.  Or whether the Comune has paid the water bill?

In an attractive gesture of collaboration, the city has an app to guide you to the nearest public toilet.  Perhaps it will be open, perhaps not, but at least you can say you found it.

A map of the not exactly numerous public toilets.  I count ten here — none on the Giudecca, for unknown reasons, but the one at the cemetery is helpful.  The ones strewn about the Maritime Zone are for the non-existent cruise passengers, so ignore them.  But again — pardon my diatribe — there is no reason to publish such a cheerful and encouraging map if the public can’t be sure the loo will be open when it’s needed.   The other day a friend of mine was in severe need on Sant’ Elena and both of the only two bars were closed.  The doors of the so-cheerfully indicated city toilet were locked.  This is not a happy memory.  But as I say, it does look nice on the map.
The public WC at the foot of the Accademia Bridge. This is what a self-respecting public toilet should look like.  Its most impressive feature?  It’s open.
They’re doing work these days, heavy work with tools. I just hope you weren’t counting on using this facility. Zwingle’s Fifth Law: Do not count on things.
A curious sub-class of public toilets are Those That Were (and I don’t mean vespasiani).  This building on the northwest corner of Campo San Polo was a public loo until some not-distant time in the past.  Lino remembers it well, and it had the advantage of being in an extremely busy point of the city.  So it could have been highly useful.  But as you see, the need for the sketchy Euronet cash machines was greater.  Sorry, I shouldn’t say “sketchy.”  But I can say this: Independent cash providers such as Travelex, Euronet, Moneybox, Your Cash, Cardpoint, and Cashzone have high fees, higher than a bank ATM.  Example: 15 euros on a 200-euro withdrawal. There are probably ten times more Euronet ATM’s than public toilets in Venice now.  Priorities!
Back to the toilets. Once you know what this place used to be, you can easily make it out. Those high windows somehow give it away.

I decided to experiment and went looking for one of the city’s toilets last Saturday afternoon around 5:00 PM.  I was near the Arsenal, and wondered where the large sign indicating a nearby loo might lead me.  I didn’t need it, and what a good thing that turned out to be.

This very narrow and slightly ominous street is marked as the route to salvation. The Calle del Cagnoleto is right by the area on the Riva degli Schiavoni where the day-tripping tourist launches load and unload their passengers, so it would seem to be an ideal place for a rest stop, as we say in the US.
Yes, that happy arrow up there points toward relief. Take heart and forge ahead!
Wow. Well okay, on we go.
The street passes in front of the green doors (I was walking from right to left). You are looking for what transit engineers call “confirming signs.” But instead of repeating the sign you are familiar with, there is only a rectangle of stone saying “Alle Docce” (you frantically check for translation and find “To the showers.”  Showers?  Who wants showers?).  There used to be an arrow, but any help that might have provided is long gone.
A few more steps onward and there is a small sign that gives you hope.
And the street opens up and you discover you have reached the “Comune di Venezia Docce Pubbliche.”  City of Venice Public Showers.  We’re looking for WC and we get docce (DAW-cheh).
Let us imagine that at this point I am now beginning to feel that this experience is less a trial run and more of a real run. Now what?
The Public Showers also include, as one has been supposing, public toilets. The green arrow on the front door, on the left, has pointed toward the right, so the entrance is one of those two doors. But I’ll never know, because as you see, the place was closed up tighter than a can of tuna. Five o’clock on Saturday afternoon.  It’s the end of the road, and your choice now, as there are no bars in sight, is to turn around and hope to find a Plan B before crisis strikes, or figure out how to use the canal a few steps away.  As to the showers, they are maintained by the Diocese of Venice to accommodate anyone who is without that option, either temporarily or permanently, and clean clothes are also available.  This is praiseworthy and I have nothing but respect for this service.  But about the WC……
But you can leave with the knowledge that, according to this very edifying sign, the areas that you cannot use at your moment of off-schedule need are paragons of ecologically sound cleanliness.  I notice that hours are not even scribbled on a Post-It note. You know, it’s easy to inveigh against tourists, but I would recommend that one remember that tourists are also people.  And this little five-minute exploration has not only disappointed and discouraged me but also seems ever so slightly insulting.  “Fine, we’ll let you use our toilets, but only when it suits us.”  Solution?  There ought to be many, but the simplest would be the mere addition of the opening hours to the sign at the entrance to the street — the sign that lured me hopefully onward.  That way, at least nobody with an important problem will waste precious time heading toward locked doors.  I suggest this minimum concession if you’re not going to keep the facility open while the sun is still shining and there are plenty of tourists still around.

So to review:  The options for needy travelers are: Resort to one of the numberless bars/cafes, when available either geographically or according to time of day; or public toilet, when available either geographically or according to time of day.  Or wall.  Or canal.

Let’s return to the kiosk.  The Comune opened the public-toilet project for bids in 2019, with a budget of 5 million euros, and only one company submitted a proposal. Hygien Venezia was prepared to proceed, then the pandemic intervened.  So now, three years later, the company has finally installed its creation for a two-week trial.  Then all the reports and analyses and opinions and pros and cons will be thrown into a box and shaken (I’m making that up), and some decision will be made on installing the 20 more that the company is ready to place strategically around town.

Don’t assume that decision will inevitably be in the positive.  This being Venice, some people have complained.  From shops and hotels and other enterprises, some people have objected.  The Nuova Venezia only referred to the protesters as “the categories.”  What category?  The Worshipful Company of Environmental Cleaners? (It exists, but not in Italy.)

Whatever the “categories” might be, eight city councilors have spoken up, expressing a desire to inquire of the mayor “on the basis of what information is it considered that Venice possessed the characteristics to manage the cleaning (removal of waste) of 28 chemical toilets.” It occurs to me that Hygien Venezia probably has foreseen the problem and the solution, and described the plan on the bid itself.  I’ll bet that they will be able to provide answers as needed, without bothering the mayor.

Perhaps the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) phenomenon has arrived in Venice.  There may well be those who do not wish to see one of these kiosks near their homes or places of business.  I will grant you that the general lack of space here means that there is a risk that a new structure, however modest, could make the immediate area even more  crowded.  However, there are also campos and fondamentas that can boast of space.  But let’s not quibble.  Essentially, there seems to be an innate propensity to assume something new won’t work rather than consider ways in which in might perhaps be configured to work.

There is bound to be space for one of these kiosks at Campo Santa Margherita without jostling anybody too far to the side.
I’m going to ask the people who live here how they’d feel about having the kiosk in the campo.

In my view, this is another of the many situations in which Venice’s perplexity as to how to manage the city comes to the fore. Lots of real cities have public toilets in the streets.  Paris comes to mind, obviously — if there’s a city with bars/cafe’s at every turn, that would be Paris, and yet there are 420 cubicles on the streets of  the City of Light, used 3 million times a year.  I grant that Parisian streets tend to be more spacious than your average calle.  But the port of Piraeus has concise public toilets, as do Madrid, and Oslo, and Berlin, and so on.  Or at the very least, reorganize the public toilets in Venice with rational hours and doors that can be opened.

“The categories” want tourists, and then people grumble at how demanding those tourists can be. It seems to me that Venice might occasionally consider dismounting from its high horse on certain issues.  Give the horse a rest.

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International Women’s Day

The word hasn’t reached this street in Sant’ Elena that it’s a festive day for women.

This day is commonly observed here by means of sprays of mimosa.  I’ve written about this before.

I never buy the bunches of mimosa sold by various street vendors, but this little bouquet was bestowed on me by a member of a social club that we walked past this evening. They had a whole table full of them, and it was getting late.

Today, in addition to the mimosa, we had a 24-hour transit strike (busses, trams, trains, and of course vaporettos).  This is some sort of inexplicable sub-tradition, because Women’s Day has been disfigured by a transit strike more than once.  Some vaporettos will run, but it will be a task to reorganize your day to accommodate the ACTV, the public transport company.  If this strike were to accomplish something, I’d be so glad.  But it seems a feeble reed to wield in the struggles that women live through every day, up to and including their struggles with the ACTV.

The ACTV has a hundred reasons for calling strikes; we have one every few months.  They are mostly politically motivated and are usually directed at lapses in administration.  Work problems, not human problems.  This year they’ve decided to take every social problem yet identified and load them onto a highly worthy cause and, you know, let the women carry it.

This is the announcement on the vaporetto dock.  Note that the date is written, as typical here, with the day first, month second.
These are the reasons for the strike:  “Against masculine violence against women and violence in general towards LGBTQIPA persons; against every discrimination, molestation and sexual blackmail regarding access to and in the places of work; against the sexual division of work and racism; against job insecurity, exploitation, disparities of salary, involuntary part-time and being fired; against the dismantling and privatization of the social state; for the right to free and accessible public services, to income, to the minimum salary according to law, to the reduction of work hours to be equal to salary, to the house, to work, to scholastic education, to health care and to public transport (wait, what?); for the safeguarding of health and safety in the workplace; for the defense and strengthening of safe houses, of the centers against violence and the anticipation of measures of escape from violence; for the defense of Law 194 (right to abortion) and the right to self-determination, of the national network of public consultori (these correspond to social workers) and without objectors; for the redistribution of wealth, social and environmental justice; for the defense of the right to strike.”  It’s impossible to object to these goals, but I still can’t see how not showing up for work is going to accomplish them.  I guess there will just have to be another strike.

So the ACTV demonstrates its sensitivity to the problems of women in Venice, the nation, the world, by creating problems for women.  Transport strikes absolutely mangle your day in a city with basically two alternatives — feet and taxis.  Let’s say you have to accompany your sick neighbor to the hospital for her radiation therapy today.  During a strike last year we walked to the only functioning vaporetto stop, much farther than the usual stop, and took the sole working vaporetto two stops to San Zaccaria, where they put everybody ashore.  Then we had to walk inland, streets, bridges, streets, bridges, to get to the hospital under our own fading steam.  She was so frail by then, but such a trouper.

When the next strike rolled around she could hardly walk to the corner anymore, so we had to take a taxi — that will be 50 euros (rate from her house to the hospital).  And 50 euros back, naturally.  Her pension was 750 a month.  But sure, the ACTV’s union disagreements come first.

So just work your way around the strike however you can, or can’t.  Kids going to school?  Get them up at 4:00.  (Made up, but not by much.)  Going to your job, or your second job, today?  Call to say you can’t make it and lose the day’s pay.  Or walk. Be sure to consult the labyrinthine schedule of the times and routes of the limited service, or just decide to stay home.

So thank you, ACTV, for acknowledging all the problems that ought not to exist in a woman’s world.  I don’t see you on the list, though.

It’s a good thing the timetable for the flowering of this mimosa tree behind us is not scheduled by the ACTV.  I wonder if they’d make the tree go on strike?
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Meanwhile, in other news….

Now that the G20 has come and gone, the surface of life that was so agitated thereby has returned to its normal level of agitation.  There are plenty of things to keep track of, to one degree or another.  In some cases, to many degrees.

Here are a few of them:

REDENTORE:  The annual feast of the Most Holy Redeemer is tonight and Sunday — the big waterborne festivities on Saturday, the races and big religious celebration on Sunday.  Last year there were no fireworks, which left a huge hole in the festivities.  This year there will be fireworks, but in a serious effort to prevent the hazardous clumping-together of crowds the city has imposed a limit of 18,000 people, total, and those persons have to have made a reservation.  To reach the place or area they’ve booked, they have to show their printed ticket as well as their “Green Pass,” or other certificate of vaccination, OR a document that confirms that their swab was negative within the 48 preceding hours.

My new Green Pass.
The obverse side shows my name, birth date, and a few other details not interesting to anyone but them and me.  This document allows me to travel to other European countries without having to quarantine.
Barriers are being set up around the reservation-only zones. Here, this fence ought to keep the traffic lanes separated. If Carnival is any example, it won’t.
These barriers are intended to prevent people falling in the water, I suppose; maybe they should prevent people in boats trying to board somebody or put them ashore?

The rules are the ones that we all know so well by now: Masks and distancing. Tickets have been organized in sub-sectors.  Redentore used to be a real let-it-all-fly sort of festa; a party now where everyone will have to behave like Captain Von Trapp’s children is going to be really different.

Boats obviously won’t be permitted to tie up to each other: social distancing afloat.  No trying to pass from boat to boat.  No dancing parties aboard (take that, you big floating discotheques).  The watery areas are delimited according to size and the use of boat, and you have to show a printed “ticket” from your booking (on water as on land) to be permitted to enter the area.  Once your boat has entered its appointed area, it is forbidden to exit, nor will it be permitted to put people ashore.  Boat captains have to keep a complete list of passengers for 14 days.  Also, wear your mask.

There are regulations for people booking space along the fondamentas to watch the fireworks, or to scarf their dinner, but I’m not going to go into all that.  If you’ve booked a space, you already have the rules.  If you haven’t booked, you’d better hop to.  Preference is being given to Venetians, it says here.

Lino and I will not be there; it’s been years since we decided we couldn’t stand the mayhem of the motorboats in the dark, with their drunk drivers.  We might walk up to the fondamenta dei Sette Martiri (where I didn’t see any signs of assigned places) if it’s not too crazy.

The little yellow slice, Area 5 Dogana, is the space allotted to traditional boats, either rowed or with a motor of maximum 9.9 hp.  The other zones are organized for boats according to size and use (pleasure, work, etc.).  No need to get into all the details.  Note the white emergency exits.  When Lino was a boy, the Giudecca Canal was so thickly covered with boats — all propelled by oars, of course — you could walk across them from one bank to another.  And they were all massed in the Giudecca Canal to the west of the votive bridge, up toward the Molino Stucky.  The Bacino of San Marco was just background decoration.

THE BIG SHIPS:  Ship-haters rejoice: As of August 1, the biggest ships will no longer be permitted to pass through the city.  These ships are defined as having at least one of the following characteristics: Gross tonnage above 25,000 tons; hull at the waterline longer than 180 meters; height of ship more than 35 meters, excluding ships that are motor- and sail-driven; use of fuel in maneuvering that has a percentage of sulfur equal or superior to 0.1 per cent.  Like any other cargo vessel, the big cruise ships will be routed from Malamocco to Porto Marghera, one of many solutions that have been discussed since dinosaurs roamed the earth.  But this is just a stopgap.  The real solution is the offshore port, and that’s not happening tomorrow.

Seeing that neither Porto Marghera nor anywhere else will be ready this year, the MSC Orchestra or Magnifica and Costa Deliziosa (the only big ships on the dance card this summer) will be departing, respectively, from Monfalcone and Trieste, up along the northern Adriatic coast.  Passengers arriving in Venice will be swabbed or otherwise health-checked at the Venice Maritime area, then loaded on buses and driven a few hours to their ships.  So much for the thrill of cruising from Venice.

The offshore port project is going to take some time.  Phase One, send in your proposals by December 31, 2021.  Make sure your design can accommodate modern container ships as well as the biggest cruise ships, and make sure the port will be safe in stormy seas because there won’t be any lagoon to protect you anymore.  Phase Two, five experts evaluate the proposals.  Phase Three, choose the winner.  That decision will be made by June 30, 2023, if all goes as planned.  That’s a pretty big “if,” I feel compelled to add.

Seeing that creating the offshore port will take at least five to six years, Porto Marghera will have to be modified fairly quickly.  Building the new passenger terminal there, deepening the channels and revising the current industrial docks will cost 157 million euros — a hefty sum for a temporary set-up.  Then again, “temporary” has a flexible meaning here.  The Accademia Bridge was built in 37 days in 1933 as a temporary structure while proposals for the real bridge were to be evaluated, and it’s still there.

I have the impression that the sudden decision on dealing with the big ships is linked somehow to the fact that UNESCO recently decided to designate the water entrance to Venice — Bacino of San Marco, Canale of San Marco and the Giudecca Canal a national monument.  This is surprising in that UNESCO, when it listed Venice as a World Heritage Site in 1987, specifically included the lagoon.  You wouldn’t know that by the savaging of the environment that has gone on since then, but anyway, I’d have considered the Bacino, etc. as part of the lagoon.  Now it’s a national monument.  Okay then.

Spare a thought, though, for the humans — 1,260 direct workers and 4,000 indirect workers — involved in what will be a radical restructuring of the whole shipping enterprise here.  Many are fearing for their jobs.

Almost no workers believed that this decree would come so fast, and right in the middle of the season.  The maritime agencies are also worried.  Every shipping company is required by law to engage a maritime agency, but, says Michele Gallo, head of two agencies, “You can’t even think of having the same ships as before coming to the docks at Porto Marghera, using the same places as the commercial ships.  This is a devastating decree.”  Organizing the entry, passage and departure of so many ships through the inlet at Malamocco and along the Petroleum Canal (Canale dei Petroli) is going to be a job worthy of an air traffic controller.

By the way, all this increased traffic will make it even more important to keep the aforementioned channel dredged.  However, the deeper the channel, the faster the tide enters and exits, and already this action removes millions of cubic meters of sediment from the lagoon every year.  Everyone knows that the Canale dei Petroli has thus caused incalculable damage to the lagoon and its extraordinary ecosystems.  Ironic that UNESCO decided to designate part of the lagoon as a national monument with the notion of protecting it, but they seem not to have taken into account the effect so much extra traffic will have in a channel that essentially behaves as if it were a water vacuum sucking the soil from the lagoon.

This was the lagoon’s circulatory system in 1901. Lots of arteries and veins and capillaries kept the lagoon biome thriving.
In 1932.  Notice the large natural channel at the bottom of the picture — the inlet at Malamocco.  Here it is the shape of an oxbow.  Works fine for the lagoon, but wasn’t at all suitable for commercial traffic.
The oxbow was furloughed when the Canale dei Petroli was dug in 1964-68.  The channel shoots straight from the inlet on the right to the shoreline, and was dug along the shoreline in order to allow the tankers and other big merchant ships to reach Porto Marghera in the upper left-hand corner. After only two years, the effect was evident.  Today, in view of the cruise ships arriving, dredging the channel has already begun, and will continue for 12 months.  A deeper channel means the tide will be faster than before.  All the little canals that used to be there helped to slow the tide down, but as you see, the tide won.
On the left you can see the tide patterns before the Austrian domination (1814), while on the right the tide patterns in 2009.  So by all means make all the big ships traverse the lagoon from Malamocco for however many years it will take for the offshore port to be built.  I’d just avoid presenting myself as a defender of the lagoon at the same time.

FREE MARCO ZENNARO:

Marco Zennaro (veneziatoday.it)

The 46-year-old Venetian businessman, well-known and loved by many, has been in prison in Sudan for three months.  He is the owner of a company that produces electric transformers that has been doing business in Sudan for years.  He has been accused by a Sudanese company of fraud, but the situation is an utter tangle of claims and characters.  However, the photograph of the cell in which he was kept for two months with 30 other men, at temperatures of 114 degrees F., was all too comprehensible.  Yes, the Italian government has attempted to intervene; yes, money has been paid, but turns out someone wants still more.

Now he is on house arrest in a Sudanese hotel, awaiting the next hearing (August 9) in the string of court appearances that may finally resolve the problem.  He has already been absolved of two accusations, but it’s hard to know who wants what at this point.  Of course money is at the core of this.  Marco is well-known in the Venetian world of sport — Venetian rowing, for one thing, as well as rugby.  As it happens, Lino has known him since he (Marco) was a boy.  Also, Lino taught his mother how to row.

This one is written in English, no less.

“We Support Marco.” Petitions and initiatives continue. On June 13, some 15 Venetian rowers conducted a 24-hour event in which they took turns rowing from the Rialto to the Salute and back a la valesana (one person with two oars).  They continued from noon June 13 to noon June 14 to raise awareness of this situation and urge its resolution.  But here we still are.
“Let’s get Marco back.”  This banner has been posted around much of Italy by now, by a far-right “association of social promotion” called CasaPound. (lagazzettatorinese.it)

MOSE:

Are we heading back to this again? Oh boy.

Mose worked last winter (except for one time), so you might think all is well?  You would think wrong.  I’m starting to dread the winter again.

The plan was to complete all the work by June 30, and declare the project finished on December 31, 2021.  But that timetable is now in tatters for  various reasons, primarily money problems (as always).  The refusal of some suppliers to continue without payment also slowed things down, and the work was officially suspended yesterday, July 16, even though it actually had been stopped for three months already.

Without regular tests, without personnel from the companies involved, without some degree of ongoing maintenance, it’s not certain the gates will even rise when needed.  Broken elements haven’t been replaced, parts are deteriorating because there is still no air conditioning in the underground gallery.  There is severe corrosion that has been reported for years, to the frames of the underwater tensioners as well as the hinges of the gates.  Encrustation of barnacles and other crud will certainly make the gates heavier.  The gates at San Nicolo’ have been underwater for eight years now.

Bids have been solicited for a maintenance program budgeted at 64 million euros, even though some estimates maintain that at least 100 million euros will be needed for this every year.  (Personal note: Lino has never batted an eye at the titanic construction costs.  His refrain has always been simply “And the cost of the maintenance?”)

A Venetian deputy in Parliament, Orietta Vanin, has written to Enrico Giovannini, the Minister  of Public Works, saying “A plan is missing for the launch of the work and the completion of the machinery.  When is Mose going to be tested?  What is the risk to the city in view of autumn?  At what point are the interventions for the security of the Piazza San Marco?  We’ve asked several times but have never had a response.”

TOURISM:

Not exactly a horde at 9:00 AM on a Saturday morning. I did see a group of about 15 people being guided around the Rialto Market.

The infamous hordes are not yet swarming the streets; tourists there are, many of them still day-trippers, but not insupportable numbers, by any means.  We could probably use a good horde or two right now.  Happily for everyone, American travelers are finally permitted to fly to Venice (I presume also to the rest of Italy).  Delta Airlines has non-stop flights from Atlanta and New York, and the other day 200 passengers from the USA disembarked to great, if silent, applause.  That’s just a drop, however, as the Venice airport is currently handling 15,000 “passages” a day, a mere third of their daily pre-pandemic total.

Still, no coherent plans for managing the eventual masses have yet been proposed.  The secretary of the artisans’ association, Gianni De Cecchi, says “The pandemic has passed in vain.”  So stand by for the usual complaints, protests, and laments to come forth again.  Probably toward the end of next summer, if forecasts can be trusted.  Stay tuned.

I like these tourists. Too bad there aren’t enough of them to keep Venice afloat.
Send more of these, too.
I hang the sheets out to dry, he raises his sail. The life, she goes on.
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Back to business

At dawn the city may seem to be standing still, but just as the tide is almost certainly in motion even if you can’t see it, so are the stores, shops, and other commercial entities. But while for some enterprises the tide may be rising, for others it may already have gone out.  When money is to be made, Venice stops for no one.

The pandemic is slowly retreating here and normal life has taken a few big summer-weekend bounces that give the city the sensation that the old days have returned.  On June 2, a national holiday, there were 50,000 tourists in the city (21,000 from the Veneto, 19,000 from other Regions, 10,000 foreigners, half of which were German).  However, it’s becoming clear that the old days could have used a lot of improvement.

All those months during lockdown, etc., when so many people hoped that the city could somehow benefit from the forced suspension of so many activities in order to reassess and resolve the problems of the mass tourism monoculture, was time blown away like so many soap bubbles.  We’re pretty much right back to where we were in February, 2019.

For example, outdoor tables and chairs were permitted to occupy more space than strictly allowed during the Old Regime in order to accommodate the necessary social distancing; now they might just stay that way, filling up streets and campos, because now we’re used to it (though the owners won’t feel like paying an adjusted tax for occupying more public space).   The aforementioned bars and restaurants and other touristic enterprises have been discovering, to their surprise, that manpower is missing.  Bluntly, one out of five former employees isn’t coming back.  A year and a half has passed, and waiters and chambermaids and many other toilers in the touristic fields have found other jobs.  So let’s nab all the foreign workers we can for temporary (low-paid) summer work, even though they haven’t been vaccinated.

As for daily life, naturally I’m glad that people are working again, but this means we’re picking back up with motondoso and sometimes overcrowded vaporettos and cloddish tourists and pickpockets and seagulls ripping the food out of people’s hands in the Piazza San Marco and so forth, with more of the same coming up, no doubt, as restrictions continue to ease.  The great forerunner is the Biennale of Architecture; it opened on May 22 and will run until November 21, B.T.U.  (Barring The Unforeseen, not British thermal units.)  The unforeseen has become a major player now in any undertaking, psychologically if not logistically.

So now that Venice Inc. is trying to get back underway, I paraphrase the famous remark of American President Calvin Coolidge and say that obviously the business of Venice is business.  Or, as I put it, thisisvenicewheremoneyisking.  And now that we can talk about business in the present tense again, I see the economic landscape, as illustrated by the shops, as divided into two basic categories.  And both show the ways in which the Venetian economy has changed over the past two generations or so.

Category 1:  Shops that have changed over the years.  Category 2:  Shops that have closed forever.

Category 1:  Walking around the city, I can add my own version of what I call the Venetian litany: “I remember when that was…..”.  When Lino would walk along Calle Larga San Barnaba and tell me, door by door, who used to be there, the coal seller or the fish fryer, it seemed exotic, as if change was so long ago.  But now I too have seen it as it is happening.

It used to be, some 25 years ago, that when useful shops succumbed they were most often replaced by ones selling “Murano glass” or Carnival masks.  Lately, though, when you see yet another useful shop disappear you can assume it will be replaced — well, certainly by supermarkets, they’re everywhere now — by bars/cafes/restaurants, or by hotels.  Evidently people come to Venice to eat and sleep, as if it were a convalescent hospital.

Examples are everywhere.  The best nursing home in the city is being converted to a hotel (and the worst nursing home appears to be on the same trajectory).

This was the “Ca’ di Dio” nursing home, not only a beautiful facility but a fantastic location on the Riva degli Schiavoni. Too bad those are the very aspects that exert a fatal fascination on hotel developers.  It’s been several long and laggy years since the old people were evicted, and the restoration work has only recently picked up again with some seriousness.  So yes, another hotel is on the way.  There’s always room for one more.

When the skeletons of the two former gas holders near San Francesco de la Vigna were up for renovation not too long ago, scores of families formed a committee to implore the city to convert them to an urgently needed multi-purpose sports center for the students of the nearby high schools.  For a while it seemed as if the city had yet to decide, and then the surprise.  Renovation has continued, but the citizens are out of luck because this treasure of industrial archaeology is going to be a hotel.  Those are only two examples of how a facility useful to Venetians is removed to make room for something that makes money.

In 1969 it seemed perfectly fine that two gas holders had been built next to a 16th-century church designed by Jacopo Sansovino with a facade by Andrea Palladio.  I can imagine that the Franciscan monks in their cloisters added the gas works to their daily prayers.  (bonificagasometri.com)
Work began in January to stabilize the site. Much concrete was seen passing from barges to land.
Here is the architect’s rendering of the glorious new incarnation of the old structures.  The kids will just have to keep on making do with whatever sports areas have been cobbled together for them around the city because we absolutely need another hotel.  I make the futile observation that there are laws that prohibit any construction or alteration that is not in tune with its surroundings.  To be fair, these weren’t in tune with their surroundings 50 years ago, either. (Il Gazzettino)

So much for hotels.  Let there be restaurants!

This used to be a great family shoe store on via Garibaldi.

I don’t want to bore you to oblivion, but here’s a quick review of the transformation of via Garibaldi, still proudly promoted (not by us) as one of the few places where you can still find real Venetians.  Yet many shops that were used every day by the aforementioned Venetians have gradually been removed, one by one.  The excellent clothing store has undergone really ambitious renovation to become a restaurant (work appears to be stalled, but there are cartons of wine on the floor); the small deli/supermarket where Claudio reigned behind the case of cheese and butter is now a restaurant; a pork butcher shop dedicated to salame and other such products is a restaurant; the furniture and upholstery store became a bar and gaming salon (closed since the acqua alta of November 11, 2019); the fresh pasta and exotic ingredients shop is now Nevodi Pizzalab for takeaway pizza; a fruit and vegetable stand is now a restaurant.

On the non-comestible side, other stores have also been through various reincarnations that moved successively farther away from ordinary life.  The bank became a hardware store (could have been useful except that somehow whatever you needed on Friday was expected to be delivered next Wednesday.  This went on for at least two years until it folded) and now it’s a real estate agency.  We miss the bank.

The name “Salumeria” (salame and similar pork products) is so wonderfully generic, like shops that still have “Latteria” (milk) carved on their lintels from long ago.  Now it’s a bar/cafe’.
Another salumeria just down the street from the one above is currently selling cheap clothing. The meat display case is still inside, loaded now with T-shirts and sweaters and shoes.  At least these are everyday items, nothing fancy or touristic.
This was a scene that stabbed my heart with an icicle. In late December 2019 the dry-goods store had to move out because the landlord raised the rent. This is the classic scenario.  Stores keep closing, not because they have no customers, but because the landlord wakes up and thinks he or she would like to have more money.  Up goes the rent, out go the tenants, and eight out of ten times (seems like) what comes in is a restaurant or bar.  It’s obvious that you can’t sell enough pajamas and tablecloths to make thousands of euros a month more for rent.
The shop went back quite a way and contained so many things you need if you lead a normal life: Pajamas. underwear, ribbon, zippers, socks, dishtowels, ordinary towels, sheets, bandanas… Naturally I expected to see a restaurant or bar take its place, because God knows we need more of those.  But a year and a half later the shop is still closed, so whatever master plan the owner had devised that required throwing out the socks and underwear isn’t going quite as he or she expected, and meanwhile that’s a year and a half of rent that he/she didn’t receive.  Sometimes you just roll snake eyes.
Another stab was delivered to my heart when I discovered that the little deli by the church of San Martino had closed in October. In Venetian, the person owning this sort of all-purpose little grocery (prosciutto, cheese, bread, wine, oil, etc.) is called a “biavarol” (bee-yah-vah-ROL). The name comes from “biade” (bee-YAH-deh), meaning fodder.  Centuries ago that was where you bought your horse feed because yes, there were horses in Venice; then the products increased to grain and seeds, and gradually other provisions.  Like many such small shops, it was often run by a family — in this case, since 1985, although the shop itself was already active in 1907.  But as is also often the case, the children took other paths, the parents retired, and so here we are. There was a biavarol, Lino recalls, at the Ponte Trevisan by San Trovaso, and the word “BIADE” was visible above the door until not many years ago.  Then, when the biavarol retired, the new owners sold trendy clothes and the word “biade” disappeared.  “That’s really a shame,” Lino says. “It was a wonderful relic.”
“Seeking a biavarol to continue a century-long story.”  As this article recounts, everybody in the neighborhood frequented the shop — there isn’t anything like it nearby — but after 35 years at work Elisabetta and Francesco wanted to retire and spend time with the grandchildren.  They’re ready to rent it, though, to anyone who will pick up where they left off.  No trendy clothes, thanks.

Actually, there are plenty of places that change that don’t turn into restaurants.

This used to be a huge store selling glass. Now it’s a huge store selling pet supplies. Supply follows demand, as Adam Smith probably said.  This is one case where the dog- and cat-mad locals got the benefit of a change, as nobody here needs “Murano glass.”
Butcher shops just can’t seem to keep going. The kids want to do something else in life and anyway, with the population shrinking by the month, jewelry clearly has a better chance at survival than pork chops.  I’m glad the new people left that marvelous relief carving of the beef.
Further along the street near the Rialto Market is yet another defunct butcher shop. Fun fact: Venice was the home of one of Europe’s largest slaughterhouses in the mid-1800’s, just after Padova, Vienna and Rome.  If you think the streets are unpleasant when jammed with people, try to imagine the calle de la Beccaria near San Giobbe when it was time to drive the cows, horses, sheep, and pigs to their doom.  In the summer.  Not made up.
I don’t know what this shop originally sold, but at least it’s not a restaurant.  As you see, some bright sparks have made it into a social-message emporium.  Half-hidden by the condensation is a large tote bag proclaiming that “Plants are better than people.” This is original, if a bit antisocial, but I assume they’re thinking of popcorn and peonies and not kudzu, Venus flytraps, killer algae, purple loosestrife, water hyacinth, castor beans, deadly nightshade, wolfsbane, poison hemlock, rosary pea, or your neighborhood oleander tree.

Apartments for rent:  Of course this is a business too, and by now a very big one.  The pandemic across Europe pretty much obliterated last year’s crop of tourists, but they are coming back.  Collectively calumniated in the popular mind as “Airbnb,” apartments for tourists are offered by scores of other companies.

The continuing depopulation of Venice has left ever-more apartments empty, so of course they’ve become another commodity.  Venice is far from unique in this, as we all know, but the sheer quantity has distorted (or is the result of the distortion) of Venetian life.  Now that the apartments are being registered and regulated, virtually all of Venice’s some 3,000 streets (calle, calesela, ruga, salizada, ramo, etc.) has at least one door with an official tag indicating a touristic apartment within.  We knew there were lots, but now that we can see them it’s a bit unnerving.  Still, all those people who rail against Airbnb as the destroyer of Venetian life need to recognize that nobody has forced the apartment owner to do this, and otherwise the apartment would most likely sit empty, which isn’t a positive thing at all.

“Touristic location” and license number.

I could add a thousand more of these images, but you get the idea.

So much for Category 1, shops (and apartments) changing. Before I go to Category 2 (shops disappearing), here are some thoughts on the economics of bread.

Every morning at 6:30 a ponderous barge briskly backs up along the rio de Sant’Ana, with huge roaring, till it reaches an open space to park.  One of the two men aboard jumps ashore, loads a few plastic boxes containing variously shaped bread onto his handtruck, and rolls it rapidly toward the Coop supermarket on via Garibaldi.

Exactly five minutes later he has returned with the empty boxes and the barge is roaring its way forward (there is no space to turn around) out of the canal.

This phenomenon interests me because the barge is enormous, yet by the time it gets to us it is carrying a load that would qualify as almost nothing.  Seems like a heck of a boat to use for that small a cargo, but let’s say that this is the last stop, and that the run started at 4:00 AM with ten stops and eight tons of bread.  That’s not exactly my point.  It seems like a huge expenditure for a small return, but clearly the formula is working fine.

My point, however clumsily expressed, is that this is a proverbial coal-to-Newcastle situation.  Within the area of about two city blocks, there are three full-time bakeries turning out bread every morning as the handtruck from who knows where rolls by.  So in my primitive lizard brain, anybody who’s in favor of keeping local businesses alive ought to consider the possibility of the local bakeries supplying the supermarket, though I realize that’s slightly nuts because people could just go buy the bread straight from the baker.

So why do people buy bread at the Coop when they could buy it up the street at Crosara?  Because it’s cheaper, of course.  But it isn’t as good.  So at the intersection of price, quality and convenience (bakeries close in the middle of the day), we see the bread on the truck at dawn a mere half hour before the first bakery opens.

Hence the eternal decision is ever-present on via Garibaldi: Save 5 cents per kilo on my daily bread even though it tastes like styrofoam, or spend the 5 cents more on something divine just out of the oven.  Venice will be making money somehow in any case, because that’s the way it is.

Speaking of little shops, we come to Category 2, the most poignant witness to how Venice has changed: Shops that have closed forever.  In your wanderings around the city you may have seen, but not observed, them.  They are everywhere, mute witnesses to crafts and businesses and livelihoods and families that made Venice a place where life was vivid and intimate and dense.

Campo Ruga was bound together by shops; almost all the doors at street level led to some sort of business. A friend of mine who was born here could tell me, door by door, what used to be there. “The milk shop…the shoe repair…the fish seller…” Now they are apartments, or storerooms, or small offices, or nothing.
This small corner shop at #128 brings new meaning to the word “closed.”

Adjacent streets were one shop after another, on both sides of the street, as you see.

One of the best hardware stores in the city, in my opinion. Gone.
Campo Do Pozzi is a monument to the way almost every campo was when Lino was a boy. Literally every door and window around the campo belonged to a shop of some sort.  This is the north side.
Campo Do Pozzi looking east.  Gaze at this and populate it with everybody who lived here and did the shopping here every day, throw 20 or 30 kids outside to play, and you might get a faint sense of how, as the saying goes, “Stavamo meglio quando stavamo peggio” (We were better off when we were worse off).
South.  This was a butcher shop.  The street on the right, Calle del Forno, was obviously the location of a bakery.
West side.

Whatever this shop was, it closed before the last Ice Age.

Take your pick, you’ve got a whole street of defunct shops.  These are long since deceased, but the lockdown of March-June 2020 and the few tourists who came during the summer forced many businesses to close.
“Do you have a shop?? You have to die!!” So begins this cri de coeur from one merchant, reminding us of the crushing expenses even your little enterprise has to face. “Income: 500 euros per day, 120,000 euros per year. Annual expenses: IVA on sales (value-added tax, since 1968) 20,000; buying stock 60,000; rent 12,000; INPS-INAIL (Social Security) 4,000; accountant 1,500; electricity 2,000; store sign and cash register 2,000; trash collection 1,200; telephone 500; IRAP Regional impost for productive activity and local taxes 2,000; 5% perishability of merchandise 3,000.  Total expenses 108,200.  Gross income 11,800.  IRPEF income tax 4,000.  Annual net profit 7,800.  Work 12 hours per day for six days of the week to earn, if things go well, 650 euros a month.  And you hope you don’t get sick.”

So whenever you see a dead store, remember that it, and all the others, kept Venice alive until basically yesterday. Lino says it repeatedly: “Every time you go over a bridge you’re going from one island to another, and every island had everything it needed, right there.”
This dry-goods store near Sant’ Aponal was the only place in Venice where I could find the socks that Lino likes.  It was obviously a neighborhood fixture, but it couldn’t last forever.  I don’t know which factors determined their decision (rent?  grandchildren?).  At least the owners left a farewell note that might have applied just as well to every closed shop in Venice, if the owners had the heart to write anything.  I translate: “The shop’s voyage has now reached its end.  Here, at the end of the line, we want first of all to thank our clients who believed in us, who appreciated the work and the products, who have chosen at the shop items for special days of their lives, but also for the daily routine which has offered us friendships, esteem, gave us smiles and satisfaction, company, laughs, the grapevine, gossip, coffee, words of comfort and compliments.  Have a good life and smiles and joy always to all of you!  Angela, Raffaella, and Flavia.”
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