Archive for May, 2009
Memorial Day reflections, Venice version
Posted by: | CommentsI’m thinking about World War I today, partly because yesterday, May 24, used to be a date engraved in every Italian’s consciousness. Yet it passed unremarked in any way, which to Lino is yet another sign of the general deterioration of just about everything.
We were walking along the fondamenta yesterday morning when all of a sudden Lino said: “It’s May 24! …‘il 24 maggio l’esercito marciava…” and he was off, declaiming the four long stanzas of the “Legend of the Piave.”
This is one of the great patriotic songs, immortalizing the departure of the army to war against the Austro-Hungarian Empire on May 24, 1915. Some of the most ferocious battles toward the end took place along the Piave River. 
It is a pleasant little stream which starts in the Alps and empties into the sea not far from Venice, but more importantly, it formed the front which finally stopped the enemy advance and led to its ultimate defeat. The Piave is therefore also known as “The river sacred to the motherland.”
Schoolchildren used to be taught these impressive chunks of poetry and as you see, it stuck. This feat was perhaps made a little easier by singing; the music of “The Legend of the Piave” is so distinctive that you can’t get it out of your mind no matter what you try to put in its place. Everybody knows it. It was in the serious running to be designated the Italian national anthem.
“My father fought in the war,” Lino was telling me, “on the Asiago plateau. He was taken prisoner, and they took him to Trento, to the Castle of Buonconsiglio. He took me there once, when I was little, to show me. We went into the big room and he said, ‘That’s where the judge was sitting, and that’s where the bench was where I was sitting.’ He always told me he was going to take me to Asiago to show me the trenches he was in, but he never did. I’ve always been sorry. ”
The military judge’s job was very simple. All he had to do in order to know what to do with a prisoner was to ask where he came from. Large areas of what are now Italy only became demarcated as such after hideous battles. So if the prisoner came from Venice, or anywhere south of there, he was treated as a normal prisoner of war because he was fighting for his own country, Italy. Lino’s father got sent to the internment camp at Mauthausen for the rest of the war, came home, and went back to work driving the train from Venice to Trento.
If, however, the captured soldier came from Trento or Trieste or any of the many northern, now-Italian, towns which were then still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, he was considered a traitor and dealt with accordingly. Firing squad,say, or hanging (Nazario Sauro, August 10, 1916), or hanging and garroting (Cesare Battisti, July 12, 1916) – it was all good. 
These are famous martyrs of the Italian resistance. Despite living in Austrian territory they considered themselves Italians were fighting for Italy, while according to the Austrian viewpoint they were supposed to be fighting against it. These men were epic heroes. I can’t understand why their life stories haven’t been turned into tragic operas. Where is Verdi when you need him?
So the First World War, which to many of us seems extraordinarily remote, is still part of the lives of many people — like Lino — still walking around loaded with memories. Did I say memories? He and his twin brother, Franco, have lived their entire lives carrying the names of two of their mother’s brothers who were killed in the war. Every Venetian parish, as well as the Jewish Ghetto, displays a memorial plaque listing the names of the local boys who died in the carnage. The names of Lino’s doomed uncles are inscribed on the memorial in Campo Santa Margherita. Whenever I go by I stop to look; I have this odd feeling that they’re part of my family.
The Piave, let it not be forgotten, was also where Ernest Hemingway was wounded at the age of 19, after only two weeks at the front. Because his poor eyesight prevented him from enlisting as a soldier, he volunteered to work with the Red Cross ambulances bringing soldiers down from the action on Monte Pasubio.
He was sent to Fossalta di Piave, a town on the river not far from Venice. At midnight on July 8, 1918, an Austrian mortar hit the trench where he had gone, more out of curiosity than merely to distribute cigarettes and chocolate.
“The 227 wounds I got from the trench mortar didn’t hurt a bit at the time,” he wrote to his parents from the American Hospital in Milan, “only my feet felt like I had rubber boots full of water on. Hot water… But I got up again and got my wounded into the dug out… I told him in Italian that I wanted to see my legs, though I was afraid to look at them. So we took off my trousers and the old limbs were still there but gee they were a mess. They couldn’t figure out how I had walked 150 yards with a load with both knees shot through and my right shoe punctured in two big places… ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘My Captain, it is of nothing. In America they all do it! It is thought well not to allow the enemy to perceive that they have captured our goats!”
When the bravado wore off, he was left with nightmares, insomnia — I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body — five months of physical therapy, and his vivacious American nurse, Agnes von Kurowski. In the end, she jilted him and shattered his soul into more pieces than the shrapnel ever had.
Bombs even fell on Venice here and there (there were victims in Cannaregio). There is even an unexploded bomb which was retrieved from the roof of the basilica of the Frari, and which is mounted on the wall near the Pesaro altarpiece as a memento to this small, perhaps, but marvelous moment of salvation.
Speaking of bombs, there is a slowly disappearing stone in the Piazza San Marco. It has been worn away by millions of undiscerning feet. Sometimes I pause and just watch people walk over or past it, oblivious, snapping their pix, thinking about work, looking for a bathroom. It marks the spot where an Austrian bomb fell on September 4, 1916, five steps from the entrance to the basilica. It is just another stone, mute, but eloquent.
Every barracks and City Hall in Italy (as here, at the entrance to City Hall in Venice) displays a large bronze plaque made of melted-down enemy cannons. 
It gives the full text of the address given by General, later Marshal, Armando Diaz, chief of general staff, announcing the Italian victory of the Battle of Vittorio Veneto and the end of the war. It manages in very few lines not only to report the precise details of the enemy’s undoing but to convey every emotion conceivable in the victors of a struggle beyond human comprehension.
The war against Austria-Hungary which, under the high command of His Majesty the King, the Italian Army, inferior in numbers and means, initiated on May 24, 1915, and with unwavering and tenacious valor conducted fiercely without interruption for 41 months, is won.
The gigantic battle engaged on the 24th of last October and in which took part 51 Italian divisions, three British, two French, one Czechoslovakian, and one American regiment, against 73 Austro-Hungarian divisions, is finished.
The rapid and daring advance of the XXIX Army Corps on Trento, blocking the enemy’s means of retreat in Trentino, overwhelming them on the west by the troops of the VII Army and on the east by those of the I, VI, and IV, determined yesterday the total ruin of the adversary’s front. From Brenta al Torre the irresistible surge of the XII, the VIII, and the X Army, and of the cavalry divisions, drove the fleeing enemy even further back.
On the plains, His Royal Highness the Duke of Aosta rapidly advanced at the head of his undefeated III Army, longing to return to the positions which they had already victoriously conquered and had never lost.
The Austro-Hungarian Army is annihilated; it suffered grave losses in the fierce resistance of the first days and in the pursuit it has lost huge quantities of materiel of every sort and virtually all of its stores and warehouses. It has left in our hands about 300,000 prisoners with entire general staffs and not less than 5,000 cannon.
The remains of what once was one of the most powerful armies in the world is ascending, in disorder and without hope, the valleys which it had descended with such proud security. DIAZ
For me, though, the most powerful and poignant epitaph to war — military, emotional, or both – is what Hemingway wrote as one of the 40-some endings he crossed out for “A Farewell to Arms”:
“Many things have happened. Everything blunts and the world keeps on. You get most of your life back like goods recovered from a fire… It never stops. It only stops for you. Some of it stops while you are still alive. The rest goes on and you go with it.”
Sant’ Erasmo, where vegetables go to heaven when they die
Posted by: | CommentsYou may never have given much thought to St. Erasmus, but if you wander past any vegetable vendor in any season here — especially in the spring — you will see him referred to constantly. Not because he was so holy, though undoubtedly he was; the reference is very specifically to the nearby island which is named for him: Sant’ Erasmo.
What’s on Sant’ Erasmo are fields and fields of market gardens. On a summer evening, strolling along the verdant lanes that glimmer with fireflies, flailing at billows of insatiable mosquitoes, it’s like having been transported back to somewhere in the heart of darkest Indiana.
In Venice, any mention of the largest island in the lagoon, particularly if it’s scribbled on a sign in the market, is synonymous with the best local produce. Peas, asparagus, artichokes; by June, they have all come and are mostly gone, though the last flourishes are on sale at the annual Venetian rowing race marking the good saint’s feast day (June 2, as all the world knows).
Sant’ Erasmo is known, not only by its celestial verdure, but its few hardy and well-entrenched families. If I were to tell you that there are only a few last names here, which have been continually reshuffled as the generations have gone on, I will have told you just about everything you need to know about the place. I’m not implying children with six fingers, just that it’s a little planet orbiting Venice, near but extremely far, if you follow me. Anybody with the surname Vignotto, Zanella, Smerghetto, or Bubacco can only be from here, and you would pick them out immediately even if you were to meet them racing yachts at Cowes, on their way to pick up their Nobel Prize.
A few Sunday mornings ago, our usual group gathered at the boat club, ready to head out somewhere in the gondolone, the big gondola. We’d heard there was going to be some local farmers’ fiesta on the island, the “Festa of the Violet Artichoke of Sant’ Erasmo,” so we rowed over there. We needed a new destination for our Sunday excursion, and it took less than an hour. We drew the boat up on the sandy beach (look at the map for the little stretch of shore along the southwestern edge) and wandered ashore to see what the islanders had organized.
Naturally we were there too early. We should have known. 
The farmers don’t have cows, but they know that they’ll be milking tourists later, so there’s no need to bust a gusset setting up their stands. Still, some enterprising souls had begun unloading crates of artichokes from their assorted vehicles, and the sight was Extremely Tempting.
The Violet Artichoke growers’ lobby has recently succeeded in having their product officially designated as a protected brand, akin to a denomination controlee’. This little thistle deserves all the fanfare it can get: Stripped down to its tender inner leaves and slowly sauted over a low flame in olive oil and garlic, it has a very particular bitterness which is transmuted in your mouth into a flavor tending mysteriously towards sweetness. I think they must contain some narcotic substance; once you start, you must have more.
Everyone maintains that part (or all) of the secret of these little morsels is the saline environment. 
You’ll be glad to know I haven’t made a study of the soil, but it seems logical that there would be some salty component to their habitat. The artichokes of Malamocco were equally celebrated, back before houses took over the fields there. Meanwhile, the artichoke consortium oversees the production of them at various limited sites around the lagoon.
So: Did we buy any, or not? Yes, we did. But not from the festa. The canny farmers with their snazzy labels and tents were charging one euro ($1.38) apiece. I wish I could say I’d made that up.
Therefore we walked across the road to the large shady fig tree, under which a lone farmer was selling the artichokes he had just cut from their 
stalks in the adjoining plot. We took home a large sack of them — in fact, he went back and cut some more for us — for .29 euro cents each.
He could undoubtedly have asked a higher price if he’d been selling them as “castraure” (kas-tra-OO-reh). This is one of those legendary food items that is much rarer than you’d think, considering how many vegetable vendors claim to be selling them. The castraure are the first, topmost little artichoke on each plant; they are cut off (yes, the plant is castrated…) in order to encourage the rest of the plant to flourish. This flourishing is in the form of the little artichokes we bought, which are called “botoli.”
It makes me happy to remember all this, because they’re gone from my life for another year. I probably won’t make it back to Sant’ Erasmo before the race in June, and by the time I get there all the good stuff will have been sold. Of course, I could eat artichokes virtually all year from hothouses all over Italy, but now that I’ve tasted these I think I’ll just wait.
The voyage of the seppia
Posted by: | CommentsThis morning we were walking along the fondamenta across the canal from our hovel, and my eye fell upon one of the boats tied up alongside.
It takes no time at all to reconstruct the scene: A seagull nabbed a seppia, or cuttlefish, 
and a battle ensued, which the seppia lost. You can tell by the splashings of desperate black ink. Another clue is the cuttlebone, which if I had a parakeet or Andean condor I would immediately have taken.
Your cuttlefish are no match for a seagull’s beak, as you see, but don’t underestimate them. If you were a small marine creature you’d want to do everything possible to avoid any passing seppia (plural: seppie; in Venetian sepa/sepe). Soft and squidgy they may be (although technically a mollusc), but they too have a sort of beak, and it’s tiny and hooked and sharp. They look so innocuous, sort of like Mister Magoo, as they drift fecklessly along, but just remember that they have that mouth. Not much use in land combat, though. I could tell you some stories about that sharp little beak, and I probably will, at some point, but I don’t want to ruin your enjoyment at thinking of how delectable they are, so I’ll stop. The little ones are wonderful grilled. They are a classic Venetian snack, or cicheto (chih-KEH-to). The bigger ones are chopped up and simmered in water and tomato paste, and their ink. Some people omit the ink, which is heathen.
While we’re talking about their being eaten, by whatever sort of life form, make a note that seppie (on spaghetti or in risotto) are the only fish on which you are allowed to put grated parmesan cheese. To see someone put cheese on any other fish dish makes Venetians shudder. But it is, in fact, required on seppia. If you don’t try this, you won’t know what I mean. Trust me. If your waiter tells you not to do it, ask him where he’s from. Or just smile and go ahead anyway. Or skip the smile.
Another seppia clue: If you walk along the fondamentas edging major channels – say, along the Riva dei Sette Martiri in Castello, or the Zattere in Dorsoduro, or the opposite side of the Giudecca Canal, on the Giudecca — you will certainly see stains like these on the stones. Now you know they’re not paint. 
Many of them indicate epic battles, all futile.
There are two seppia seasons: Spring, which is when they come into the lagoon from winter quarters somewhere in the Adriatic in order to spawn, and anytime after the festa del Redentore (third Sunday in July), when the fraima (fra-EE-ma) begins, the general ichthyous exodus from the lagoon out to sea. This second period is, obviously, the time when you are aiming for the little ones — I hate calling them babies, but that’s what they are. In both of these periods the deepest lagoon channels are strewn with temporarily anchored boats from which men, and often their wives, too, are fishing for seppie. These boats refuse to move for any passing craft, from the vaporettos to the cruise ships. It drives the captains to the verge of crazy.
And speaking of decoding cuttlefish, I saw my first seppia this year on March 6. It wasn’t the little cephalopod itself, but its remains, floating in with the tide in the canal outside our hovel. It made me so happy I took a picture of it — it was like seeing the first [crocus, sandhill crane, or add your favorite seasonal thing here].
Then the fondamentas begin to fill up, lined with amateur fishermen, some of whom take their catch home, and some who sell it. 
They often go out at night, too, depending on the tides, rigging up a strong light to attract the animals. Or they use a fish-like lure. Lino once slew a vast number of them by hooking a medium-length remnant of a white plastic bag to his line and pulling it slowly through the water; despite the fact that seppie have some of the most developed eyes in the animal kingdom, it somehow looked irresistibly like another seppia. They don’t eat only crabs, shrimp, worms, or whatever — they snack on each other, as well. Too much information?
But we’ve caught seppie without even trying, when we’ve been out rowing, minding our own business. There one will be, just floating along; if it’s close enough to the surface you can pick it up with your hands. It’s better, though, to have a volega (VOH-ehga), the net on the long pole, because you can go deeper. If you can see it, you can probably catch it. I used to feel sorry for them; Lino’d be all excited and I’d be shouting, “Dive, little seppia, dive!” He thought I’d lost my mind. Now that I know how good they are, I’ve quit that. There will always be more. It’s not like they have names.
Last tidbit for the day: In the fish market, they used to use seppia ink to write the prices on pieces of paper. (Hence the color tone called “sepia,” which is more brown than black, really, but which came from the cuttlefish’s ink.) There must have been generations of fishmongers with permanently black hands. Just as soon as the Sharpie and Magic Marker were born, and tourists began to pay good money to eat spaghetti with cuttlefish ink, you can believe that stopped.
One more thing: It may not be very likely that you’ll be buying seppie in the fishmarket, but if you are looking at them for whatever reason, you should know that the whiter they are (it’s more like a ghastly gray mortuary pallor), and the more smeared with sticky black ink, the older they are. Lots of ink is a Bad Sign.
The super-fresh ones, as shown here, have very little ink on them, are a lovely brown with faint pale stripes, and display the most amazing iridescent stripe along their bodies, which is another guaranteed way to confirm their freshness. This stripe is made up of iridophores, which reflect the color of the seppia’s immediate surroundings and hence are part of its system of camouflage. I did not make that up.
Naval cadets pledge allegiance to everything
Posted by: | CommentsDown on the island of Sant’ Elena, the last lobe of land at the eastern tip of Venice, is the Scuola Navale Militare (Naval Military School) Francesco Morosini.
Navy coat of arms
It was founded in 1937, closed in 1945, then went through various versions till it was reopened in 1961. The school is named for one of the Venetian Republic’s greatest Captains-General, who held on to the Peloponnese while most of the rest of Venice’s Greek possessions were dropping like rotting olives into Ottoman hands. Yes, no point pretending we don’t know: He’s the one who ordered the cannons to fire on the Parthenon (September 26, 1687) during the siege of Athens, turning Athena’s temple into an instant ruin. Of course if the Ottomans hadn’t used the temple as an ammunition dump, none of that would have happened. The Republic made him doge a year later. You can see his stuffed cat in the Correr Museum. But back to the school.
“Morosini,” as we call the whole thing for short, is a three-year high school which till the end of this year was strictly for boys (this will change next fall — everyone is pretty keyed-up) and its students are, in fact, officially sworn into the Navy.
(Photo by the Department of Defense.)
They wear the stars on their collars, they get paid a pittance, and they march and salute and haze each other and complain about their commanders and do everything else that military men do.
They also learn Venetian rowing, which is where Lino comes in. He’s been teaching this uniquely Venetian sport/skill/art/tradition to the boys here since 1994. Sailing was already part of their sports program, but Lino thought they ought to learn something that belonged to the place they were living. The Commandant took him up on his proposal, and so it has gone, ever since.
(Left to right, excluding officer with back turned): Adm. Mario Fumagalli, Chief Commandant of the Navy in the Adriatic, based at the Venice Arsenal; Annamaria Giannuzzi Miraglia, city councilor for Education, whose sash in the national colors indicates she is representing the mayor; man with blue sash represents the President of the Province of Venice; (behind them, left to right) Rear Admiral; Brigadier General of the Air Force; General of the Carabinieri; another officer of the Carabinieri
So that’s why we were invited, as we are every year, to the ceremony of the Swearing of Allegiance to flag and country by the boys who are finishing their first year. By this point any boy who’s likely to drop out has already done so, and the remaining first-year cadets — this year numbering 46 — have chosen a name for their class and ordered their banner. This is where it gets really good. Because they not only pledge fidelity to national and military values, but officially present their class banner to the Commandant, which the chaplain then blesses with holy water. Then they swear. Stay with me.
At this point, any reader who doesn’t have the slightest interest in the navy, the military, banners, oaths, or ceremony of any kind can be excused from the rest of this post. (They may already be gone.) On the whole, I wouldn’t have admitted to a particular interest in some of these elements, but now that I’ve gotten to know so many of the boys and their commanders, rowing or going out to dinner with them, that I have to say that I really love this event.
This is one occasion where the ceremonial isn’t the sort of “Hey, crack yourself a cold one” approach that you see at other events, such as the lowering of the flags in the Piazza San Marco on Sunday evening. And any time that the military demonstrates that it takes itself, its comrades, and its history, seriously, will virtually guarantee an event that impresses and moves me. The Navy Band, the oldest military band in Italy, is brought in from Rome just for the occasion, to play the appropriate pieces such as the Submariners’ Anthem, the Navy Anthem, and the national anthem. And if the speeches get boring, I can always watch the boys, as the sun rises toward noon and they start to collapse. This year there was a cool breeze and they all managed to stay vertical.
The class of 2011 chose the name “Ulixes” (as in Ulysses), and the motto is “Suae Quisque Fortunae Faber Est” which as you all know means “Every man is the architect of his own fortune,” a much-quoted observation of a certain Appius Claudius Caecus. 
Sounds excellent, just the sort of half-boast, half-challenge that 15-year-old boys would like, but if you look closely at the sharpness with which Appius C.C. seems to have designed and built his own fame and fortune, not to mention the Appian Way and Appian Aqueduct at the total expense of more talented colleagues and the state treasury, it makes you wonder if the boys chose an example they seriously intend to follow. For any who might be curious, the class of 2010 is named “Eracles,” and the one that’s about to graduate is “Theseus.” I haven’t discovered a reason for the sequence of Greek heroes. Just a coincidence; they could just as easily have chosen the names of stars, constellations, and other terms that look very good on the stern of a dreadnought.
There are two high points in the ceremony for me. The first is the entrance of the class banners. There are more than 40 by now, of all sorts of colors and sizes and mottos and designs, and each is carried by one member of that class. Some of these individuals are not holding up quite as well as their banner, but it’s brilliant to see them all marching across to the martial music of the band.
(Above and above right): procession of class banners; (lower right), the Navy standard displaying copies of all the medals awarded either to ships or to individuals. It is kept by the National Association of Discharged Sailors.
The second great moment, naturally, is the oath-taking itself.
At the crucial moment, the Commandant orders “A me la bandiera!” (Give me the flag — he means the Italian flag). He grabs the flag on its pole and holds it up in front of the boys, all standing at attention. Then he pronounces the oath: “‘I swear to be faithful to the Italian Republic, to observe the Constitution and the Laws, and to fulfill with discipline and honor the duties of my State for the defense of the Motherland and the safeguarding of free institutions.’ Do you swear?” 
What follows is something between a bellow and a roar: “I SWEAR!” It’s thrilling. It’s like something out of the ”Oath of the Horatii.”
Then, of course, there’s lunch. As the saying here goes, “All the psalms finish with the Gloria,” meaning however whatever-the-thing-is may have gone (you remember that there are happy psalms and ghastly, garment-rending psalms), just about any gathering will finish with a feed. In case you might have felt any extreme emotions or thought any inappropriate thoughts along the way, this makes everything all better.
By now the buffet is as predictable as the speeches and the oath — and much less moving — but by this point we’re always famished so we don’t mind facing the same platters of prosciutto, skewers of mozzarella and cherry tomatoes, rice salad, some half-hearted pasta, assorted sandwiches, and so on. No no, I’m not complaining. Anything I don’t have to cook is fine with me.
Besides, it gives me a chance to review the assortment of mothers. There is quite a component of women who, where their garb and jewelry are concerned, will never, ever give up the ship.
Below is a small gallery of the assorted uniformed guests who gave the ceremony its sense of real importance.
Lt. Col. Alberto Catone, Guardia di Finanza. This is a special military police force which, among other duties, oversees fiscal crime and punishment.
(Left) A Lieutenant Colonel of the Serenissima Lagoon Regiment; (right) A colonel of the Artillery, as indicated on his hat by the crossed cannons above a small tank.
Veteran commando frogmen of the legendary “Decima,” or Tenth Assault Vehicle Flotilla. Their first operation was an attack on an Austrian warship on Nov. 1, 1918, making Italy the first ever to use frogmen and manned torpedoes, predating both the U.S. Navy SEALS and the British Royal Marines Special Boat Service. Their badge is crowned by a skull clenching a red rose in its teeth, symbolizing they have pledged themselves up to and including death. MAS stands for various phrases, some technical, but the best is their motto: “Memento Audere Semper,” or, “Remember always to dare.” Today the unit is known as COMSUBIN, which sounds dull even if you do say it in Italian.
(Above left) A captain of the mountain artillery, part of the Alpine regiment of the infantry. Troops carry a black raven’s feather in their cap; junior officers a brown eagle feather, and senior officers a white goose feather. Said Radio Moscow during World War 2, “Only the Alpini can claim to be undefeated on Russian soil.” (Above right) A general of the Carabinieri who is also a pilot, with a monsignor of the Military Ordinariate, a type of military chaplaincy.
Members of the National Association of Italian Partisans, who fought in the Resistance during World War 2. The subject of the partisans is still a highly-charged subject, politically and emotionally, and while they are always present at military ceremonies, they are never officially acknowledged.
Immediately after the oath is the singing of the national anthem. The emotional payload of the moment is clear; this may well be the only time they will ever sing this song with this much conviction.
Giro d’Italia takes Lido hostage, part two
Posted by: | CommentsI regret that this report was held up by technical traffic backed up over my computer. But I promised a report on the effect of stage one of the Giro d’Italia on the Lido, so here it is. Note to self: Don’t be so quick to make promises.
So far, the report from assorted Lido People I know is that they overcame the trauma of being without transport like real troupers. I’m very glad about this, otherwise my sunny Sunday morning trip to the erstwhile “Golden Isle” would have been spoiled by what I anticipated would resemble the final scene of The Trojan Women.
I think the impact of this event was mitigated, not by a resurgence of civic pride – the wildness that bursts forth when, say, Italy wins the World Cup — but by the wealth of stuff that was on sale. Violent pink being the official color of the winner’s jersey (as crocus yellow is for the Tour de France), the crowds were speckled with pink baseball caps, T-shirts, rubber bracelets, and other paraphernalia.
We took the special boat from Venice to the Lido and got off at San Camillo, the rehabilitation hospital, to visit Lino’s oldest sister who’s been there for a month for problems I don’t understand (polite way of saying “Didn’t ask, didn’t listen”), related generally to her being past 90. We took her outside and sat by the edge of the road with a batch of other inmates and watched the squads shoot past. 
We managed to identify a Spanish and a French team, but I never did locate the Italians. In any case, it was an Englishman, Mark Cavendish, who won today’s effort. You probably already know that.
No more than five minutes after the last team whizzed by, the army of Giro workers passed, tearing down their signs and collecting the plastic cones in the street and all the temporary metal barriers. That was much more impressive than the race itself, perhaps because it was so dazzlingly efficient.
We were favored with a rare sighting of the Mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari, who passed by with his bike and his characteristic nonchalance, an attitude of pretending the rest of the world, primarily its humans, doesn’t exist. (”It’s him,” “It’s him,” the people on our side of the road were murmuring excitedly, as if they’d managed to glimpse the last great auk.) Being a professor of philosophy, whose Ph.D thesis was on Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” he might have been giving us a demonstration of Kant’s approach toward the problem of the other six billion people on earth: Walk away.
I realize it was his day off, even though I wouldn’t have thought that politicians gave themselves time off when they go out to move among the voters. But scorn is his default position; 
I have been in a small room with him during a press conference, and this is pretty much his approach to everyone, even people who are two feet away. His personal philosophy appears to be to ignore people as long as possible, but when forced to interact with them, as in a meeting with the city councilors, to shout them down. He is a passionate fan of cycling and told a reporter that he’d once dreamed of becoming a sports journalist. I’m not sure how good he would have been; sooner or later, you do have to talk to people, unpleasant and inconvenient as they may be. And sometimes even listen.
Years ago I interviewed him for 30 minutes — everyone was so impressed that he gave me a whole 30 minutes! — and he didn’t let me ask one question. I realize now that instead of taking the usual mayoral approach to interviews (I’ve done four by now, anyway), which is to give non-answers, he cut out the whole answer category entirely. What I got was a monologue about the history of Venice, which I already knew and if I hadn’t, could (and should) have read in a book. Interviewing mayors is a bigger waste of time than popping bubblewrap. And less amusing.
Giro d’Italia takes Lido hostage, part one
Posted by: | CommentsI don’t follow bicycle racing that much (polite way of saying “at all”) but I do know that there is a hugely important annual Italian event which corresponds roughly to the Tour de France: The Giro d’Italia. It has to start somewhere, and this year, its centennial, it will start on the Lido of Venice.
The oddness of that fact may not strike you immediately, but I have no doubt that it was a major PR coup for Venice, even though I’m not clear on exactly what the benefits might be. But never mind. Perhaps the TV stations covering it are paying for the privilege.
(The view from Venice: The long dark strip on the horizon is the Lido.)
Why is it odd? Because you can’t get anywhere from the Lido. Your choices are to go forward till you hit water, then turn around and go forward till you hit water. However, it does have the advantage of being very flat. Also, to be fair, one could hardly be expected to race around Venice itself, and Mestre would be just as weird. And Venice, as the Most Beautiful Stage Set in the World, inevitably lends itself to big events which want to benefit in some way from the backdrop.
So how is this supposed to work? The racers will be divided into squads, and they will do a team time trial by the chronometer. Then they’ll eat and drink and get their vitamin injections and take the ferry and leave the Lido and pick up the race the next day on the mainland, where the terrain has some verticality and they can really get their teeth into each other.
(The Lido is the long narrow island on the right. Detail from the EuroCart map LAGUNA VENETA, Studio F.M.B. Bologna.)
The city has been working dangerously hard to get the island spruced up and ready for the onslaught. The positive side: Banks of flowers have been installed (usually when plants are put out to beautify a public event, such as the film festival, people begin to liberate them. We’ll see how long these last). Even better, every bump, pothole, crack, fissure, bubble, or other anomaly in the road pavement for the 20.8 km (12.7 miles) course has been filled, smoothed, buffed. The residents are thrilled about that.
The downside: The Lido is being taken hostage by this event. 
Residents have long since been notified that they are forbidden to use their cars tomorrow. Period. (This would be obvious, but it needs to be stated because there aren’t so many roads on the Lido which would offer other options to residents wanting to drive half a mile to do something.) Not being able to drive anywhere means that life will have completely stopped. Forced to take the bus? There will be no bus service. No taxis. No vehicles. This is officially from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, with some inconvenience tacked on at each end. For the Lido People it will suddenly be like they’re living in Brigadoon, for the 99 years and 364 days it’s invisible.
Anyone who needs to go somewhere on the Lido (Lino and me, say, if we were to want to go rowing that afternoon) tomorrow will have the option of once-hourly boat service which will make several stops along the lagoon shoreline. At which point you debark and walk inland — presuming they let you cross the road.
Well, it won’t kill me not to go to the Lido one day. Au contraire. But it’s the drama of the logistics that has overwhelmed the world- and life-view of the Lido People. Whereas citizens of other towns experiencing world-class events (Monaco comes to mind) might feel a kind of excitement and even pride, people on the Lido are thinking only of how hard life is going to be tomorrow. They are among the most provincial, isolated people I’ve ever known, and about the only thing that has any reality for them is their own little island life. (I exclude shopkeepers, who I imagine are hoping for some kind of windfall from the tornado passing through.)
I would love to have the chance to announce that Jesus is coming back tomorrow and He’s starting on the Lido, just to hear what the Lido People would say. It would either be “Will Billa [the supermarket] still stay open till 8:00?” or “So, does that mean that the vaporetto will follow the Sunday timetable?”
I’ll let you know how it goes.
May Day in Venice: What we did
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We ran away. We ran far, far away, out into the lagoon in a little three-oar sandolo called “Granchio” (crab) with our best friend Anzhelika.
By “running,” I mean rowing, naturally. We left the Lido about 8:00 and rowed all the way to Quarto d’Altino, on the mainland shore out beyond the airport. We got back around 6:00; it’s about 45 miles roundtrip, and we were going against the tide. Both ways. And there were also waves, in the sense that after a typhoon you might say there had been wind. I woke up the next morning feeling as if a battalion of small people with big hammers had been pounding me all night.
We’ve done this before, with various people on various types of boat, and it’s always wonderful. The reason is simply because we go out into a distant, seemingly wild part of the lagoon which is so different from the area we’re used to, near the city. We wend our way through the barene, or marshy islets, and along reed-lined channels that seem luxuriously remote (if you can ignore the sound of airplanes taking off from Marco Polo airport just a mile or two away).
This is something like what the lagoon looked like, in a broad sense, to the earliest Venetians who took refuge here from the passage of Attila and his Huns. (I say “broad sense” because most of the barene that formed much of the lagoon landscape even 50 years ago have been washed away by the motondoso, or waves from motorboats.) We had to face our share of motorboats, but what mattered was the haunting loveliness of the waterways.
As we rowed easily along (in the stretches without motorboats), listening to the musical soft sound of our oars and the answering music of the water sliding under the boat, we could also hear the crooning of turtledoves, and a few nightingales, and a distant cuckoo, which sings only in May. There were gleaming white egrets, and one stately heron that flew heavily away. The hawthorn trees were lush with clusters of creamy blossoms, and I could see some tangly bushes of pink wild roses. The surface of the water was streaked with the faint but clear wake of scattering fish, usually grey mullet, and once or twice one sprang into the air, attempting something resembling the long jump. 
When the breeze shifted, or the clouds let more sunshine through, the wetlands would give off a faint muddy smell which seemed oddly clean. There was a hawk wandering around overhead. And a pair of swans, not far from the fish-farms.
All of this, and much more which I haven’t yet seen, or didn’t know when I saw it, is — of course — under phenomenal pressure from all sorts of human activities. The most dangerous and, for us, the most maddening, and even painful, were the motorboats. Big honking mothers full of trippers from somewhere back in the countryside, or smaller boats roaring past with teenage boys, or even cruddy little old boats with cruddy motors carrying some sort of decrepit men with old fishing tackle.
We stopped for half an hour at the trattoria “Ai Cacciatori” at Mazzorbo, just before Burano, for the usual sopressa sandwich and plenty of water. 
Lino, naturally, had an ombra, a glass of white wine. Venetians call this morning refresher (or afternoon, or evening…) a “shadow.” The story goes that back in the very olden days, when the Piazza San Marco was something between a Levantine souk and the Roman Forum, there was a man who sold wine from a small stand in the shadow of the belltower. As the sun moved, he would shift with it to stay in the shadow, and so people went from saying “Let’s go have some wine in the shadow” to just suggesting, “Let’s go have a shadow.” That’s the story, which I have no plans to research further.
We got to Altino past noon, and somewhat past the time when I had begun to wish we were already there. For all the breeze, you could still feel the sun, beginning to shine back up from the water onto your face, and it was hot.
We tied up the boat in the reedy little canal that ends at the very old pumping station; there are still fields stretching out here that need to be irrigated, or drained. Altino was an important Roman town on the main road heading northeast, and farmers still turn up assorted Roman relics of metal or marble. We had lunch at the trattoria “Antica Altino”and started the row home around 3:00.
It was about the time we were passing Sant’ Erasmo that I began to feel really tired. Being tired doesn’t impress me, but I wasn’t happy because I knew what was coming up, and it would have been so much better if I hadn’t been tired: Traversing the lagoon between the island of the Certosa and the vaporetto stop on the Lido at Santa Maria Elisabetta. If I were to say “Recreating Lawrence of Arabia’s life-threatening trek across the Sun’s Anvil,” or “Sailing around Cape Horn with only a torn jib and a busted rudder,” I’d be saying about the same thing.
Of course I knew there’d be waves, but they were worse than I had anticipated, caused by the ferries, and the big motonave to and from Punta Sabbioni, and tourist launches, and taxis, and vaporettos, and all sorts of private motorboats. As far as the quantity of boats is concerned, this was one-quarter or less of what it will be on a Sunday afternoon in July. But it was enough for me. Big, heaving, confused waves came from all directions; small, invisible waves tried to suck the boat back out from under our feet; tall, curling waves surged toward the bow, threatening to send sheets of water into the boat; clustering waves just pounded the boat from all sides, with no design, no rhythm, no pauses. And did I mention we were also rowing against the tide? I believe I did. By the time we reached the tranquil home stretch of water, halfway along the Lido, my left knee was stabbing, my right shoulder felt like a hot anvil had been dropped on it, each palm had a stinging red blister, and I was pretty much at the blind staggers stage.
Of course we swore we’d never do this again. We may have sworn this last year as well. If we do this next year, I will undoubtedly swear it was for the last time. Does that mean it wasn’t punishing? Of course not. Next year it will be even worse. But by the next morning — about the time I became conscious of having been bludgeoned with crowbars — the black, fermenting rage that darkened the return had already faded to pale grey in my mind, and now all I really remember are the birds calling and the boatsong, and the scent of the watery land, and what a great thing it was that the old Venetians had diverted a couple of rivers, because otherwise by now we’d only have had fields and parking lots to row across.
May Day in Venice: What they do
Posted by: | CommentsThere’s so much to say about tourism in Venice I’ll have to go in easy stages, filling many pages and posts. Let’s start with last weekend, which demonstrated the rough outlines of what the term “tourism” can mean here.
The first of May is a holiday in much of Europe, its version of Labor Day in which we celebrate workers and excoriate employers.
Piazza San Marco. People having a good time. I think.
Nothing quite so simple anymore as sending armies and tanks marching across Red Square; this year saw mass demonstrations of angry workers (and ex-workers) in Greece, France, Turkey, Spain, and Germany, and even Russia, which once reveled more in its military parades than rallies of irate trade unions.
Here in Venice, it was just another day in the march of money, and in fact there are plenty of days you could label “mayday mayday,” when holidaying legions of tourists from all over Europe march across the city. So far this year the Horde-Meter has registered Carnival, followed by Easter weekend, then by April 25 (which fell on a weekend this year), and finally May 1.
There were roughly 60,000 tourists per day, instantly doubling the city’s population, shuffling along the narrow streets, overwhelming the Piazza San Marco, and turning the vaporettos (when and if you finally managed to get on one) into something from the Pushkar Camel Fair. Hundreds of tourist coaches unleashed their day-tripping multitudes onto a city whose only public space, the Piazza San Marco, is 320 times smaller than Red Square. Let’s put it another way: The Piazza covers 255 square meters, and crowd-density experts estimate that one square meter can reasonably (we’ll leave some latitude for what that means) hold 3-4 people. That means that ideally there would be no more than 1,000 people in the Piazza at any given time. Let’s say that the crowds peak at noon, and let’s say that that amounts to 40,000 people. Or even 30,000, half the daily total. Or even 20,000, one-third the daily total. Numbers aren’t my strongest point but I think I could already have guessed that there might be as much as 20 times more people in the Piazza than would be pleasant.
The ACTV added three runs per hour to its already heavy Grand Canal vaporetto schedule (reaching a total of 37 extra runs), as well as nine extra runs to Murano and Burano and 13 extra back to Venice. But it’s never enough, in the sense that “enough” would mean no waiting, no crushing, no delays. 
It would be an impressive spiritual exercise for anyone wanting to determine how much compassion they can feel toward their fellow humans to board the #1 local vaporetto line at Piazzale Roma on any Mayday (which amounts to virtually any day from May 1 to September 1) with their soul full of love for humankind, and then measure what’s left by the time they reach San Marco.
If you look at tourism in Venice in strictly logistical terms, you can see that it’s a fascinating little problem, which so far has defeated solution. There are approximations of functionality (more vaporettos), but essentially there is no way in which a city which covers only three square miles can prevent or neutralize the stress caused by this particular kind of mass demonstration. It can only be minimized, sort of.
I spent an hour in the Piazza and I came away with one unexpected insight: It’s entirely possible that the gondoliers at the two “stations” (stazi) there were not born crazy. I’ve always wondered about that. I believe it’s likely that they have been made to go crazy by too many days like this. And don’t think all these tourists represent wallets on the hoof. An inverse ratio between quantity and quality has been noticed by almost everyone, something I’ll go into on another occasion.
Me, I have no idea how much money you would have to pay me — in cash, even – to go to San Marco on a holiday weekend, at least any later than 7:00 AM. I need to protect what little sanity I have left.
When you walk out of the train station in Venice, the Grand Canal is the first thing you see. Or ought to see. I remember that day 25 years ago; it was a bolt from the blue from which I have never recovered.
But the Grand Canal hasn’t been the first thing you see for quite a while now. Your eye goes straight to the imposing baroque church on the other side of the water, and you’ll be staring at it not because it’s a church, or baroque, or imposing. It will be because of the imposing not-even-close-to-baroque billboard covering the facade. I won’t describe it, I’ll just show it to you:
The idea of offering a sponsor a public space to promote its product in exchange for the money needed for restoration of art and architecture has become the greatest thing to hit Venice since the invention of the coffeehouse. And it is absolutely true that the billboard preceding this one was much worse, as the lady promoting a line of handbags was even less clad. This is the kind of hair-splitting you find yourself indulging in here, but ”It could always be worse” doesn’t get it done in a city that is an entire work of art.
Since the city never has any money to do anything it doesn’t feel like doing (though there are weekly miracles in which funds appear for all sorts of unexpectedly necessary things, like installing turnstiles on the vaporetto docks), for some time now it has been offering vast spaces for private cash on monuments. I am not the only person who finds this ad objectionable (nor am I the only person who is wondering why this church has been condemned to Restoration Purgatory; it’s been under scaffolding since the first time I saw it, in 1985). Plenty of people have objected.
I also find it objectionable that half of the Doge’s Palace is covered with publicity for Chopard (it started last September, with ads for Lancia), and 
most of the Marciana Library is concealed by silliness by Swatch. By the way, there is a national law which requires that the scaffolding covering a public monument under restoration must show a perfect replica of the concealed facade. A mere detail, obviously. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
And I mustn’t let myself stop now to talk about how the city had stamped all the waivers needed to allow a Maltese business to put five mothers-of-all-Jumbotrons in the Piazza San Marco, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in exchange for millions of euros to restore the buildings they would be defacing. This plan seems to have been halted, at least for now. One can never be sure if these shenanigans are really dead, or just in hibernation.
Don’t imagine that there are no rules for the safeguarding of Venice’s monuments. There are metric tons of them. But here is how the Doge’s Palace became, overnight, the most beautiful billboard in the world:
The palace needed restoration; among other things, bits of marble were falling off it and barely missing passing tourists. The work would cost 2 million euros, which the city doesn’t have. So the Dottor Group, a massive company specializing in architectural and historic restoration, got the job and put up the money, and so they get to rent out the billboard space of the gods. Then they installed the scaffolding (of course there are also laws limiting the square-footage allowed for publicity on public monuments, which these exceed) by driving iron hooks between the 500-year-old blocks of Istrian stone, hooks which will be there for at least three years.
Suddenly the legs-on-the-church don’t look quite so bad? That’s how you begin to lose your bearings here. But never mind your taste in legs, or churches. There are so many other facets to the plight of San Simeon Piccolo that I can’t organize them for you; I’ll just give them as they come to me.
- Nobody knows how much money is needed for the restoration
- Nobody can say how much money has been found so far for the restoration
- Nobody knows how many hours a day that SACAIM, the restoration company, is working at the site, or whether the contract is being honored
- SACAIM won’t make any statement on whether or not the work has been stopped because it hasn’t been paid all the money it’s due
- Nobody knows what criteria are involved in deciding what is considered acceptable publicity
- The Curia (the church administration) has stated many times that seeking pelf through publicity is “squalid” (there goes most of Western civilization). But this point is especially tricky because church buildings aren’t technically the responsibility of the Church in Italy anymore, but are wards of the state and depend on federal money which is allocated by an assortment of Superintendencies (for architecture, archaeology, “cultural goods,” and so on).
- The Municipal Police (as with the Superintendencies, there is a variety of forces of public order, with varying responsibilities) says that it has done its job as far as paperwork is concerned, the array of official permissions required for work on public buildings, or on public spaces. So technically it has no authority to remove the poster.
The Superintendency of Architectonic Treasures has already stated (as with the handbag-lady poster) that the publicity has to come down. The Curia is against it, but the Superintendency says that the Curia has the power of reviewing all publicity before it goes up. But wait — in the controversy of the Jumbotrons, the Superintendent herself, Renata Codello, stated that every piece of publicity put up during restoration work is regularly approved or rejected by the Superintendency. So who gave the permission for this poster to be put up in the first place? Nobody knows.
So here we are: Nobody decided to put it up, and now nobody can decide whether or how to get it down. But this sudden flurry of discussion is making the Superintendent a little testy.
Yesterday Monsignor Antonio Meneguolo pushed his advantage a little too far by stating that this whole thing is “monstrous and immoral.” Superintendent Codello shot back that even though she never gave permission for this poster (that ought to be an embarrassing thing for a superintendent to admit, but let’s keep going), the Curia hasn’t got much to be proud of either. “We’re all for publicity,” she told the Gazzettino, “it’s the only way which allows us to be able to restore buildings. If the Curia were to put up some money, we’d take the publicity down.”
Furthermore, ”It’s not as if we could have just left the church to fall to pieces, abandoned by the Curia. The patriarchate has never put up a single euro.” So there.
But what about how hideous it is? She’s ready: “The churches of the city are full of examples of really bad interventions.” Presumably not approved by the superintendent. Though one doesn’t know why.
This bickering only shows that here in the Cradle of the Renaissance people still defend themselves by saying ”Yes, I did it, but he did worse.” Which comes right after you say ”Well he started it.”
Let’s imagine that I understand most of what has been going on. What I really don’t understand is why this horrible thing has become an issue right now. It was out there for months and months and nobody said anything. Now, all of a sudden, it’s a huge problem.
In fact, the only thing that both the Superintendent and the Monsignor agree on is that they are shocked, shocked to find that there is a vulgar and immoral billboard on a church.
(I acknowledge the excellent reporting of Davide Scalzotto).
April 25, Part One: Saint Mark’s Day
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April 25 is the feast day of Venice’s patron saint, Mark. (Not the official patron saint of tourists, though you might have thought so. I haven’t been able to find one yet, though Gerasimos and Dymphna would be likely candidates, seeing that they’ve already been assigned to watch over the mentally infirm. Travelers — as opposed to tourists — have the choice of Nicholas, Joseph, St. Anthony of Padua (he of the lost-objects fame) and/or the Archangel Raphael. There is a definite difference between travelers and tourists, and it’s more often the latter who have need of divine aid. Those are just my thoughts.) Still, having one of the four Evangelists to watch over you ought to cover just about any eventuality, and clearly the early Venetians thought so too.
Venice was never without a patron saint, but for the first several centuries of its existence that task was assigned to a Greek soldier saint, Theodore of Amasea (”Todaro,” in Venetian).
The original of this statue is safely out of the rain in a sheltered corner of the courtyard of the Doge's Palace.
In that era Venice was still technically a colony of Byzantium, and a saint’s being Latin or Greek had as much political as religious significance. By 828, though, Venice had begun to reach a level of importance, and independence, which convinced its rulers that they needed to upgrade their guardian. A Latin saint now looked better than a Greek one, and why stop there? They aimed for one of the four Evangelists, Saint Mark, whose body was known to repose in Alexandria, Egypt.
And so they went and stole him. Two intrepid sailors, known to history as “Buono” of Malamocco and “Rustico” from Torcello (unquestionably noms de guerre), spirited the body of the city’s erstwhile bishop out of the Muslim metropolis by hiding it on a wagon covered in pig carcasses (and also cabbage leaves, which was the Venetian way of conserving meat, between alternating layers of lard and cabbage. The Bible compares humans to grass, but Venetians are more realistic).
This exploit highlights two of the most fundamental Venetian traits: shrewdness and audacity. And in case “Good” and “Rustic” appear to have been improbably daring and clever, some scholars have made a good case for their having bribed the shrine’s guardian. The point here, as in much of Venetian history, is that it worked. For my money, the appropriate motto for the Old Ones wouldn’t be the legendary “Pax tibi, Marce, evangelista meus” [Peace to you, Mark, my evangelist] which is inscribed on the book most of his symbolic winged lions are holding, but a straightforward “Get it done.”
In the great days, Venice observed not one, but four celebrations of its saint:
- January 31, the “translation” (well, theft) of his remains, which was popularly called San Marco dei mezeni, because the body had been concealed between (in mezzo) the aforementioned pork and cabbage;
- April 25, his martyrdom. This is the big day for us, and it is called the festa del bocolo, or feast of the long-stemmed rose;
- June 25, the finding of his relics (fancy word for corpse), which had inexplicably gone missing during or after the great fire in the basilica in 976. Legend has it that a priest was led to the site of the concealed body by a powerful scent of roses, so not only did the liturgy involve a priest sprinkling the altar with rosewater, the day itself was referred to as San Marco dell’acqua rosata, or Saint Mark of the rosewater. Roses again. I have to look into that.
- October 8, the dedication of the basilica, which had been built specifically to honor and preserve his body. Ordinary people called this simply San Marco de le zizoe, the Venetian word for jujubes, a popular but transient little autumn fruit here which is like a date made of styrofoam. I buy them at least once just so I can say the word: ZEE-zo-eh. It makes me smile. There is, in fact, more to say about them, but I’ll save that for another time.
All this wasn’t just because Mark deserved it. Venice’s masters loved pomp not only for itself but because they knew how to exploit it. They made a point of creating celebrations around an enormous number of events — saints’ days, deliverance from plagues (twice), military victories, even military defeats. All that was necessary was that Venice had to have been the star. It worked extremely well, because all of this festivizing kept civic pride bubbling away, ready for use at any moment. You weren’t even to imagine that there could be anything better than being a Venetian, and ceremonial was a dependable way to keep that fact front and center in your average Venetian’s brain.
Back to the body. There is a body under the high altar, and it is labeled as being Mark’s. Lino doesn’t believe it. I don’t know if this counts as heresy, but being a good Venetian, he doesn’t care. He makes a good case: For one thing, he says, it’s pretty suspicious that the body is never venerated, not even on April 25. For another, he says that when Angelo Roncalli (patriarch of Venice from 1953-1958) became Pope John XXIII, he gave an important (unidentified) relic to the church in Alexandria. Lino tells me this with that “What more do I need to say” look.
What it all comes down to today is the long-stemmed red rose, the longer and redder the better.
The custom is for a man to give one to the woman — or women — he loves. Could be his wife, mother, sister, girlfriend, cousin. No protocol on this, except for the wife or girlfriend, which are non-negotiable. Anyway, as roses were costing at least five euros each this year, the typical man’s list has probably been cut back to the minimum.
Lino is a traditionalist to the bone, or in this case, the rose. He would go without lunch and possibly even without wine, if he had to, but he would never skip the rose.
He even gives a rose to our club’s eight-oar gondola, or gondolone. Of course she is named “San Marco.”
