Archive for August, 2009
See you in September
Posted by: | CommentsThere are two months here — well, two and a half, if you count the 12 days of Carnival – which are the most intense (polite way of saying “difficult”). They are May and September.
A brigade of lions could help with crowd control. This one doesn't look like leadership material, though. Worry has already taken a toll.
As we’re on the verge of September now, I can say I already feel its ponderous impetus, in the same way a river lifts at the unseen approach of a heavily laden barge.
On September 2 the Venice Film Festival begins (runs till September 12). This world-class event overwhelms the Lido, where our boat club is, which means that going to row and getting home again is going to be hard. The Lido is 6 miles [11 km] long and something like 1/3 of a mile [500 meters] wide, which comes to about two square miles [5.5 square km]. That’s not a lot of space for thousands of visitors all at once. True, most of those thousands spend most of their days (and nights) indoors, at hotels or bars or most of all, screening rooms. But they do come out occasionally, especially to go have a look at Venice, and I leave the rest to your imagination. The vaporetto stop at the Lido is like the fall of Saigon.
Then there is the Campiello Prize, an important national literary event whose peak moments will occur on September 5 and 6. So we add all the literati to the streets and vaporettos.
Fangs and claws. Now we're getting somewhere.
Then we throw in the Regata Storica, or Historic Regatta, which is always the first Sunday of September and this year will be on September 6. This draws mostly day-trippers, or people who are already in town for some other reason. I don’t believe many non-Venetians do more than come in for the day, and many more now stay home and watch it on television. But it does majorly disrupt some of the vaporetto service, seeing as the Grand Canal is blocked for about six hours for the races. Trying to decipher the official timetable for the day is like solving one of those innocent-seeming problems in logic which eventually unhinge you, problems which posit A, B, C and if not A but only B, or if A and C but not B, and so on. It doesn’t bother me because I’ll be out in a boat most of the day and into the night, but yes, there is disruption.
Or cannon. A bronze lion with a cannon might be all that's needed to keep the vaporettos in order. And quiet, too.
Then — because the foregoing wasn’t enough — an international show-jumping event, the Venice All Stars, is planned at the stable next door to our rowing club. This will be September 16-19. Workers have been slaving away at primping up the general area, since it is usually in a state of resigned degradation. The major arteries of the Lido (both of them) will be sclerotic, I imagine, with vans and horse trailers and cars. Equine events seem to involve more wheels than hooves, when you think about it.
But all these mammals, however many legs they may have, will require fodder. So to the restaurants (and also hotels), I wish a hearty mazel tov, this is your big (only; last) chance to recoup whatever losses the skimpy tourist year has inflicted on you. And I have no doubt that recoup you will. Then we’ll spend the next three days reading articles in the paper about how expensive Venice is and how people have been carried out on stretchers after getting the bill for a pizza and a beer.
This dude has got the right idea. If he's serious about anything, he's seriously mellow. He ought to get to know the bronze lion, who is more stressed than a carnivore with a cannon ought to be.
I did in fact just make that last part up. What does happen, however, is that they get the bill and then go to some office and make a formal protest. Complaint. Denunciation. Assorted Venetians read these accounts and go, “Bummer, man.” Or the Venetian equivalent, which doesn’t immediately come to mind.
And on we go.
The power of the Po
Posted by: | Comments“Every river is compelled to flow toward the sea, and it also carries tears with it.”
I don’t know who wrote that, but it is the perfect epigraph for the Po River. And nearly 60 years ago, there were many, many tears.
The Po near Mantova.
Those two words — Po River — are tremendously evocative to millions, especially those living near it, or in some way depending on it. It’s the longest river in Italy, and although it isn’t much compared to the Nile or the Congo, it is Italy’s mythic mass of water.
The Po valley comprises some of the richest and most heavily cultivated land in Europe.
The Po flows 405 miles [652 kilometers] from Monviso, a dazzling mountain in the Cottian Alps, to the Adriatic, through the core of the north Italian Padania Plain and drains an area of 28,946 square miles [74,970 square kilometers].
Some people think it’s monotonous and boring, but that’s when it’s just rolling along like Ol’ Man River. Then every once in a while it floods, and turns into something cataclysmic, and suddenly people are praying to God to make it boring again. You can read more in the article I wrote for National Geographic in the May, 2002 issue.
I’m talking about all this because of my chronic curiosity about a statue stuck off by itself amid a few trees near the Giardini vaporetto stop.
It’s dramatic yet curiously detached; nevertheless, you realize something serious is underway. A rescue, obviously, but it isn’t immediately clear what the danger is. It’s the Po.
Catastrophic floods have occurred many times, but in November of 1951 there was a confluence of factors which spelled doom for man, beast, buildings, crops, bridges, soil, and anything else that was in, on, or near the river. People seem to get all worked up about high tide in Venice, but that’s a Gilbert and Sullivan ditty compared to the Wagnerian devastation the Po visited on 200,000 people, nearly 1,000 of whom lost their lives.
I’m not going to try to describe it; the numbers can do it for me. But I do remember what a friend of mine in Cremona told me about the Po in the major flood of 2000: “The river under the bridge sounded like a waterfall.” In 1951, the volume of water was measured at Cremona at 399,055 cubic feet per second [11,300 cubic meters per second] — it must have sounded like the Last Judgment.
That autumn was especially rainy, not only in Italy but elsewhere in Europe and also in the United States. From November 7-13, two weather fronts — one from the Atlantic, the other from Africa — brought rain that wasn’t particularly intense, but it was continuous. In fact, due to the nature and extent of the catchment basin, it’s long rains, rather than intense ones, that create serious floods.
Before long, the ground was saturated, unable to absorb any more water. Then the rain intensified. A hot southeast wind hit the snow that was falling in the Alps, and melted it. More water.
In the five days between November 8-12, 600 billion cubic feet [17 billion cubic meters] of water fell on the Po Plain, the amount which would normally fall in six months.
The Po’s average discharge is 48,400 cubic feet per second [1,370 cubic meters]; at its flood peak in 1951, the Po’s discharge was estimated at almost ten times that, or 424,000 cubic feet [12,000 cubit meters] per second. That would be Niagara Falls doubled, thundering horizontally toward the sea.
The river was rising because many of its 141 tributaries were also rising, obviously. But when some of these smaller rivers tried to empty into the Po, the power of its flow actually forced them back, where they began to flood their own immediate surrounding territory. That southeast wind wasn’t merely melting snow, it was preventing the Po from emptying into the sea.
Nov. 13: During the night, the church bells in Casalmaggiore (Cremona) and Sabbioneta (Mantova) and all the bells in the surrounding towns and villages begin to ring, to summon the men to try to block the rising water. Urgent requests go out for sandbags.
Nov. 14: The Po exceeds 14 feet [4.30 meters]. At 7:00 pm the river bursts its embankments at Paviole di Canaro. An hour later, it breaks through at Bosco and Malcantone at the rate of 211,883 cubic feet [6,000 cubic meters] of water per second. In a few hours 156 square miles [404 square kilometers] are flooded.
When the flood crest reaches the Po Delta, the area also called Polesine, the level is higher at Rovigo — 15.7 feet [4.8 meters] – than any recorded flood ever.
Nov. 15: An emergency truck evacuating people is caught by the water at Frassinelle Polesine; 84 people, including women and children, die in what is remembered as the “death lorry.”
At 2:00 pm the river bursts the banks at Arqua’ Polesine and the water spreads toward Adria.
Nov. 18: Rovigo is evacuated.
Nov. 19: Adria, Cavarzere, Loreo are completely flooded. The cities are evacuated.
Nov. 20: The embankments at Ceserolo are cut to save Rovigo.
Nov. 25: The crest reaches the sea, and the water begins to recede. After three months, toward the end of February, only about one third of the flooded land is still submerged.
In all, some 425 square miles [1,100 square kilometers] were flooded.
The rescue efforts were massive: The Army, Navy, Air Force, firemen, police, Red Cross, Scouts, and volunteers descended on the stricken towns, working continuously with the help of some 2,000 boatmen. People spent days trapped on the roofs of their isolated houses, hoping someone would come by.
The damage in Polesine: 900 houses destroyed, 300 houses damaged, 38 communities flooded, 160,000 people forced to evacuate, 113,000 hectares of farmland flooded, and 300 hectares of land covered by a layer of sand 6 feet [2 meters] deep.
4500 cattle, 150 horses, 7800 pigs, 700 sheep and goats, and one million quintals [220 million pounds] of fodder, all lost.
37 miles [60 kilometers] of embankments and 52 bridges destroyed.
Of course no one had insurance. What was lost was gone forever. It was Biblical.
Contributions poured — excuse the expression — in, from 65 countries, including Uruguay, Tunisia, Haiti, Indonesia, Lebanon, Costa Rica, Somaliland (as it was known), and Albania, as well as NATO.
Lino remembers the effect it had on people in Venice who, like people for miles around, responded by bringing mattresses, clothes, shoes, blankets, and more to collection points around the city. My friend Roberto, from Milan, was just a tyke at the time, but he still remembers his mother telling him he had to donate one of his toys to the children in Polesine, and not just any toy. She decreed, “Your favorite toy.’”
“It was my favorite teddy bear,” he told me, “but I sent it away.”
"To the soldiers of land and sea Venice salutes the Italians" and below it, "To the memory of Alberto Vio, symbol of the generous impulse of Venice for the brothers of Polesine." On the right side of the pedestal is incised MARZO MDCCCLXXXV and below it, NOVEMBRE MCMLI. The plot thickens.
Many improvements were attempted to prevent anything like this happening again. One of the measures taken was to build ever higher embankments, often (in the cities) walled with concrete. You know how water behaves when it’s forced into a tighter channel or tube? Think of turning on your faucet very hard. Yes. That’s what the Po does now when it floods.
Therefore, when the river floods in spring (melting snow) or autumn (rains), as it will do until snow and rain cease from the earth, it inevitably gains force as it races seaward.
So floods continue — not much anyone can do about that — but the effects are still, if not as catastrophic as in 1951, expensive and distressing. Because houses and fields and poplar forests planted for cellulose keep increasing, and always closer to the river’s edge.
Oh, and some 30 million cubic yards of sand and gravel are illegally dug out of the riverbed for construction every year. Not good if you were looking for ways to minimize flooding, which if you’re a gravel-robber you probably aren’t.
In 1994, the Po flood caused 70 deaths and 10,000 people lost their homes, due mainly to failures in the flood warning system. The human element — always the wild card.
In 2000, the Po flood caused 25 deaths and 40,000 were evacuated.
And so it goes. The Po. Majestic. Magnificent. But I’d never call it monotonous.
NOTE: About the statue with the double inscription: Everyone but me will already have figured it out – it was originally made to commemorate the heroic efforts of the Army to help the victims of the Po flood in the spring of 1882. (I know that the inscription reads 1885, but I am trusting my source, the immortal Giulio Lorenzetti, for this information.) After the inundation of 1951, the statue was recycled to commemorate the equally heroic rescue work (hence the noticeably non-1951 garb of the figures depicted).
Alberto Vio, Lino tells me, was “famous” for having provided boats for the rescue efforts. I don’t know any more than that just now, but it explains why he is mentioned on the plinth. I can tell you, though, that the statue was made by Augusto Benvenuti in 1885, and that it used to stand in Campo San Biagio, the small area in front of the Naval Museum and church of San Biagio. Lino remembers seeing it there when he was a lad. Then someone decided it should move out and they found this anonymous little spot for it by the Giardini. Kind of a modest end to a work that was entitled “Monument to the Italian Army.” But if everybody’s fine with this, so am I.
“Besieged”: tourism update
Posted by: | CommentsI know it might seem that this subject just won’t go away, even if, as Mark Twain said about something else, you take a stick and hit it on the snout. But as it’s one of the central subjects of existence here, there is no escape.
I was interested to see the headline in the Gazzettino two days ago, “Venice doesn’t know how to keep its tourists.” This is intriguing, considering that much of the criticism hurled at tourism here seems to have to do with wanting the tourists to go away.
Just in case, though, that my recent disquisition on tourism might have seemed like the lonely ravings of a solitary misfit, a recent study by the Confindustria Venezia, a business consortium, which looked at Venice, Rome and Florence, has shown not only the brevity of the average stay (2.47 nights), but that tourists rarely return to Venice. And they say outright that, as I mentioned the other day, the city lacks a tourism strategy.
“The central point,” said Elisabetta Fogarin, president of Confindustria Venezia Turismo, “is that Venice needs a policy of Destination Management. It needs to be relaunched at the international level, to make it an icon and a glamour destination again, where the visitor and traveler can live an experience that can’t be repeated somewhere else.”
Glamour is the grail of tourism here, the notion that quality can be made to replace quantity in the economic equation. I’d suggest that this dream is something like wanting all trains to be like the Orient Express, including the Venice-Pordenone local. Which I would totally endorse, except that there are too many people who just need to get home from work to make that even imaginable.
The statistic of 2.47 nights here is, according to the study, a sign that Venice is drastically under-realizing its potential; in any case, it’s not indicative of “culture tourism” (for which one needs more time, clearly. Anybody who has entered the Uffizi Gallery in Florence with the intention of seeing it all knows that about five months is probably a more reasonable time frame for visiting some cultural monuments here.) And 2.47 nights is just another way of saying “not quality tourists.” Bearing in mind that to reach an average, you must have many people who are staying less time (and at least some who are staying longer, true.) But mostly tourists just hit and run.
I think somebody has already recognized this and decided to play to Venice’s currently somewhat battered image. A new campaign promoting the city’s museums shows two scenes: One is a detail of the huddled masses in the Piazza San Marco, next to a shot of the magnificent Scala d’Oro in the Doge’s Palace, a ceremonial staircase dwarfing two lorn humans. The slogan in Italian translates as, “If you stay outside, you can’t say you’ve seen Venice.” Which I like better than the way they translated it, snappy as it may be.
So to really see Venice, you have to get away from Venice? Well, I guess that’s as good an approach to crowd management as another. It just seems slightly regrettable that instead of promoting this monument for the wonder of the world that it is, this angle is more like “Want to get away from all those uncouth boors outside? Flee into our gorgeous past, which is deserted,” which actually sounds pretty good unless you know that this means you’re going to have to pay 13 euros ($18) to walk through endless non-air-conditioned rooms and look at a million paintings that all look alike. Or so it might seem if your primary motivation for entering was merely because it isn’t Out There.
I happen to worship the Doge’s Palace and consider it a given that if you don’t spend several hours here, you can’t have the tiniest notion of the greatness, brilliance and sheer power of the Venetian Republic. Without which, your visit to Venice is just a pointless trek through a flyblown postcard.
It’s just too bad to tell people they should see the museums because there aren’t any of those awful tourists there. But I guess if you have no tourism strategy, you’ll try all kinds of things.
Seeking a new viewpoint
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The location of Rosa Salva's cafe makes an excellent outdoor perch for resting and ingesting many first-class calories in the form of pastry and ice cream.
One Sunday afternoon as I was toiling along toward the Fondamente Nove on my way to Burano, I stopped for refreshment (coffee and use of the bathroom) at the elegant cafe/bar Rosa Salva in Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo.
Let me note right here that although travel writers seem to love propagating “Zanipolo,” the ancient Venetian name for this trusty duet of saints, I myself have never heard any Venetian use that word, even by mistake. That era, whenever it was, is long, long gone. (I have seen it written, occasionally, on local boats or bars.) I just wanted to point that out.
Anyway, it was a miserable day. When it rains like that the entire world goes sodden, nothing escapes. Your skin isn’t just wet, it’s saturated. The air, your clothes, your brain. A day like this makes you want to just stay in bed, with the (sodden) covers pulled over your (sodden) head.
Not surprisingly, there were no other customers in the cafe. A dark-haired girl and a young man wearing glasses were standing behind the bar. I smiled and gave that whaddya-gonna-do shrug toward the weather and the world.
I said, “Why are we here?”
They smiled. He said, “Good question. There’s nobody around — nobody. And there’s five of us here to work today. Some days even with five we’re working like crazy, but look at this. There’s nothing to do.”
Helpful little Anglo-Saxon, no-minute-left-unexploited me, bounces right in: “You could read a book,” I offered. “Write some letters. Do needlepoint. Write the story of your life. Not the stuff that happened, but the stuff you wish had happened. Your dreams.”
Did someone say dreams? He was ready. “My dream was to become a captain of a vaporetto with the ACTV [the local transport company],” he replied.
“Good grief!” I said (or rather, its Venetian equivalent). ”If you’re going to dream, dream big! Captain of a vaporetto? Why not make it captain of a cruise ship? After all, it’s just dreams. Go for it!”
“Well, no,” he replied, unruffled. “It would be enough for me. It’s a secure position, you work your seven hours and then you go home.” (This the classic philosophy of a certain sort of person here: I need to work but don’t let it disturb my life.) “Besides, my father was captain of a cruise ship and he was gone for weeks at a time.” Oops. I was aiming at the wrong dream.
“Well, that changes things,” I said. “You know what you’re talking about. So fine. Why don’t you apply to the ACTV?”
“I did.” He gestured toward his glasses. “You can’t make it if you wear glasses.”
I didn’t want to give in. “So have the operation!”
“I could do that” — he had obviously been serious about this dream, small as it might have seemed to me. “It would correct the near-sightedness, but not the astigmatism.” (Or the other way around, I can’t remember.)
“I wouldn’t have minded being a train driver,” he went on, “but it’s the same problem about the eyes. ”
“Subway driver?” (Somewhere else, obviously, not here.) Nope — anyone who wants to work at something that’s part of the autotramvieri union, it’s the same story. He was stuck.
He had sort of made his peace with it, but he was still young enough to feel the empty space where what he wanted to be his life was supposed to have been put. Meanwhile he’s making do with carrying overpriced cappuccinos to exhausted tourists. Or not, as is the case today.
“Well,” I said, still trying to be helpful but drastically changing tack, “just think, anyway you’ve still got your eyes. How many people could say they wish they had your problems?” Not the best contribution, being repulsively banal, but true, which is something, anyway.
He agreed. Well, what else could he do? Evidently he had long since reached that conclusion, the idea that things could have been, or be, worse. But meanwhile the rain is pouring down, and the motor has pretty much stalled in his life, so to speak. Whether he simply needs more fuel, or new spark plugs, or some part that’s more expensive and hard to find (”…we’ll have to order it…”…”it will be two months…” …”everybody’s closed for Christmas/New Year’s/summer vacation”…) I hope he finds it and gets his life moving again. He’s too young to stay stalled in the breakdown lane of life like this.
Kids coming out of the woodwork
Posted by: | CommentsI love the fact that this neighborhood is running over with children, like some cosmic bathtub.
If your mom forces you to go shopping with her first thing in the morning, at least you can make it easy on yourself by hitching a ride.
Contrary to the Italian national average birthrate, which at 1.37 per woman is almost the lowest in the European Union (only Spain and Greece are lower), here in the heart of darkest Castello offspring are definitely not produced in fractions. I suppose they are seen as — well, I’m not sure what. Necessary? Fun? Inevitable? Normal? Probably all of these, and more.
In the morning, all is effervescence and charm; the little urchins are full of high spirits as they set off to conquer the world. Toward afternoon, though, the scene turns darker. Something happens to those shining little angels, tousled, chirping, frolicking, laughing in twinkly little voices, beings that can make you want to have a dozen just because they are the concentrated essence of happy-to-be-alive-on-Earth-with-youness.
As 5:00 PM slinks toward you, Things Change. It is the Hour of the Crying Child. You hear crying in the distance, or even nearby, as the little people begin to troop homeward, often goaded by their intolerant and domineering older siblings. (Yes, they have siblings here. It’s great.)
On St. Martin's Day (November 11,) kids dress up and come out in droves, banging pots and buckets and demanding candy or money from the neighbors. The afternoon turns into something of a controlled riot.
The crying, or screaming, or incoherent baby-vulture-like screeching, gets closer and closer, and as it approaches it also gets louder and more grating. Often it is lubricated with angry, exhausted, exasperated, helpless tears, the kind the kid can’t turn off even as they overwhelm him or her. The kind that gets ratcheted up with each attempt, increasingly harsh, by its adults to bring the hysteria to a halt.
A little boy was crying like this the other day as he and his entourage passed along the fondamenta across the canal from us. It was a sound somewhere between a shriek and a whine, more temper than pain, and was definitely under his complete control. It was that “I’m going to punish you till you snap” noise that you know he can keep up for hours, if need be, that stops being about anything other than itself.
I was heading over the bridge toward him, to do some errands. Two American girls crossed the bridge, coming toward me. As they passed, I heard one say to the other, “I’m never having kids.”
I went down the other side. Standing at the bottom of the bridge were three little old ladies — they’re always in three, like the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. As I passed, I heard one say to the others, in Venetian, “We always had a smile on our faces. Always.” Of course she was referring to the Golden Age, when she was the little boy’s age and life was hard but happy and people were simple and honest and children were perfect.
Kids can claim virtually any part of the street for themselves; if they had a flag they could declare their own independent republic. Which would be ruled by dictators, thousands of them.
Yeah, right. Everybody was ready with a comment, no matter how irrational. I choked off the temptation to turn around and shout at all of them, “You’re lucky your mother isn’t here now!”
Late yesterday afternoon I was headed toward via Garibaldi at the Moment of the Swarming Children (when they all obey some primal signal and come out to, well, swarm), a festive interlude which briefly precedes the Hour of the Crying Child.
As I was walking along the fondamenta, I saw a little blonde girl, maybe four years old, standing at the railing looking into the water of the canal. Her mother and a couple of her female friends were standing near her but involved in hashing over whatever needed to be hashed. Meanwhile, the girl was transfixed, staring down.
As I passed by, curious to glimpse what she was looking at, her older brother went over to her. He might have been seven. She looked up at him and I heard her say two words: “E’ morto.” It’s dead. A pensive little voice stating a simple little fact.
It was a pigeon, floating in the water. I had a strange rustic impulse to say “Great! One less! That leaves only about ten billion to go.” But I didn’t. First, I try not to invite myself into other people’s lives, especially if I don’t know them (though via Garibaldi grants a lot of leeway for spontaneous badinage even among strangers).
But I couldn’t do it. Something in her voice had struck me. It wasn’t that she was sad, or repulsed, or anything you could identify with a single word, or even several words. She was standing there doing her best to grasp the fact that something which had been alive wasn’t alive anymore, and wasn’t ever going to be alive again. She made me feel strangely respectful.
I am sure that if I had said anything — anything at all — I would have made it worse. I think her brother sensed the same thing, because as long as I was in earshot, I didn’t hear him say one thing. They just stood there, looking down, waiting for their mother to stop talking.
Gondoliers gone wild
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Not only have gondolas changed fairly radically in the few hundred years since this image was made, but so have the gondoliers. Boatmen have always gotten into arguments; under the Venetian Republic there was even a special code of laws designed specifically to adjudicate boat-borne conflicts. Maybe we should bring them back.
Last Friday an unfortunate event occurred which not only did not shed honor on the worshipful order of gondoliers, it did way, way the opposite, and then some.
The two gondoliers involved have not only been suspended for five days till the jury decides whether to suspend them for three months (”You are so grounded!!”), but three sopping American tourists have been hauled out of the canal, and I think most of their personal effects have been recovered by the fire department divers.
For all its elegance, complexity, and historic value, in some ways the gondola is just another working boat in a city where most of the work involves a boat somewhere. Just like the blue cargo barge and the green garbage truck, the black gondola is here to make a living. What the passenger brings to the experience is kind of up to him or her.
In the early afternoon of the aforementioned Friday, two gondoliers based at the stazio near Piazzale Roma came to blows. I have to say that having heard their location, what followed didn’t come as a total surprise, seeing as the gondoliers here generally are not of the type you can imagine drinking tea with their pinkies extended. It is also fairly evident that conflict between the two men had already been on a low boil for some time now.
Gondolier A was boarding three Americans for a gondola ride. To do this, the gondolier ties his boats to some slim pilings next to a wooden platform with descending steps, and helps the passengers aboard.
Gondolier B approached and, seeing that the embarkation point was occupied and that the people were taking too long (in his opinion) to get aboard, was seized by a fury that impelled him to leap off his boat without even tying it up, and head straight for Gondolier A. The enraged bellowing, threats, imprecations, etc. that flew between the both of them did not need subtitles or any other form of translation; the Americans, seeing an ugly fight approaching, got scared and all stood up together to get off the boat immediately.
Sudden simultaneous movements, which involve weight as well as motion, especially all concentrated on the lower starboard side of a flat-bottomed gondola, are Not Good. The tourists know that now, because suddenly all three were in the drink and one was at least momentarily sort of stuck under the capsized gondola. This is Extremely Not Good.
Happily, at that moment a motor launch was passing, carrying some firemen back to the firehouse. Firemen here are almost always involved in nautical rescues, so they got right to it. People saved, boat righted, sunken objects (including a video camera) eventually retrieved. Gondolier A gets to washing and drying the boat, and peace — or the opposite of rage, anyway — descends.
Needless to say, the Ente Gondola (the gondoliers’ organization) is now taking steps, which will be determined after all the meetings have concluded.
An isolated incident between two men who haven’t had their rabies shots? Not quite, it seems. Because the scene now shifts to Sunday morning (two days later), at the Rialto area.
A batch of us had rowed over from the Lido, as we like to do on Sunday mornings, and had tied up our eight-oar gondola to the platform at the Erbaria, an open sort of small square facing the Grand Canal.
Being a popular tourist area, the Rialto is a place where some gondoliers tie up to await potential clients. Even to entice passersby to become clients. But not today. Enticement was not in the air.
The young gondolier kneeling on the stern wiping down his boat with a chamois cloth suddenly started to roar at a passing tourist who had stopped to make some snaps of him at work. “I’m not paid to be photographed,” the gondolier yelled, using plenty of vulgar phraseology and making some threatening motions that implied he might be ready to come ashore to demonstrate how much he meant it.
The tourist fled. We stood there, aghast. Lino was outraged.
“The gondola and the tourist are a gondolier’s bread,” he said. “If there’s one thing a gondolier depends on, it’s tourists. This shows that not only is he incredibly rude, he’s even willing to shoot himself in the foot.”
Say what you will, it's hard to think that this gondolier is feeling very much in tune with the romance and glamour the public might imagine was his lot. It can be a very demanding way to make a living, as you can surmise by imagining the frame of mind of a gondolier like this one, preparing his boat for a cold and possibly not very profitable day -- here, on New Year's Day at 9:00 AM.
Lino wasn’t shouting or gesticulating but I think he was angrier than the gondolier. Because the gondolier was merely responding to some random neural firing somewhere in the limbic system of his brain, whereas Lino felt offended as a Venetian on behalf not only of the gondoliers who aren’t insane, but the image of the city as a whole. It’s painful to him to think that people go away with an idea of his city as a place where you take your life (and your wallet) in your hands.
Let’s see if these two events turn out to have been merely some bizarre coincidence and we can all go back to sleep. Otherwise, I don’t know whether it makes more sense to approach a gondolier wearing a life vest or a bullet-proof jacket.
Watermarks: The sign of “C”
Posted by: | CommentsIt may be that your eye is not drawn wallward as you stroll along the canals of Venice when the tide is low.
Perhaps you don’t find the mats of squishy green clinging to the building foundations very appealing. Perhaps you don’t wish to notice how many small life forms are scurrying around, unhindered by that pesky water. Perhaps there is a general sort of sliminess that reminds you uncomfortably of just how biological the Venetian environment is, and how little the lagoon cares about posing for you and your romantic photographs.
But let’s say those things don’t bother you; let’s say you’re curious to find out what’s beneath the waterline, or almost. If you look carefully, you may very well see this:
This incised capital C with the line beneath it is called the “Comune Marino” (hence the “C”), which roughly means “average sea.” Or perhaps “sea average.” This one, as it happens, is in the canal just outside our little hovel.
Water level measurements were formalized in Venice in 1440 when the Water Authority (Magistrato alle Acque) began to measure the upper level of wet algae on canal embankments by carving the letter “C,” which indicated the normal high-tide level. Water fosters certain kinds of algae which flourish in an “intertidal zone”, which is alternately wet and dry, and the line of algae corresponds to the level of water. Obviously.
So “Comune Marino” refers to the line created by the algae, a line which clearly indicates the upper limit of the tide.
Good to know, but why? Because there are many situations in which an engineer would want to know where the average upper limit would be — if he was planning to build a bridge nearby, for example, or even an entire building.
So far, so general. Keep in mind, though, that in each place the “C” is a marker of the average sea level in that canal at that point. Its height only matters in relation to what’s next to it — the water level will be “high” (or low) compared to a building foundation or embankment. If the “C” appears to be going down (or the algae to be going up, like elevators in a French farce) it might indicate that the building is subsiding, or even that the canal is silting up and becoming shallower. Factors such as these all bear some influence on where the average sea level will be in that place and whether you find it innocuous or annoying.
A look at the mark when the tide is out. This illustrates the difficulty of answering the frequent question, "How deep are the canals?" As in, when the tide is high, or when it's low?
An analysis of the displacement of the “algal belt” also gives engineers some idea of the long-term trend of apparent rising of the sea level. This is a subject that is far too great for this little post, but I merely note that the algae is playing its part in informing the world about the state of Venice.
Don’t be too quick, though, to think that just because there’s some algae above the “C” that the city is sinking inexorably into the lagoon. The algae has its own growing period (late winter to early autumn) and if the average high-tide level should rise one year, for one or many of several reasons, the line of algae will also rise. If it should go down the next year, there will be less algae at the previous level. Exceptional peaks in the high-tide level may cause temporary new growth, but it won’t necessarily survive the sunshine and dryness that returns when the tide level goes down.
Algae growth is also influenced by whether its location is on a sunny or shady side of the building, or whether the stone or brick it’s inhabiting is particularly porous.
Field observations have shown that the fluctuation in the height of the “algal front” is no more than 2 cm (7/10ths of an inch).
So all is well? Not really. One factor the Venetian engineers of 1440 didn’t have to deal with was “motondoso“ – that’s a polite way of saying “water constantly splattering from the waves caused by motorboats.”
I’ll be devoting plenty of attention to motondoso on a future page, but I recommend that you draw conclusions very carefully about water level based solely on the line of algae. It’s highly likely that whatever spot you’re looking at is getting drenched by waves day and night, encouraging algae in an extravagant way, something that wasn’t happening back when they were busy carving “C’s” all over town.
The constant and extreme "motondoso" in the Giudecca Canal has created the perfect environment for algae on what used to be considered dry land, so its presence here doesn't tell you anything useful about average sea level. Do not ever step on this kind of algae, it's more slippery than a slice of raw bacon.
The Daily Trivia: Regular measurements with instruments began in the 1870s. In 2004, mean sea level was found to be 25 cm (9 inches) higher than it was in 1897. Yet all water-level measurements continue to be based on the mean sea level in 1897.
We like to cling to the old ways here. Or something.
Welcome to the neighborhood
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Via Garibaldi used to be a canal, which you can tell by the white stone border on each side. It contains everything needful for human life, including two pharmacies. The fact that they both stay in business tells me something about the neighborhood but I'm not sure what.
If someone in Venice were to ask me where I live, the generic answer would be “Castello,” which is the name of the sestiere, or one of the six neighborhoods into which Venice is divided. But that’s just a little too generic, considering that Castello is fairly large and has several hundred little subsets with all sorts of variations ranging from the sublime to the moderately mystifying.
The more precise answer is “Via Garibaldi.” We don’t actually live right there — we’re down beyond the end of it. But it’s an answer which represents not only geographical coordinates and a zip code, but an entire biosphere of its own with its own history and climate and fauna, a zone which to Venetians of other sestieri still connotes verging on the exotic, even vaguely hazardous.
Carnival means the street is clogged with kids, the only difference from every other day being that they're in costume. Otherwise, it's just chaos as usual.
Once, when we were living in Dorsoduro, we overheard a mother snapping at her kid: “Stop shouting! You sound just like somebody from Castello!” And when we moved away — to Castello, of all places — Lino could hardly believe how far down in the world he had come. To his relatives, he might as well have gone to Tasmania. In fact, Tasmania would have made some sense. But Castello?
Many, if not most, people who visit Venice think of the city of palaces and monuments, and maybe also some trendy boutiques and clever little galleries. Our part of Venice is a gristly precinct beyond and behind the Arsenal. The Arsenal was the shipyard where Venice’s fleets were built, the foundation on which Venetian power — economic, military, political — rested. It’s thanks to the Arsenal that all those palaces and monuments exist, so Castello doesn’t have to apologize to anyone if it has chosen to remain in its primordial state. During Venice’s Great Days there were as many as 10,000 people working in the Arsenal, and their dwellings and relatives surrounding it constituted what amounted to a company town. Although very few, if any, locals still work in the Arsenal, I’m convinced there are people here who still haven’t discovered fire.
A member opens the clubhouse of the Mutual Aid Society of Carpenters and Caulkers, a flourishing remnant of the old Arsenal days when the workers had only each other to turn to for help.
If Venice isn’t a place for everybody, Castello is even less so. And Via Garibaldi is the axis of a Hogarthian world where the men’s bodies swarm with tattoos; where men and women alike use hand-hewn phrases which can’t be translated and shouldn’t be repeated, and their rampant children have two basic ways of communicating: Yelling and crying. They’re a lot like London’s East Enders (denizens of another once-great seaport enclave) — tough, practical, unromantic yet sentimental homebodies to whom family and neighborhood are the universe, where grown men call each other “love” and women call each other “girls.” It’s not that they don’t know there’s a world out there, they just don’t find it all that interesting.
I love Venice in a complicated way that I don’t understand very well. In the midst of the obvious beauty and grandeur and all, the city is also composed of so many aspects which verge on ugliness but which, strangely, also have their own sort of allure. Nelson Algren once wrote that “It isn’t hard to love a town for its greater and lesser towers … but you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too.” You discover this in unexpected moments and glimpses, where she doesn’t mind you seeing her without her girdle: no excuses, no apologies.
The “alleys” would be out here, with the ingenious, illegal, improvised sewer outflows, and the “What, me worry?” deposits of dog poop and the hand-lettered signs vilifying the anonymous neighbor who has left his bag of garbage under your window, and the mismatched lifelong friends in the bar shouting at each other — the one who’s right and the one who’s wrong — about something that happened years ago. In fact, they’re both right. Or wrong.
What happens is this: Some people put out plastic bags of garbage long before the collection is due to begin. Sometimes they do this on a Saturday afternoon, which means the bags will sit there till Monday morning, thereby giving the seagulls plenty of time to bust open the bags and scavenge. Now the pigeons have started to take up the habit as well. Everyone knows this, including the people who put out their bags, bags which would be collected from their very own doorstep, but which they prefer to bring secretly to this anonymous corner. It's so stupid it's almost beautiful.
This is not nostalgie de la boue; many things about life down here in the bilges range from infuriating to only slightly flinch-worthy. Then there are the aspects you can’t easily categorize — say, the septic tank somewhere on the other side of our canal which for far too long desperately needed pumping out. When we had company for dinner I used to pray that the wind wouldn’t shift. They say you can get used to anything, but I’m here to tell you: Not that.
I was walking down the via Garibaldi one early evening; there was a middle-aged Venetian couple coming toward me.
There had been a few airplane crashes that month: One in the sea just outside Palermo, another that hit near Athens, now one in Venezuela somewhere.
Anyway, I reach earshot just as the woman is saying to her husband, “Not me. I’ll never go on an airplane. Forget it.”
He says, “What about a ship?”
“Not even a ship. I’m staying home, I’m not going anywhere. If I die, I’m going to die right here in Via Garibaldi.” (Wait a minute — “If” you die?).
That’s what the true voice of a neighborhood sounds like — especially this one. Via Garibaldi to the bitter end.
I’m with her.
You'll always run into somebody to talk to -- or about -- on Via Garibaldi.
Street Names: Refreshing
Posted by: | CommentsThere are four places in Venice which share a mystic link, which is discernible only to the initiated. The initiation will now proceed:
The "'Passage Under a House' of the Waters"
The “waters” in this street name are not those of the adjoining canal, you may be glad to know.
They were the delightful iced drinks which were sold in shops often called botteghe da acque, or “shops of the waters.” Such a shop was doing great business here in 1566, run by a pair of brothers, Alvise and Girolamo Giusto.
In 1724, a guidebook stated that “The best chocolate, coffee, refreshing frozen waters, and other such drinks are made and sold in the Calle delle Acque, near the Ponte dei Baratteri.” Right here, in other words.
These places were not unlike the cafes we know today; they were often small, crowded, loud, and attractive to gamblers. (There are still assorted joints around town where little old men sit all day playing cards and shouting at each other, but their drinks usually involve some kind of alcohol, and it’s not particularly frozen, either.) On November 10, 1756 a decree forbade gambling in this very locale, which leads me to suspect that things had gotten even further out of hand than was usual.
"Ice Street"
Frozen beverages require ice, which was made and sold in various places around the city. Older Venetians have no trouble remembering the boats loaded with large blocks of ice, which the men who rowed the boats would haul ashore wrapped in sheets of coarse hemp to whatever customer had ordered it. The block went into the refrigerator — in America it was simply called an icebox – where it kept the food cold (or cool, anyway) until it had melted away, dripping into the pan below.
In 1661, when this street was mentioned in a property document, the sale of ice was a semi-monopoly of the coffee business. This is not surprising, considering that the coffee-house was where the iced drinks were made.
"Spirits Street"
While we’re discussing potables, you also had the option of something stronger, particularly grappa and its relatives, distilled liquids near which one should not play with matches.
The spelling of this street name is a bit eccentric; it ought to be acquavite, or “water of the vine,” as grappa and some of its relatives are made by distilling either wine or grape residue (vine, stems, seeds, skins, etc.), while aquavit is made from grain. But as the word has also been transmogrified into acqua vitae, or “water of life” (”life” being “vita“), we won’t quibble. I guess they know how to name their own streets.
And who had the concession to sell these shots of liquid fire? The coffee-house owners again. In 1711, in the street above, near the church of the Gesuiti, there was just such an establishment being run by a certain Elia Giannazzi. By 1773 there were 218 shops in Venice specializing in acquavite. Life was hard, winter was long, it kept you going.
A very Venetian product which Giannazzi and his confreres would also have sold was rosolio. Still made today in various forms, it is a liqueur made of rose petals which is often used as a base for other liqueurs. I’m not sure what would happen if you asked for rosolio in a cafe or bar today; you’d probably have better luck asking for one of its siblings, such as limoncello or maraschino.
A note on alcohol: You will frequently read that alcoholism is hardly known in Italy because wine is such an integral part of the culinary and social culture. Children start sipping wine at an early age, at meals, and so it is assumed that they are immune to excess. However, these cliches do not acknowledge the popularity and omnipresence of what are generally termed super-alcoolici, or hard liquor, especially with people living along Italy’s northern rim where mountain traditions often involve making and consuming highly inflammable liquids.
Young people today in Italy may or may not drink wine with their meals, but increasing numbers of them will almost certainly be binge-drinking hard liquor in discos and bars on the weekend and then attempting to drive home. In Venice, this often means using a motorboat, probably without any lights on, usually at high speed. More often than you’d wish, you read about some adolescent who never made it because he “painted himself on a piling,” as they say here. Or dying by alcohol poisoning. And in case you’re tempted to similarly romanticize the seemingly so-grown-up approach to alcohol in France , which like Italy shares the stereotpical image of the jovial family, children included, tranquilly drinking wine out in the garden with their baguettes and challenging cheeses and all, I merely note that France has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world. So, easy with the cliches, here as everywhere. Nothing is simple.
"The Street of the Coffee-Seller."
And so we come to the fountainhead of all these concoctions: The cafetier, who sold and prepared coffee to be consumed on the spot and who, as we have seen, had his finger in the ice and booze businesses as well.
Coffee has a long and glorious history in Venice; Venetian merchants first recorded its use in Turkey in 1585, and began to sell it in Venice in 1638, whence the enthusiasm for coffee-houses spread across Europe. The Caffe Florian in the Piazza San Marco opened on December 29, 1720, and makes a good case for being the oldest coffee house in continuous operation.
The “mystic link” I mentioned above is therefore revealed to be coffee. The coffee-house owners and/or operators managed a very large slice of the liquid refreshment business in Venice, and while Venetian coffee doesn’t enjoy the fame of its Neapolitan or Roman cousins, I’m willing to call it the water of life. Especially first thing in the morning.
Flashback: Signor Vitale
Posted by: | CommentsVitale Rossi was the last luganegher (yoo-ghan-eh-GHAIR) in Venice, and his shop and workshop happened to be just across the canal from our first apartment. In the shop, he and his implacable wife Anna sold the myriad pork products he had created: prosciutto (cured and cooked), pancetta (smoked and otherwise), sopressa, salame, culatello, zampone, and so on. If it had been any relation to scrofa domesticus, it was fair game to him.
More important to me — as after all this time I still have only a cordial, if not passionate, relationship with swine products — Signor Vitale was my guardian angel. I deeply regret not ever having taken even one picture of him, but I doubt that a mere camera could have captured, much less conveyed, the profound kindness that radiated from his eyes, his smile, his follicles, his synapses, his DNA.
Facade of the former scuola of the luganegheri, on the Zattere at number 1473. At the fall of the Republic in 1797 there were 684 individuals registered in 198 shops working exclusively with pork.
Back when I was totally new here, knowing nobody and speaking only the most rudimentary pidgin Italian, he would gaze at me as I attempted to order with the gentlest and most patient expression I’ve ever seen. If I came into the shop on the verge of closing time, at the end of a long and tiring day, and asked for a mere bottle of water or two rolls, in some silent way he convinced me that this transaction was the best thing that had happened to him all day.
There were many, many afternoons around 4:00 or so when I would go over to buy some fragment of something just so I could absorb for a moment his extraordinary aura. He would relax for a few minutes by expressing some opinion on the current state of anything, or relating assorted tidbits about his past, or about the business, or the finer points (explained very carefully but lovingly) of curing prosciutto. Occasionally he would take me back into the laboratory and show me the various pieces of meat undergoing treatments and processes involving smoke, salt, and time.
As a workplace, it couldn’t have changed much from the pork labs of the Dark Ages. But for Signor Vitale, raising a herd of Olympic heptathletes would not have required more devotion or given him more satisfaction than he felt every day as he tested and turned and smelled the progress of his assorted hanging hocks.
Their patron was Saint Anthony Abbot, who is often depicted with a pig. Monks of his order would support their charities by raising swine.
On dark, foggy winter nights, the light shining from the shop window was the only illumination on that entire stretch of fondamenta. It was the lighthouse of the neighborhood, in more ways than one.
As my language skills improved, so did our conversations, obviously. I still depended on the smile, but now was much more curious to hear his opinions and ruminations. He never disappointed me. Talking with him did me more good than five homilies.
One January morning I stopped in for something and there he was, alone. This was great — it meant he had a minute to “exchange four words” with me, as he put it.
I started: “Did you see the eclipse of the moon this morning?” (We had gotten up before dawn to go out and witness the event.)
He smiled. “I have to work.”
“Working at 4:30 in the morning??” I asked.
“I was sleeping.” His eyes smiled at me. I don’t know how he does it. If I were a pig, I’d say “Yes, come slaughter me. Just as long as you’re happy.”
I said, “Well, it was beautiful. We didn’t get up at 4:30 — we saw it from 5:30 to 6:00. But we’re up then anyway.”
He looked startled. “I get up at 6:30,” he said. “If I’m going to work a 12-hour day, at nearly 80 years old, I need to get some rest. No point staying up late or getting up too early.”
Which brought to mind the subject of age, which segued almost immediately into the topic of one’s departure from this life. The notorious exiled politician Benito Craxi had died of a heart attack the day before, and the funeral was today, in Tunisia. So people out and around have been discussing him, with heavy moralistic overtones (anything from “What a pity, he was a good, innocent person who didn’t deserve to die” to “What a crook, he should have died years ago”). No one, clearly, taking into account that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and whatever you do, your train is headed in the same direction as everybody else’s.
“Look at Craxi,” Signor Vitale volunteered. “”What use was all that struggling for power and money? There he is, dead at 66. Didn’t do him any good at all. You don’t need a lot of money in order to live.” He touched his forehead, to indicate that the only requirement was a functioning brain. “People need to learn to content themselves with what they have. We need to learn how to take life for what it is.”
“Yes, but he wanted to be big,” was my very unoriginal observation.
“You can’t be big,” Signor Vitale stated. “Or anyway, not past a certain point. You know the balloons kids have at the fair? They blow them up and blow them up to the point where the balloon can’t hold anymore and it explodes. The same thing for us. We can’t be big past a certain point. After a hundred years, nobody will remember we even existed. You know?” He seemed completely at peace with that fact.
“He wanted more,” I said, just to keep things going.
“Well sure,” Signor Vitale replied, one of his large, machete-like knives in his hand. “Mussolini wanted more, and he got it, too” — he made a thrusting motion with the knife and smiled seraphically. “Yep, he got more.”
At 6:00 the same evening I found myself back in the shop. Needed milk and butter. Signor Vitale was at the helm alone again, but this time there’ was a lady wearing an extremely gorgeous mink coat buying some milk and few other oddities. As I waited, I stared at the mink, struggling not to reach out and caress it — it was one of those furs that is so lush and gleaming that it not only screams “Money,” it also screams “Touch me.” I didn’t, but I stared.
When she left, I said to Signor Vitale, “Did you see that coat?”
He shrugged. “I’m no expert on fur.”
“I’m not either, but even a civilian like me could tell that it was something exceptional.”
He looked unimpressed. “Doesn’t it seem a little much, to wear something like that to go shopping?” I’ve gotten so used to see women here wearing fur coats, especially mink, that it hadn’t occurred to me. She has to wear something, after all. But of course he was right.
“Was it mink?” he asked.
“Indubitably,” I replied.
“I guess it usually is.”
“Well yes,” I said, “but there’s mink and mink.”
“I don’t know,” he went on. “Some people try to make themselves appear to be something greater than they are. Look at Craxi.” This was clearly the topic du jour, a very useful tool should you want to calibrate your personal values along with the barometer.
“He went so high, but people who go so high, who achieve all those glories, usually have humiliations to match. It’s better to be content with what you have. All that money. What was it for? He could still be alive” — he seemed to be implying that the desire for pelf was one contributing cause to the man’s demise. I didn’t know that “love of lucre” could be listed as a cause of death, but there was no doubt in Signor Vitale’s mind.
“The important thing is to love your work,” he declared, smiling that incredibly benevolent smile. His eyes beamed on me. I felt like a mink coat. “If you can work with serenity, you’ve got all you need in life. You need to be honest.” Evidently Craxi’s dishonesty — which he dishonestly denied, of course, up to the last palpitation of his flawed little heart — was another reason for his dying so young.
“What you need in life,” he continued, “is to work, to listen to the birdsong, to look at a beautiful woman” — he smiled, but seemed to sense he might be wandering onto tricky terrain, “to read a good book,” he neatly recovered. “This is what matters in life.”
These were clearly not opinions he was expressing, but facts. You can’t argue with a philosophy like this, especially when you know that the person expressing it spent several years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany during World War II, and raised four children, at least one of whom is a doctor, on the money he made from a batch of prosciutto.
Anyway, he was preaching to the converted. I had just noticed, crossing the bridge, the exquisitely pale, violet gleam of the winter sunset, and how the transparent sky was beginning to show tiny dots of stars. (I had also noticed a small water rat swimming sturdily from the drainpipe on one side of the canal to the other, leaving a perfect rippling V behind him or her. It’s all nature.)
I wondered if the woman in the mink coat would have noticed the same things, and if they’d have given her spirit the same lift they gave mine. Or does mink act as a sort of protective layer against more than mere cold? (Let’s be fair here, even philistines have to keep warm.) I have to watch out that I don’t fall into the mindset of those Russians who boast that they’re more spiritually alive than the materialistic clods in the West, even as they’re scraping the mold off their last piece of bread. It’s a very tempting frame of mind sometimes. The old “less is more,” but taken to metaphysical extremes.
This is the sort of musing that Signor Vitale almost always lures me into. Still, it so obviously works for him that you’re really, really tempted to believe it.
