August, 2009 | Venice: I am not making this up

Street Names: Refreshing

August 11, 2009 2 Comments

There 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.

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.

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.

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.

Venetian-ness

Flashback: Signor Vitale

August 8, 2009 No Comments

Vitale 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.

Problems

The Daily Budget: A modest handout gratefully received, sort of

August 4, 2009 No Comments

main10centsmall-ten-euro-cents-front — Buddy can you spare a dime? This coin is worth ten euro-cents.

Not long ago I outlined some of the elements in the Venetian municipal budget, especially the way in which the budget is always discussed to the basso continuo of keening and rending of garments (theirs, not mine). The city is broke, we have no money, no ghe xe schei, we’re going to have to go on the dole. Oh wait — we’re already on the dole (see: Special Law for Venice).

By now, Mayor Massimo Cacciari and his associates have acquired the habit of reminding the constituents that the coffers are bare; the search for cash anywhere was beginning to resemble one of those harrowing cinematic scenes of near-starvation where people start to kill each other over a piece of tree bark.

But good news!! The federal government (otherwise known as “Rome”) has just found another 50 million euros for the beleaguered most beautiful city in the world. Where? How? Why now and not earlier? These are futile questions and let’s not even bother asking them. The mayor’s response to the largesse: “It’s not enough, but it’s something.” (This is one phrase which does not sound better in Italian.)

The Italian ten-cent coin shows Botticelli's "Venus." If every work of art in Italy could be converted to specie, even the mosquitoes would be rich.

Now that we’ve all savored that rush of joy and relief, let’s look at the fine print.

The entire 50 million aren’t going straight into the city’s desiccated bank account. Thirty-five million are earmarked for assorted groups which are responsible for overseeing various aspects of the lagoon, and 15 million are going to the Veneto Region. That leaves 28 million for Venice itself.

Of course this news, like much of the preceding news, doesn’t resolve the problem; a large part of the funds allotted by the Special Law in recent years has been dedicated to the construction of the protective floodgates (MOSE) to prevent exceptional high water from entering the lagoon, i.e. Venice. In other words, too much has gone to too limited a purpose. Worthy though it may be. Which I and many others strongly doubt.

Predictably, the measured gratitude of the (left-leaning) mayor has attracted — as does his every thought, word, or deed — the scorn of the (right-leaning) President of the Veneto Region, Giancarlo Galan.

“I’m sure he (Cacciari) will say that the funds aren’t enough and that it’s all the fault of MOSE,” quoth he. “The Special Law for Venice is an inciucio [a word whose translation defeats me; it contains elements of scam, flimflam, scheme, entanglement of plans and plots and counterplans, sharp dealing, etc.] of the former social-activist regime which re-routed ‘special funds’ (hundreds and hundreds of billions of euros) from its primary objective, which was to confront high tide and environmental degradation of the lagoon, instead to the repaving of piazzas and sidewalks in Mestre and Marghera. It’s these disturbing remnants of aid-ism that cause me to urgently request the reform of the Special Law for Venice.”

I will let you know if anything truly interesting transpires from this parry-riposte, which is the only way they communicate with each other. If “communicate” is the right word.

So let us smile, because today we have 28 million more euros than we did yesterday. If I could say that about myself instead of about the city, you wouldn’t hear any snidery from me about anything. I’d be a walking compliment factory.

Events, History

Saga of the seven martyrs

August 3, 2009 1 Comment

Like the rest of the city, the long promenade along the lagoon from the Arsenal to the Giardini (public gardens) has experienced assorted mutations over the centuries.

This stretch of waterfront, some 100 years ago or more, was a tiny industrial landscape lined with boatyards sloping down muddy inclines into the water. Did I say “boats”? I also meant “ships.” This was a serious place where serious, unglamorous, important work got done.

But by the Thirties the boatyards were mostly moribund, and in 1937 they were demolished to make way for this corniche which was dubbed the “Riva dell’ Impero,” or “riva of the empire.” That would have been the one Mussolini intended to refound along the lines of the earlier Roman version.

But after the episode of August 3, 1944, the name was changed to the Riva dei Sette Martiri (the riva of the seven martyrs).

This is the beginning of the Riva dell'Impero, approximately at the point where the executions took place, and the small crowd is ready for the speeches.

It happened like this: The final phases of World War II in Venice were very tense, marked by an increasing number of events involving partisan resistance and reprisals. In this case, we skip almost immediately to the reprisal stage.

The Cronaca di Venezia recounted the story on July 1, 1945, on the eve of the first anniversary of the event in question. As with any story involving the word “martyr,” it’s not one that will make you smile.

Here is a transcript of the story, published in the Gazzettino a few years ago, translated by me:

“At dawn on 3 August 1944, a group of houses which extend from the beginning of the then-Riva dell’Impero to the limits of the Giardini was assaulted by the German soldiers. All of the inhabitants had to leap out of bed and let themselves be searched, mutely witnessing, astonished, the fanatical search for arms. Everything was thrown in the air, trampled, and often, in their rage, destroyed.

“Amazed, everyone asked themselves what could have happened, the reason for such a furor. They came to know later that that night [i.e., the night of August 1], the crew of a German torpedo ship moored at the Riva had abandoned themselves to an orgy and that the German sentinel had been offered, many times, wines and liquors. People overheard ‘evviva’ and other toasts exchanged between the crew and the sentinel.

“A few days later, it became known that the sentinel, drunk, had fallen in the water, and had been pulled out, and that no traces of any firearm or any other sign that could prove the cause of his death could be found on his body.

“But it was too late. The firing squad and the revenge had already taken place.

“That morning, 500 men of the neighborhood, after having been compelled to stand immobile for more than two hours on the riva with their faces against the walls of the houses along the left side of the via Garibaldi, were taken to the riva and made to watch the execution of seven hostages who had been taken from the prison of Santa Maria Maggiore.

“A little before the massacre, the Germans had erected two poles on the riva, between which a rope had been strung.

“The scaffold is ready. A motor launch from the prison arrives with the seven victims: Bruno Degasperi, 20; the brothers Alfredo and Luciano Gelmi, respectively 20 and 28, all from Trento; Girolamo Guasto, 20, from Agrigento; Aliprando Armellin, 23, from Vercelli but residing in Mestre; Alfredo Viviani, 36, born and living in Venice; Gino Conti, 46, from Cavarzere.

“The prison chaplain, mons. D’Andrea, hears their confessions and administers Communion. The butcher [executioner] offers them all a cigarette, which they accept. The few minutes which pass between lighting them and their disappearance seems eternal. How many people lining the riva or immobile at the windows are observing with terror the tragic scene.

“Now the seven unhappy ones are tied, with arms extended as if on a cross, to the rope stretched between the two poles. Their backs are toward the Lagoon. The sentence of death is read.

“A German official turns toward the 500 selected citizens and reads, in Italian: ‘During the night between August 1 and 2, by the hand of someone unknown, a sentinel of the German navy was assassinated during the fulfillment of his duty. The German Command has determined to apply the reprisal of war, for which in your presence these seven persons will be shot, guilty of terroristic acts; after which we will take from among you 150 hostages whose fate will depend on the outcome of the current inquest.’

“The chaplain extends the crucifix to each of the seven victims to kiss and the 24 rifles are aimed at their chests. Behind the firing squad the chaplain holds up the crucifix, on which the eyes of those who are about to die are fixed — and who give their last desperate cry, ‘Avenge us!’ A German officer raises his hand and then lets it fall, shouting ‘Fire!’

A rendering of the event is displayed to refresh the memory.

“The thunderous volley strikes even the rope itself, which breaks, leaving the poor bodies to fall heavily to the ground. A shot from the pistol to each temple, a few other shots to those who are in agony.

“The sacrifice is complete. In the light of the rising sun not even the echo of their last desperate appeal remains. The pavement of the riva is strewn with large bloodstains. All eyes are fixed on those vermilion stains, and from every heart arises a vow of revenge.

“The bodies of the Martyrs are placed on a boat and taken to the cemetery.

“To remove the clots of blood, teeth, and brain matter from the pavement, the Germans give brooms and buckets of water to the innocent children of the neighborhood.

“Then the selection is made from the 500 men and about 150 hostages are taken to the prison to await the results of the inquest.”

img_0786-martiri-10-comp1 — "The sacrilegious Fascist factionism wished, The barbaric Teutonic hand struck" (then the names); "May the light of your martyrdom illumine the way of the people reborn to liberty" (and the date). Evidently the candles were an afterthought, seeing as they effectively conceal the date being commemorated.

Later, they put up a very nice stone tablet, with seven symbolic electric candles, one for each sacrificial lamb, which are never illuminated. It’s true that they were unjustly condemned, but one also remembers that if they were in prison it’s possible that they were not, as they say here, the “shinbone of a saint.” Perhaps they were guilty of political crimes, or of homicide, or of resistance (which would cover both of the preceding misdemeanors).

But they definitely were not involved in the murder of any drunken German sentinel, and forming a cleanup squad of children has to be just about the worst thing in this entire appalling story. But then again, it wouldn’t be war without stupidity and death. It would just be another day in the most beautiful city in the world.

Now it’s today. Every year, on the anniversary of this event, the local Communist Party club organizes a commemorative ceremony. At six o’clock this evening they formed up their procession, and walked first to the monument outside the Giardini to the monument to the partisans to render homage.

Then they walked up the Riva dei Sette Martiri to the plaque and placed the large laurel wreath, and two large arrangements of scarlet roses, beneath it. There were banners, there were speeches.

A small mismatched group of onlookers/participants/curious bystanders watched and listened, and was photographed by various people, including me. (I apologize for the quality, I snapped these with my cell phone.)

Before the rituals begin, there's the hard work of setting up the accoutrements.

I turned around to look at the audience and there was a mountain of ship steaming ponderously past: the aptly named Costa Fortuna. I mean “aptly” considering the caliber of fortune which the seven martyrs (and the German sentinel, and the children) had been allotted. It looked as if the total passenger payload (2,716) was lined up on the brim of the topmost deck watching the panorama of Venice slip past as they headed out to sea. I suppose that we and our little banners looked as tiny to them as they did to me. I wonder if anybody but me happened to notice the empty silent space separating their moment here and that of the men whose last was spent at almost the same spot.

When thoughts like that begin to merge in my brain, it’s time to leave. So I headed down via Garibaldi toward home, just as the first gust of cold air hit my back. The wind had been rising all afternoon, but when I felt the temperature plunge suddenly I knew it was time to get going.

Ten minutes later I was inside, and it was raining hard outside. And that was undoubtedly the end of the Martyrs’ Moment until next year. I’m sorry it didn’t end better. But then again, it was also raining on the Costa cruise which at that point wasn’t even out of sight of land.

Speaking of martyrs and resistance and all, we were walking across the central piazza in Mestre this morning, the Piazza Erminio Ferretto. I casually asked Lino who Ferretto was, and he said, “He was a partisan in the Second World War. He was my sister-in-law’s brother.”

Excuse me? Yes, his oldest brother had married a girl from Gazzera, a town outside Mestre, by the name of Elvira Ferretto. Her brother was a full-bore freedom fighter who had spent part of the Thirties also fighting against Franco in Spain. He and his companions got caught by a Fascist patrol one night — they were hiding in a manger and got jabbed by the pitchforks the soldiers punched into the hay, testing to see if there was anybody under there.

I wonder if it’s good to dwell on these things or not. I’m thinking maybe not.

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