Afa: get to know it
By · CommentsI was going to write about something else but it’s just too hot. Every summer we get a heatwave around about now, but I’m not sure I remember one quite this heavy. Or long-lasting.
We’ve been having temperatures up around 100 degrees F. (39 degrees C) during the day, slightly less at night, for at least a week. Yesterday the weather report indicated that it was hotter here than in New York. I can tell you without consulting anybody but myself that it’s hotter than the hinges of hell.
Looking toward Murano at 8:30 this morning.
In addition to simple heat, there is the element called “afa,” which means sweltering, sultry, breathless heat, the kind of mugginess that makes you feel like an old sponge that has been left in a dark damp corner next to things that smell.
There are only two places I can think of where this weather would be even more intolerable. One would be anywhere along the Po River plain, where the fields stretch for long, desperate distances with no shade. Where there is shade, among the poplar plantations lining the river, there is no oxygen. Whatever is taking the place of oxygen does not move, because the world has stopped.
Looking toward the Lido at the lagoon inlet of San Nicolo'. The egret is happy, but egrets don't sweat.
The other place where the heat is torment is the mountains. Mountains are made to be cool, at least at night. If I had to endure this kind of heat at 4,000 feet, I’d have to think long and carefully about my revenge.
Clamming takes your mind off the fact that you're suffocating.
We’ve gotten through it so far by going out in the lagoon in a small mascareta, to a place where there is virtually always a breeze. And enough water to immerse myself for ten hours or so. Other people go to the beach on the Lido. Other people go shopping at the small supermarket off Campo Ruga, where the air-conditioning is set to cryogenic depths. We go clamming. More fun, for us. Probably not so much for the clams.
I’m off to bed now, planning to dream of the freezers at the Tyson chicken-processing plant. Do not wake me.
Crimes of passion
By · CommentsThings are heating up here in an alarming manner, and I’m not referring to the Saharan heatwave that is currently sweeping the old Bel Paese and suffocating everybody’s capacity to think.
I’m referring to two recent spectacular homicides with distressing similarities, the kind one hears that judges in Provence excuse because of the effect of the mistral. Here, I’m not sure that the weather is considered an accomplice or not. But the girls are still dead.
These two tragedies demonstrate the most effective way to resolve your pain when your girlfriend breaks up with you. Not a new approach, but it works: You kill her, then yourself.
Both of these recent calamities happened on the mainland (sorry, no romantic canals into which to throw the body), but just a few miles inland, and the Gazzettino has been providing the details for days, even though virtually every element is pretty much out of the handbook.
Roberta Vanin (left) and her body being removed from Bio-Vita, her store.
Spinea is a small town in the Province of Venice about 10 miles from the Piazza San Marco, hitherto famous (I guess) for being the hometown of Federica Pellegrini, an Olympic swimming medalist. Spinea is like numberless other small towns on the mainland near Venice; what were once little villages stuck in the middle of fields of corn or wheat differentiated only by the belltower of their parish church, and now are larger settlements surrounded by roads, highways, and shopping centers, differentiated by nothing, not even their love-deranged inhabitants. I’ve been there several times to visit some of Lino’s relatives.
Now Spinea is stuck in my mind as the home of a certain Andrea Donaglio, a 47-year-old professor of chemistry, who was in love and lived with Roberta Vanin, 43; they even owned and operated a health-food store.
Anyway, she broke up with him, moved out, found a new boyfriend. He began to stalk her. He kept phoning her. He threatened her with a knife. (And then people start with the “We never imagined he could do such a thing.” Makes no sense in Italian, either.) She felt sorry for him. Her friends and family told her to get a restraining order against him. She didn’t.
So July 7, we pay our one euro for the Gazzettino to read the lead story: “He massacred his ex with 20 stab wounds.” (Later accounts raised it to 40, then to 60; it appears he used two knives, perhaps because the first one broke. Oy.) Then he tried to kill himself with a couple of stabs to the stomach, but he’s recovering. Physically, I mean.
"Death of Romeo and Juliet," by John Everett Millais (1848). Even in iambic pentameter, the onlookers say pretty much the things they say today: "What a waste."
So if this catastrophe is the pebble thrown into the pool, we now experience the ripples of the subsequent stories which go into all sorts of aspects of the situation from all sorts of points of view. There is the story about how the scene of the murder is now a sort of shrine, covered with flowers and notes and stuffed animals, then the story about the funeral and how many people were there — a thousand, anyway, because everybody knew them. The story about her as told by her friends, how wonderful she was. The story about him as told by his friends (or relatives) about how desperate and unhappy he was.
The one really unusual part of this whole horrible tale is the fact that Roberta’s parents declared that they forgave Andrea. This is as amazing here as anywhere else, and I want us all to stop and reflect on that for a moment.
Fabio Riccati and Eleonora Noventa.
A mere four days later, while all this was still boiling through the newspapers, another man decided to punish his girlfriend for leaving him. (I thought romances were supposed to end in September.) This happened at 9 in the morning on July 11 in a very small town, Asseggiano, a mere mile and a half from Spinea.
Fabio Riccati, 30 years old, had found the first girlfriend of his life, and they’d been seeing each other for six months or so. Eleanora Noventa, an only child, was evidently one of the sunniest and loveliest girls ever. Unfortunately, she was only 16. Maybe a tad young to have started up with him, but not too young to have realized she had to break it off. On Saturday she gave him the bad news and whatever little presents he had bestowed on her.
On Sunday morning, Fabio waited for her out on the street, expecting her to pass by on her bicycle. She stopped. They exchanged some comments. He pulled out a Magnum .357 and shot her three times, the last shot to the head. Then he shot himself in the heart.
I want to live somewhere where nothing ever happens. Nothing. Ever. And I never liked Romeo and Juliet, either.
Racing through Murano
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Murano is just ten minutes from Venice, but it's a whole other world. And not just because of all the glass, either.
If you’ve ever been to Murano, one of the world’s great glass-making centers, you will know that it’s impossible to race through it. You will be exhausted, but not because you’ve been going so fast; au contraire, you will have been plodding along at the pace of those debilitated galley slaves in Ben-Hur, going in and out of so many shops you’ll think they’ve been breeding in dark corners when you’re not looking. The five islands that make up Murano, of which you will probably only visit two, cover barely one square mile, and the Yellow Pages list 61 shops. I think there must be more.
Anyway, you will not have been racing. Unless it’s the first Sunday in July, in which you can come to Murano to watch other people race, and believe me, they’re going to be more tired in less time than you and your whole family after an entire day.
A glimpse of the leaders last year, heading from out in the lagoon into the Grand Canal of Murano and the home stretch.
The regata of Murano is really three regatas, each involving solo rowers, which calls not only for stamina but for skill. The races are for young men on pupparinos, women on pupparinos, and grown men on gondolas. It’s always hot, and there is always wind, and sometimes, like a few years ago, there can be sudden thunderstorms with pouring rain. But the race must go on.
Only about ten more minutes to go, and unless something extraordinary happens, at this point the positions aren't likely to change much. But they don't slack off, all the same.
The city of Venice organizes nine regatas a year, plus the Regata Storica. Each race is designed for a particular type of boat and number of rowers, and each is held in a different part of the lagoon, which means that the conditions and course present their own particular quirks. These changing venues also means that some are easier to watch from the shore than others, and the one at Murano is especially exciting not only because you can see both the start and the finish, but because there are good vantage-points along the fondamentas, and even a big cast-iron bridge from which to get a spectacular view of the finish.
The women on pupparinos are about 60 seconds from the finish line and it looks like the pink boat may still have a chance to overtake the white (2009).
Regatas (a Venetian word, by the way), have been an important feature of Venetian festivities since the Venetians crawled out of the primordial ooze; sometimes they were part of a religious celebration, or part of the myriad spectacles staged for the amusement of visiting potentates, but they were one-time events.
Luisella Schiavon -- from Murano, as it happens -- has a clear shot at first place at this point. She won last year, and this year, too. Being tall, as well as talented, makes a difference.
But in 1869, the regata at Murano was established as a regular annual event and not for any prince or pope but to entertain — yes — tourists. And whether or not tourists can look up for a few minutes from the heaps of glass necklaces and picture frames and flower vases, this race is arguably the most important occasion for a Venetian racer to show what he, or she, has really got. I can tell you that the man who wins the gondola race is universally regarded as having won something akin to Wimbledon, or maybe the Ironman Triathlon, or the Tour de France. Maybe all of them.
Here’s what it takes to win: Strength, stamina, skill, luck, and extreme and ruthless cunning. It also helps if you’re tall. It’s a physics thing; short rowers have a hard time keeping up with taller ones, though sometimes a short person has pulled it off, especially if he or she (I’m thinking of a she) is lavishly gifted with the aforementioned luck and cunning. Or just cunning.
My two most vivid memories of this race are from one of the earliest ones I ever attended, and the one from last Sunday. Both, oddly, involve a certain racer named Roberto Busetto.
Roberto Busetto last Sunday, crossing the finish line in third place just ahead of the yellow gondola. Victory is sweet, at least until you black out.
Mr. Busetto is strong — he looks like Mr. Clean, and he has biceps that make you think of whole prosciuttos. He is also experienced, and very determined (I’m not sure that he’s made it up to “ruthless”), but if anything ever upsets him during the race — even if it may not have prevented him from finishing really well — he can be counted on to show up for his prize yelling about it. In fact, there will always be something that’s wrong, and he goes all Raging Bull at the judges, at some fellow racer, at some onlooker, at anyone or anything that might have created even the tinest problem for him. Or who looks like they don’t care. It’s never easy to understand, in the midst of his tirade, what actually went wrong. But you know he’s mad.
Okay, Mr. Clean, let's just check those vital signs again.
The first time I saw Busetto at full throttle, he had barely crossed the finish line when he started ranting. It had something to do with what he claimed was some sneaky, illegal thing that another racer, Franco Dei Rossi, had inflicted on him, thereby preventing him from finishing better.
The confusion of boats immediately following the race doesn't usually include the ambulance. Last year it was just the usual suspects.
But it wasn’t his tantrum that stunned me, though I didn’t know at that point that tantrums are his normal means of expression, the way some people can’t help starting every sentence with “Well” or “You know.” It was the fact that under this deluge of outrage, Dei Rossi was sobbing as he mounted the judges’ stand to be awarded his prize. A grown man, one of the greatest (in my view) racers of his generation, son of one of the greatest racers in history, was standing there weeping uncontrollably. It was so astonishing and distressing that I know I didn’t imagine it, and I’m not exaggerating, either. I’m glad I didn’t have a camera with me, I wouldn’t be able to bear looking at the pictures. It really left a mark on me.
So we come to last Sunday. It’s Busetto again. He has been racing for at least 20 years, maybe more, but he had only a very brief peak, and that was quite some while ago. In fact, I’d have to stop and do some research to determine when was the last time he won a pennant. I think the Beatles may still have been together. (Just kidding; it was in 2000.)
But this year, he finished third. Which means he won the green pennant, which means that after a ten-year drought he had managed to pull himself back into the ranks of the demi-gods. Pennants are awarded to the first four finishers, and they really matter to the racers, almost as much as the cash prize.
This is what normal collapsing looks like -- here, Sebastiano Della Toffola has just finished his first race with the big guys. Franco Dei Rossi, a certified, gold-plated Big Guy, looks on with something that looks like comprehension.
Finishing third is pretty great, but about two seconds after crossing the finish line, he collapsed. First he sort of let himself fall down backwards on the stern of the boat, which isn’t so strange except that it’s usually the younger men who want to show how completely wrung out they are. It’s like when they throw their oar in the water (rage, joy, some other intense emotion — looks very dramatic, till you realize how dumb it is).
An excellent example of what incredible-victory collapsing looks like. Last year, like this year, first place went to Igor Vignotto. On the orange gondola both times. You may laugh, but this is how superstitions are born.
But then my friend Anzhelika said, “He’s too white.” Then I noticed that his boat had drifted slaunchwise across the canal, blocking the arrival of the last gondolas. Then there was some commotion, then the sound of the water ambulance arriving at full speed.
Much pouring of cool water on his head, much checking of his blood pressure. He tore himself away long enough to come pick up his pennant, annoyed (of course), though not yelling, because everybody was fussing over him. He likes attention, but nobody with arms like prosciuttos wants it to be because he fell apart.
But some things in life are bigger than prosciuttos, and rowing under the searing sun for 40 minutes at full blast if you’re not in astronaut-type physical condition is asking for it. “It” being an ambulance and a blood-pressure cuff, and lots of people suddenly looking at you like you’re some kind of invalid.
You know it’s serious when Roberto Busetto isn’t yelling.
Franco Dei Rossi (2009) in a more typical post-race moment: Smiling because he's won another pennant. In this case, a blue one for fourth place. Not at all bad in a field of nine, for a man who's drifting up on 60 years old.
This year's first and second-place finishers. Igor Vignotto on the left (red pennant) and Rudi Vignotto (white pennant). They were adversaries, but only sort of; not only are they cousins, but they have rowed together their entire lives.
The fourth-place pennant, clutched by a sweat-soaked Ivo Redolfi Tezzat. This is an especially nice design, with the rooster, the emblem of Murano, in the upper corner. If you've won this, though, you really don't care if it's a rooster or a wall-eyed vireo.
Then we all followed the scent of the scorching sausage and ribs to the local festa. This little girl out with her grandmother has the most astonishing pre-Raphaelite face. I just can't stand the thought of her growing up and walking around with a cell phone and tattoos and mutilated hair. Must be getting old.
Interested in the races? The ribs? The music? The thunderstorm about to shatter the sky into a billion sharp wet pieces? Not really. Here is an excellent demonstration of what these parties are for. The food and music are just ruses.
Saint Peter’s mom, bless her heart
By · CommentsThe period around St. Peter’s feast day (June 29) is notable for two things beside the annual bacchanale at the church, as described in my last post.
The littlest ones are St. Peter's pears. They'll only be around for a short time and that's why I like them, even if they have almost no flavor at all.
The two notable things are: ”St. Peter’s pears,” which I haven’t been able to identify in any other way (maybe they’re here so briefly that Linneaus was never quick enough to nab them with a name), and thunderstorms. Everyone expects thunderstorms in this period (we’re still waiting, oddly enough, though this year the weather has been very strange; last week it snowed in the mountains. Maybe St. Peter is trying something new with water).
St. Peter's fish (John Dory) by William MacGillivray.
For the record, there is also a fish, not necessarily associated with the feast day, which is commonly called “St. Peter’s fish” (Zeus faber), known in English as “John Dory,” who wasn’t a saint as far as I can discover. This fish has a particularly gobsmacked expression which doesn’t resemble any saint I could ever respect, but maybe everybody in the Dory family has that look, not to mention the underbite.
June weather coming in: Roll out the barrel.
Back to the storms. Around here, the ones that crash down around us in this period have long since been associated with the Big Fisherman; well-meaning adults reassure their little people that the scary thunder is nothing more than the sound of St. Peter cleaning the wine barrels.
But there is one folk-tale, recounted by Espedita Grandesso in her exceptional book on Venetian expressions (Prima de parlar, tasi, Edizioni Helvetia) that puts the blame squarely on his mother. As told in Venetian it has an irresistible back-porch-stringing-beans atmosphere, as if the speaker were talking about a fractious family known to everybody in the neighborhood. I’ll do what I can to render it here.
ST. PETER’S MOTHER
Well, St. Peter’s mother was so nasty and so nasty that when she died, even though her son was such a honking big deal as a saint, he had to send her to hell.
When she got to hell, she got up to so many shenanigans, busting everybody’s fishing lines [polite euphemism for "balls"] and complaining and whining and calling her son at all hours of the day and night, that the saint went to Jesus Christ to tell him He had to let his mom into heaven.
“Can’t,” said Jesus, “she’s just too bad.”
Saint Peter wasn’t very happy because, when you get down to it, she was his mother, and the Lord was so sorry to see this that he told him, “Well, you know, Pete, if, maybe, she were to have done at least one good deed…”
Peter was quiet for a while, because his mother, as far as good deeds were concerned, had never done one in her entire life. Then he remembered that, one time, his mother gave an onion to a little old man who was begging.
“Okay,” said the Lord, to make a long story short, “take this onion that’s got a few little roots still on it, and, if you can manage it, pull her up here with this onion.”
T-shirt design for the festa of San Piero in 2008. No onion, no roots, no mom. He looks so happy.
Peter went to the mouth of hell and said to her, “Mom, grab onto the roots of this onion and I’ll pull you up here.”
“Onion roots? You nitwit! How do you think they’re going to support me?”
“Don’t worry about that, just grab on.”
The old lady, grumbling, grabbed onto the roots of the onion and she started to rise off the ground, but she didn’t make it as far as the mouth of hell because a batch of other souls, who wanted to get out of hell too, grabbed onto her skirt and her ankles.
St. Peter’s mother started to go crazy, screaming “Get out of here, you disgusting damned souls, the onion’s for me, it’s mine, and my son is St. Peter!!!” [This is undoubtedly one of the best moments for the person who is telling this story to imitate the meanest, crankiest woman in the neighborhood.]
Onion roots do not inspire as much confidence as, say, a steel cable.
Seeing that the souls were still hanging on, she started to kick them to try to get rid of them.
At that point, the onion roots tore off, and St. Peter was left holding the onion while the old lady fell back down into the very center of the flames.
“What the heck have you done, mom?” St. Peter said. “All you had to do was have a tiny bit of charity and you’d have made it out and so would all those other souls. Now you’ve got to stay in hell forever.” [Pause for cheers from the kids who must all be imagining whichever of their relatives--obnoxious big sister? busybody aunt?--would most deserve this doom.]
BUT [the kids suddenly stop cheering], being that not even the Devil himself could stand to have this hellion among the damned souls, and also, well, it wasn’t exactly decent that the mother of St. Peter, he who carries the Keys to the Kingdom, would have to stay in hell, the old shrew got pulled out and stuck in a corner and given the task of washing the barrels of heaven before the season of new wine.
Wine barrels at the Robert Mondavi winery, Napa Valley, presumably not washed by St. Peter's mother. (Photograph: Sanjay Acharya).
Saint Peter runs amok
By · CommentsAs you probably know, today is St. Peter’s feast day. And in this neighborhood, it really means something.
St. Peter by Carlo Crivelli (1473). Not looking particularly saintly here; those spectacular keys may be slightly more of a burden than a blessing.
I’ll bypass the cadenzas about the saint himself, though he has always been my favorite mainly because for most of his life there was nothing so saintly about him, except the part about his asking Jesus to cure his sick mother-in-law. That was cool. But then again, she must have been a saint as well. Imagine having Peter as your son-in-law. (Story about St. Peter’s mother in the next post).
The great thing about him is that before he became the Rock upon which the church was to be founded, he was just a working fisherman, which meant he probably smelled like fish — do they have algae in the Sea of Galilee? He probably smelled like that too — and I’m sure he had chilblains and smashed fingernails and feet that were more like hooves. If you want proof, I mention that he’s the go-to saint for people with foot problems.
Peter's feet, a detail from a limewood relief carving by Christoph Daniel Schenck (1685).
Peter's hands, a detail from a painting by Georges de la Tour (1615-1620).
More to the point, he had one superb quality and that was, as they say in Venice, that “What he had in his heart, he had in his mouth.” Impulsive, a little clueless sometimes, but spectacularly sincere and frankly never afraid to just put himself out there. (Pause for sound of many, many chips falling where they may.)
The posters are a bit redundant, since everyone already knows all about it.
Why I like him so much now isn’t merely all the above, but because he is the patron saint of the former cathedral of Venice, the church of San Pietro di Castello, which is just over the canal from our little hovel. And each year they put on one heck of a festa in his honor.
Like most festas, there is music, and food, and dogs and old folks and little babies and a big mass, and etc. But this one also has three regatas, the mass is celebrated byno less than the auxiliary bishop (the patriarch can’t ever be bothered to come to these things), and the party goes on for five solid days, by which I mean nights, too.
The juggler is working the audience into a frenzy. "Festa" is just another word for frenzy.
Attempting to kill your friend with your balloon sword is always entertaining.
Balloons that are not swords are also fun.
I have no idea what happened. One minute he was fine, the next minute he was hysterical. Festas seem to have that effect on little people.
What does this mean for us? Well, it means not only five days of the fabulous aroma of charcoal-scorched ribs wafting around the area, and not only five nights of inconceivably loud music audible from way over here, but five nights of all the festa-goers coming and going till 2:00 or even 3:00 in the morning. The main street to the church is right outside our bedroom window and of course our windows are open. Happy people going home always shout, I don’t know why.
So while Peter may be the patron saint of locksmiths (hint: he carries the keys to the kingdom) and butchers and cobblers (feet again) and other trades, including fishermen and netmakers and, naturally, the Papacy, for my money he is also the patron saint, at least in our neighborhood, of the deaf, the insomniac, the overtired and overstimulated (technically he’s the go-to saint for cases of frenzy, but people here like frenzy), and also the occasional Russian drunk.
The latter is a newcomer to the list, but at 4:00 AM last night whoever he was was wandering the streets, which had finally achieved slumber, calling out forlornly for Marco. Surprising how far your voice can carry at that hour.
I have no idea if he ever found him, but I’m really sorry that his friend wasn’t named Peter. That would have been so perfect I might actually have gotten up to help him look.
Maybe next year.
We rowed the auxiliary bishop and the parish priest to church for the big mass on Sunday morning.
We were preceded by the band from Sant' Erasmo. I have only ever heard them play two pieces, maybe three. They're never completely in tune, but they’re very loud, which is all that matters.
Two of the nine mascaretas rowed by women battling it out in the regata of the Marie (Marys). As always, the ladies were shrieking the most un-saintly remarks at each other. Of course, the men do too, but the women are much worse.
One of these ladies is trying to imitate the other.
Mass is over, now we can all go eat.
These guys must have to burn their clothes, after five days in the smokehouse.
Pitt stop
By · CommentsYou may have heard — or maybe you’re hearing it now — that several Venetian spring months were sparkled-up by the presence of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, here filming “The Tourist.” (Stuntman Vladimir Tevlovski was also here. Just thought I’ve give him a shout-out.)
But naturally the excitement was generally focused on The Jolie and also Brad Pitt, who seems to have come along to drink and eat things and get photographed around town with the kids. And perhaps to keep an eye on her and Johnny Depp, if some unkind comments are to be believed.
I’ve lived most of my life in cities where there are more celebrities than plumbers. And usually Venetians aren’t too easy to impress, even with the annual Film Festival and other big events that so excite reporters and editors. This “Hey buddy, you’re blocking the entrance” attitude is just another of the many similarities between Venice and New York, and just another reason why I love it here.
Hoping to illustrate the reason for Venetians’ general indifference to stars (”So who is that?” “It’s Al Pacino!” “It’s Heath Ledger!” “It’s Daniel Craig!” “Oh……”) I thought I’d add here the number of films which have been shot in Venice over the 100-some years that cinema has existed. But a complete list evidently has never been made. Listers tend to name only their favorites, which is a little annoying. Anyway, it’s a lot. Since I’ve been here I’ve seen at least six in progress, which isn’t all that many.
But in a bar/cafe/pizzeria behind the trees in the generally nondescript area known as Sant’ Elena, at least one barista hasn’t made any effort to be blase’.
The other morning I noticed that somebody had set up a little shrine to a moment of elation which will probably endure till the last person who knows who Brad Pitt was has been cremated and forgotten.
The note says: "Brad Pitt drank from this cup." The date is April 24, 2010. I'm sure it has never been, and never will be, washed.
Sensing Venice: more summer taste treats
By · CommentsI don’t mean to pound this topic into the mud like a piling or anything, but I just thought I’d mention two more flavors that make Venice real to the old gustatory organs. By which I mean things I eat here that I haven’t really found (or taken seriously) elsewhere:
When the bovoleti are ready to eat, they look almost good. Gentlemen, start your toothpicks.
Snails, or bovoleti (boh-voh-EH-ti). Think escargots, with absolutely no pretensions — the polar opposite of pretensions. And absolutely no taste, either, which is why they are boiled, then thrown in a bowl with an overload of sliced fresh garlic and olive oil. Snails are merely an excuse to eat oil and garlic, in my view. It couldn’t possibly be for their nutritional value. Or their texture, either. (The garlic helps you get past that, too. Those old-time hungry people thought of everything.)
Bovoleti show up in late spring and are sold by fishmongers; odd, considering that your snail is a land creature, happier clinging to some plant stem in a field somewhere. They’re on sale until after the feast of the Redentore (third Sunday in July).
The thing to remember about snails is that they tend to wander off. Here at the Rialto fish market, their way is illuminated by reflections from the red awning outside.
Therefore your shrewd snail-seller will block their exit with a ring of salt. One does wonder how the little critters stay alive under water, since they don't have gills. Maybe they're all holding their breath and hoping for better days, like the rest of us.
The palazzo Contarini has a distinctive staircase which has long since been nicknamed "del bovolo" -- of the snail.
In fact, that festival is their moment of glory, if snails can be said to have one, because there they demonstrate their other sterling quality, as entertainment. Eating them gives you something to do while you’re waiting for the fireworks. Slippery little shell in one hand, toothpick in the other, the point is to snag and pull out the bit of whatever you’d call that material that used to be alive, and eat it. The waters of the Giudecca Canal can be speckled with these shells, tossed overboard by oily-fingered people who are beginning to run out of conversation.
The other special item would be fondi, or artichoke bottoms. Perhaps you didn’t realize that an artichoke has a bottom, but usually there is somebody near a fruit and vegetable stand who has been assigned a mountain of big tough artichokes and told to cut off all those leathery outer leaves and other useless bits (which is most of the artichoke) with a knife as sharp as a billhook, then carve a neat disk from what remains.
The artichoke puts up a struggle, but with the right knife and the will to prevail, you'll have something really good to eat. If you get bored with them like this, chop up a few and mix them with some pasta.
Simmer slowly in — you know what’s coming — oil and garlic, throw some minced parsley over them, and there you have your daily thistle.
Bit of useless information: You may discover that in Venice there are two words for artichoke used interchangeably: carciofo and articioco. Carciofo (kar-CHAWF-oh) is the standard word, but across northern Italy, from Friuli to Liguria, you’ll find variations on articioco (ar-tee-CHOKE-oh). Such as: articjoc, articioc, articioch, and articiocc. Both carciofo and articioco ultimately derive from Arabic; carciofo from kharshuf, and articioco probably from the Old Spanish alcachofa, which in turn came from Arabic.
Sometimes words are almost more delectable to me than the thing they represent. But I’ll stop here. Must. Go. Eat.
At this stage, the poppies and artichokes on Sant' Erasmo are more or less struggling for dominance. I suppose you could eat the poppies, but I'll stick with the spiky little purple flower I know.
Extremely gross tonnage
By · CommentsI have taken some cruises, let me state for the record. What follows is not a screed against cruises. Sometimes a screed isn’t even necessary.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, cruises are one of Venice’s main sources of income — not from the paltry trinkets that the passengers may buy as they wander the streets on shore leave, or from the soggy sandwiches or slices of cold pizza they may eat while sitting on a bridge, but from the tax levied on each passenger of about 100 euros each.
Today I only want to share with you the sheer — there must be a word — sheerness of the sight which greeted me as I reached the end of via Garibaldi this morning.
We knew yesterday evening that a cruise ship, as occasionally happens, was destined to be moored at the Riva dei Sette Martiri, because the wire fence that serves as a minimal sort of barrier had already been set up.
What I hadn’t really noticed last night was that the fence stretched the entire length of the Riva, which I now know is about 970 feet, give or take. Because the ship that is tied up there is officially 965 feet long and, by the look of it, about three miles high.
This is the stern of Cunard's "Queen Victoria," as proud a protuberance as one (though probably not the erstwhile Empress of India herself) might wish. Don't think for a minute that the highest deck you see is the highest deck there is.
I gave up trying to fit the entire vessel into one frame. If you want, I can send you the pieces and you can make a collage.
Of course this is a modest optical illusion. The campanile of San Marco (that tiny belltower in the distance) is 325 feet high, while the "Queen Victoria" is a mere 205 feet high. I wouldn't want to fall off either one.
Cruise ships come in and out of Venice virtually every day from April to October (plus a little bit on each end). On weekends it’s the March of the Pachyderms when as many as seven arrive in the morning and depart that evening, a turnaround system that would dazzle the Ferrari pit crew.
My impression, standing by this behemoth, was that this is the largest thing afloat that isn’t an iceberg. But the facts are otherwise (fancy way of saying I was wrong). In fact, I must be really easy to impress, considering how far down the list (34th) of behemoths she ranks.
I tried some snaps from the water side, but still can't make it look like anything less than what it is.
The “Queen Victoria”’s stats are: 965 feet long and carries 2,000 passengers.
The “Oasis of the Seas,” which has yet to grace Venice with her presence, God forbid, measures 1,181 feet and carries 5,400 passengers.
I’ve seen plenty of ships which are essentially the same size as the Queen Vic: the “Norwegian Gem” (965 feet), MSC “Musica” (964), “Costa Serena” (952), and the “Ruby Princess” (951). So I really shouldn’t have been so stunned — it’s just that the others moor in the maritime zone and I only see them underway at some moderate distance from the shore. Walking past the “Queen Victoria” is like walking past the Great Wall of China.
Nope. There is no angle from which this vessel looks like anything smaller than the Matterhorn.
And then I got to thinking. It carries 2,000 passengers and about 1,000 crew (I like that ratio, by the way). And it’s got so much square footage that I don’t want to stop to figure it out, amusing as that might be.
All I was thinking is this: The proportions are essentially ludicrous, in the same way that it’s ludicrous that a vehicle has been invented (a car) which weighs 2,000 pounds in order to carry me, which weighs 125. Now we have this leviathan of the seas carrying a mere 2,000 people, which probably means that each person rates 4,500 square feet all his or her own.
Or look at it this way: All 2,000 of those passengers, none of whom is any larger than the crumblike humans in the photographs, are the only thing keeping this mutant mammoth alive. If it weren’t for the assortment of tiny plantigrade mammals I saw descending the gangway in the rain, this colossus would just starve and die.
The idea that something so big could be so vulnerable is nothing new. Other behemoths come to mind, such as the Temple of the Jaguar Priest at Tikal, or the Hill Complex of Great Zimbabwe. But we keep building them all the same. Maybe it makes us feel slightly less crumblike.
We were on the Minoan Lines ferry waiting for whichever Princess that is to back out of her parking space and leave room in the world for us. I'm starting to love those little crumblike humans. They're so cute.
Sensing Venice: Taste
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A rare sighting of the trio of great spring vegetables together: asparagus, peas lurking behind them, and artichokes lurking to the lower right. The jury is instructed to disregard the figs, which are obviously from some hothouse somewhere, as the local ones don't appear till August, as God intended.
The gustatory sense is next on my list of attributes of the sensual Venice because this time of year is swamped, decks awash, in great things to eat. If one is inclined (”one” meaning “me”) to focus on seasonal comestibles, then this is a period that verges on the orgiastic. Naturally I try to conceal this. Sort of.
From October to April we eat in a sensible-shoes sort of way –plenty of local food, warm, sustaining, totally good for you but not very exciting, if you don’t count the castradina in November or the roast eel on Christmas Eve, and several forms of pastry. But this somewhat restrained diet means that by spring I’m watching for the first asparagus with an intensity most people give to watching the Powerball drawing.
At the annual patron saint's festa on Sant' Erasmo in early June, the farmers sell their produce essentially in job lots. It all looks so good I think they must call in makeup artists.
When I finally see that first green stalk, it’s like the starter’s gun on a new season of — how can I put this delicately? I can’t — glorious glut.
First comes the asparagus, which is steamed or boiled and often eaten with hard-boiled eggs cut in half. Sprinkle this assortment with salt, pepper, and extravirgin olive oil, and you’ve had dinner.
These are definitely my favorite flower to eat.
Shortly thereafter the artichokes arrive. Not just any artichoke, but the carciofo violetto from Sant’ Erasmo. This is a purple variety that thrives around the lagoon — we’ve had them from the Vignole, and from Malamocco, though apartment buildings now cover the artichoke fields that Lino remembers. The encyclopedia says they are also to be had from Chioggia, but I’ve never knowingly eaten anything from Chioggia except a type of radicchio. In any case, the saline environment evidently does something important to the old Cynara scolymus, if my taste buds are not lying to me.
This spring we rowed over to Sant’ Erasmo many times, which meant that we’ve eaten more artichokes in the past five weeks than ever before, I think. We’d come home with bags of these little creatures, often cut off the plant just for us, paying about two-thirds less than the price at the Rialto. We’d pull off the outer leaves and eat the inner morsel raw. We’d simmer them in olive oil and garlic. We’d cut them in half and throw them on the griddle. We even experimented with boiling them and then storing them in a jar full of olive oil. No verdict yet on how those turned out, but it’s hard to imagine they could be bad.
I approve of a food that comes in its own wrapper, even if I do have to pay for the extra weight.
Peas: Fresh peas are next up, the crucial element to risi e bisi (REE-zee eh Bee-zee), or pea risotto, a Venetian classic. Preparing artichokes is a very grown-up sort of thing to do, but shelling peas takes me very, very far back. I could be anywhere (say, Venice) and it would still make me feel like I was sitting on somebody’s back porch. The only thing I object to about fresh peas is the same thing I object to about fresh pinto beans: you pay by weight, which means you’re paying for a whole pod in order to get a batch of little pellets. That’s another thing I’m going to have to change when I get to be in charge of the world.
This is an early spring bonus: carletti, which Lino finds on foraging expeditions along the lagoon edge of the Lido.
After a few weeks of glory this trinity of sublime plant life has begun to fade from the scene and I will not be eating them again till next spring, even if I could get them from hothouses in Sicily or Israel or who knows where. But other things will be along — lettuce and string beans and tomatoes and eggplant. The faithful old zucchine. Fresh tomatoes right off the vine — we make our own sauce. Around here, “Eat your vegetables” sounds like an invitation to a party.
Clamming is hard work if you don't really love it. Lino's got the focus of a lion stalking its prey.
And the clamming season is now officially open — to the entire world, if your average Sunday afternoon in the lagoon is any indication. Of course it’s open all year to the professionals, but families spend recreational summer hours digging around in the shallows, and it is probably Lino’s favorite thing to do, way ahead of sleeping or eating. Maybe even drinking. It must be like meditation or yoga. He can do it for hours.
So we’ve already been out a few clam-hunting expeditions. The trick is to find some patch of terrain that hasn’t already been ravaged by legions of trippers. Lino is very patient and he actually looks for the clams, one by one, whereas most of the other mighty nimrods just claw up fistfuls of mud hoping to find something good. These are not fishermen, these are locusts.
After we’ve let the clams soak in a bucket of lagoon water for several hours, we take them home, and get ready for the Great Cooking Thereof. This may not happen immediately; we may have to leave them in the fridge in their plastic bag for a little while. They kind of hang out in there till we’re ready to cook them. When we put the bag in the sink, I can hear them making moist little shifting and tchk-tchk noises. Yes, they’re still alive, and these little sounds sort of do something to me. Maybe they’re talking about how much they enjoyed spending the afternoon in the dark and the cool. I hope so. I’m glad they don’t know what’s coming next.
Lino brought home the ideal assortment -- cape tonde ("malgarote"), caparozzoli, sansonei, lungoni, and the occasional bevarassa. Now we're introducing them to oil and garlic.
So we throw them into a large saute pan with garlic and oil. Steam goes everywhere. About a minute later they’ve given their last dying gasp, opened their shells and succumbed. We put them in a bowl where they slosh around in a celestial broth of their own saltwater, garlic, lemon juice and chopped parsley and we eat them like crazed little swine, right out of the shell – ignoring scalded fingertips, drops of oily water falling at random.
I’ve been talking about clams in a generic sort of way, but there are all sorts of bivalves to be had out there. Bevarasse (Venus gallina), sansonei, cape lunghe (Solen vagina), cape tonde (Cardium edule), caragoi (Vulgocerithium vulgatum), canestrei (Pecten opercularis), to name a few. There are also oysters — Lino went out on Christmas Eve a few years ago and brought back a load of fresh lagoon oysters, which were delicately sweet. Wish he’d do it again.
Just a few short hours ago, these mussels were clinging to their piling wondering what to do today. Unfortunately for them, we got to decide.
And now it’s mussels. A friend of ours went out in his boat yesterday with a fiendish contraption and scraped a huge amount of them off the pilings — wait, I’m not finished! — the pilings in the lagoon near the island of the Certosa, near the inlet of San Nicolo’, where the tide is so strong that the water is always really clean. Last night we permitted ourselves a modest gorge, annihilating a large bowl in a very short time. They were divine.
Somebody gave us a batch of canestrei, or "lid scallops." It took no time at all to open, bread, and fry them. You don't like fried food? Try these.
Whatever remains of the clams or the mussels is either thrown into tomato sauce for pasta later, or set aside (clams especially) for a risotto. Then we go out and get more.
I haven’t even gotten to the subject of fruit or ice cream, which are whole galaxies of delectable on their own, but I’m worn out. So let’s all put our heads down on our desks and be quiet for a few minutes.
But as we do, let me just repeat something I say far too often: It’s not easy to eat really well (not impossible, but not easy, to eat really well) in a restaurant in Venice, but here at home we eat better than the entire dynasty of Gediminids.
Sensing Venice: Sound
By · CommentsThat tenor with the Kevlar lungs has no trouble getting your attention. But what may be a little harder to imagine is how beautiful Venice sounds when left to her own devices.
Nothing against sight; of all the senses, sight comes first, at least for us humans. But sight can make you lazy, especially in Venice. All you have to do is open just one eye, even squinting, and you’d still see enough beauty to keep you going for months. Which led me to believe, for quite a long time, that being blind in Venice would be the worst thing in the world. I mean, if you had to be blind, you might as well go live somewhere else. Bland, Missouri. Oil Trough, Arkansas. Anywhere but here.
Venice in fact is doomed to be stared at, posing for a million of the same photos every day, a life as predictable and monotonous as the typical gondolier’s. So it’s easy to assume that it’s your eyes that you need most.
I don’t think so anymore. Here is how Venice sounds to me.
Silence. There is plenty of noise all day long here, normal third-millennium racket ranging from pneumatic drills to 40-hp motors to deafening boom-boxes in passing boats blasting that car-crash-torture-dungeon music. And on summer nights, when people tend to stay out till dawn, along about 2:00 or 3:00 there is the boisterous chorus of their inane “Good-night-it-was-great-see-you-tomorrow-I’ll-call-you-okay-I’ll-text-you” comments from right outside our bedroom window, which naturally has to be open because of the heat. You’d think somebody in the group was going off to walk across Antarctica, the way some of them carry on.
I sometimes wonder whether anybody out on the street bothers to consider that there might be people — us, for example — behind our Venetian blinds. But even if they did, I don’t think they’d care. The street by our window is like Andorra, a zone free of duty — any sort of duty, like not shouting after midnight. Public space here isn’t understood to belong to all of us. It’s understood to belong to none of us, nobody at all. Do whatever you want.
But there comes a mystic moment somewhere in the night when a silence suffuses the city that is almost more beautiful than Bach. Deep. Intricate. Voluptuous. It’s not merely the absence of noise, this silence is an element entirely its own, made of everything alive but inaudible, the tide turning and the breeze that begins to waft from the sea and the luminous darkness itself. The proto-morning is filled with a silence that could be the distillation of every sound in the world that we can’t hear.
Blackbirds. Just as I wait for certain flavors to appear in season, I wait for certain sounds, and beginning in March and going on till around now, the blackbirds announce the dawn with an accuracy a chronometer could only dream of. In fact, I know it’s 4:00 AM as I lie there in the dark because one blackbird will begin to sing. One. A single voice that’s like a flute that wants to be a crystal bell. It’s almost more beautiful than laughter. It is so beautiful that I challenge you to suggest a song that could even come close. It hasn’t been written. And as long as there are blackbirds on earth, I really don’t care. Too bad they got such a boring name, but I suppose calling them the “voice of angels” bird would sound worse.
A shutter opening (or closing).
These are working shutters -- nothing decorative or ogival about them. Strange to say, while leaving a shutter open at night will kill you, you must open them in the morning, even if it's below freezing outside.
For me, this is one of the quintessential sounds of Venice, even more than foghorns or the bells of San Marco, God forgive me. It is one of the elemental sounds of dawn, an intimate, homely scraping noise ( it depends on how old and how plumb the shutters are) followed by two clunks as the shutters reach the outer wall. It’s the domestic equivalent of the trumpet at Churchill Downs.
Shutters are no mere decoration; Venetians believe — sorry, they know — that drafts are the thin end of the health wedge. Anything from a head cold to pleurisy, hiccups, the blind staggers, whatever you’ve got will almost certainly have been caused by a draft that was carelessly permitted to enter. “Colpo di finestra, colpo di balestra,” they darkly say: “A blow (as in punch) via the window is a blow from the crossbow.” No doubts, no discussions. If you don’t close your shutters, you’re just asking for it.
Rolling suitcases, all sizes, from carry-ons to steamer trunks. This is a fairly new sound which — unlike the birds and the shutters and all — the Venetians of yore might have trouble identifying. Considering how tourist apartment rentals have proliferated all over the city, the suitcase-sound has become as irrevocable as the sunrise. I will hear it as early as 3:00 AM, if the hardy travelers are trying to make the first flight at 6:35 sharp. (Unlikely, as that plane is going to Lyon, but they’ll almost certainly want one of the following flock of early flights to Rome, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and all those other big connection points for intercontinental flights).
Your average rolling suitcase isn’t any happier to be up at this hour than its people are, because it makes a heavy low grumbling noise as it is dragged along the granite streets. Then it goes bumpbumpbump twelve times, up the steps of the bridge. And twelve bumps down the other side.
Until a few years ago, the only hotel in this precinct was a modest if overpriced former palazzo with guests who traveled at decent hours. But now there has been an explosion of little bijou hotels which call themselves “bed and breakfast” but which have no relation whatever to the classic British version I remember so fondly (a spare room in some little retired couple’s house). There has been an even greater efflorescence of apartments for rent; if you start noodling around on the Net, you might think there is no dwelling left for Venetians, a feeling which many Venetians have begun to share.
So with all these places to stay, about ten to fifty times more people are hauling their stuff around today than even two years ago. The second-floor apartment across the street from us — all of ten feet away — belongs to someone who rents it through a French agency, because only French people stay there. They annoy the hoo out of the Venetians who live in the building, because they forget to close the front door, or they put their garbage out at inappropriate times (”Well we’re leaving before the trash is collected tomorrow,” one woman told me huffily, and I had to admit she had a point). And they toss their cigarette butts out the window. I never see them do it, but I also don’t see any excuse for it. Every few days I go out and sweep up all the cruddy filters strewn between their door and ours. (Filters — strange, I know. They don’t make French smokers the way they used to. Next thing you know, they’ll be drinking Coke. Oh wait — 42 percent of the French population does drink Coke. Well there you are.)
Via Garibaldi toward evening, not long before the kids begin to have their nervous breakdowns.
The sounds that shape the rest of the day depend on weather, whether or not school is in session (parents and children chattering on their way home), when the shops close (usually between 12:30 and 1:00) which means clumps of women form at the foot of the bridge to finish whatever it was they were discussing). It also depends on whether or not the kids have had their naps, or snacks, or have been thwarted in some way as their blood sugar plummets. Between 5:00 and 6:00 it seems that every toddler in the neighborhood collectively snaps, because what I used to think of quaintly as the “aperitivo hour” I have now re-labeled as the Hour of the Imploding Child.
The invisible piano. This is my favorite summer sound. I’ll hear it in the early evening, wafting out of an upper-storey apartment at the foot of via Garibaldi, behind some trees. It’s obviously a person and not a recording because of repetitions and occasional errors, and whoever it is (man? woman? no way to guess) plays well enough for it to be enjoyable but not so well as to be off-putting. Chopin ballades, sonatas by Scarlatti, “Invitation to the Dance” by Weber, music my mother used to play after supper. It makes me feel happy.
Fog is always beautiful, even if it does wreck your day's logistics.
Foghorns. My favorite winter sound. There are a few unpleasant aspects to fog, of course — clothes on the line which have given up all hope of ever drying; vaporettos re-routed up the Grand Canal for safety reasons, which drastically distorts your route to wherever you need to go. People not from Venice think that high water is a nuisance, but they’ve never seen what fog can do to your day. Hordes of tired, hungry, harassed people accumulating on the dock at Sant’ Elena waiting for the vaporetto with the radar to finally arrive and take them the five minutes across to the Lido. No radar, no vaporetto. Boats used to make this little crossing all the time, now you’d think that they were facing the iceberg zone off Greenland or something.
But when I hear the distant foghorn, it carries more romance to me than 289 gondola rides — or even one, actually — under the Bridge of Sighs. The occasional deeper blast from the Minoan Lines ferry arriving from Greece – warning? threat? — is also exciting, especially if you’re out rowing in the fog and it’s blowing at you. This has happened to me.
Bells. The bells in the campanile of San Marco ring several times a day, but I pay special attention to certain ringing. Such as the single bell that sounds at 3:00 PM every Friday, to recall our thoughts to Good Friday and the crucifixion of Christ. There is the midnight tolling of the marangon, the deepest of all, which you can hear from many parts of the city. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, I’ve even heard it when we were out in the lagoon. Deeply comforting, like the sentinel on the battlements. The bells also ring every July 14 at 10:02 in the morning, to commemorate the epochal collapse of the campanile at that moment in 1902.
But with the dark that sumptuous stillness (eventually) returns, permeated not only with the voices of forgotten doges but also the voices of exasperated mothers and Macedonian plasterers.
Of course it would be terrible to be blind in Venice. But it would be at least as bad to be deaf here.
