The big picture (of the world, life, etc.) is still being painted in various gradations of grim — we are in various gradations of lockdown till May, just to give an example — but all it takes is a walk (or a vaporetto ride) and two open eyes to discover a whole world of strange out there. Strange is refreshing, so have a look.
It all started a few weeks ago when I walked past this door. This arrangement makes no sense.
I could have stood there for an hour gazing at this but I wouldn’t have been any closer to understanding it. I realize that the flowers can’t be in front of the door, that’s obvious. But when did the railing come on the scene, and more to the point, why is it opposite the door? The door has always been on the right. I see that the door opens outward, so it might have blocked the hand reaching for support. Closest I can come is that Aunt Maria Rosa Addolorata died and it cost money to remove the railing, so the family left it, and so did the new tenants. Anyway, the railing and the plants seem to have decided that seeing as they’re in the majority, the door is going to have to adapt to them somehow. This stalemate appears permanent.Rowing with a baguette? This entrancing vision is promoting, in a quintessentially Venetian way, the take-out services of the Rizzo chain of bakery and gastronomic shops. “Lunch at work?” the poster says. “We can think about it!” As in: Just leave it to us, we’ll be the ones to organize and plan and provide, all you have to do is eat and pay. Not in that order.Continuing on the theme of food, these fresh tuna steaks are gorgeous. The sign uses all the important key words, no need for whole paragraphs: “Tuna. Red. Alive. Local.” Skipping “red” — one can see that — I stop to stare at “vivo.” Alive? This is pushing me into deep philosophical waters. Does this mean it’s so fresh it might as well be alive, an interesting concept if seen from the tuna’s point of view? Or is it the red that’s alive, which seems like a pointless remark to make when you can already see that this is a red that could give Venetian scarlet some serious competition. Vendors will often add “fished” to make clear that it was caught, and not farmed. But live slices of dead tuna, or dead slices of once-alive tuna — nope. We bought a piece and grilled it. It didn’t taste alive. Were we cheated?This is primal polenta and I haven’t encountered anything that resembles its elemental perfection in any restaurant. This is home cooking straight from Lino’s childhood. First, you make real (not instant) polenta in his mother’s deep copper pan, stirring for 40 minutes. The result is soft but solid (out in the world, it’s either one or the other). Butter from the Alps, grated parmesan cheese — technically, its lowland twin, grana padana. Take a forkful of polenta, dip it in the well of melting butter, dab it into the cheese, to which it sticks, and eat. This could be dinner, as far as I’m concerned. No disrespect to the cook, but this is a very tough act to follow.This poster is a dauntless relic of the shop it decorates, now extremely closed. As an advertisement for truffles, it obviously bounces off “A diamond is forever,” the famous advertising slogan for De Beers diamonds created by genius copywriter Mary Frances Gerety in 1948 and still in use today. She died in 1999, so she was spared this vision of creative sloth. Besides, what does it mean? Of course a truffle isn’t forever — you’re supposed to eat the dang thing. No food is forever, unless you count frozen mammoth wedged into the permafrost. They might as well have written “This is not a truffle” — homage to Rene’ Magritte: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”Venice is just full of things that aren’t. First we have a truffle that wants to make sure you know it isn’t a diamond, and here we have the recycling set out on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday, obviously one of the days that paper is picked up. So is the paper in a paper bag? Of course not. It’s in a plastic bag carefully labeled “Carta e cartone” (paper and carton), just so you know. A trash collector told me that there are people (the same people?) who put plastic in paper bags. Someday I’m going to ask somebody what they’re doing.It’s 856 meters (2,808 feet) from the vaporetto stop at San Pietro di Castello to the far end of via Garibaldi, and in this stretch of city not only do many people pass, but they are often carrying bits of things they need to throw away. There is not one trash can. Not that I’m excusing whoever it was who decided his/her plastic cup had become a hindrance, though I have to say I feel that they deserve points for creativity and willingness to take risks to have disposed of it by jamming it into the space atop this bricola. These pilings must be three meters (nine feet) high and they’re too far from the bridge to make it likely that anybody could have leaned out to get rid of the pesky plastic.Maybe it was a dare?Similar problem outside the Crosara bakery on via Garibaldi. Also a similar solution, the old just-jam-it-anywhere move. Like the bricola, it’s fairly high up. Somebody brought a ladder? They think if it’s up high nobody will see it? Because I can promise that the trash collector isn’t going to see it.It’s a plastic drinking glass containing tea of some sort. It appears that the brand is Estathe’. Must check from time to time to see if swallows are nesting in it or something.I see that the house-number painter did not consider the space at the center of the arch to be sufficient. I myself wouldn’t have drawn that conclusion, but I failed geometry. In any case, even if it was done decades or centuries apart, I admire the artistic sensibility that made the numbers lean toward each other. It could so easily have gone the other way.I can’t explain the fascination of this little scene. Of course I was curious to discover what she was perusing so very carefully; something about her clothes, or the battered condition of the tiny book, gave me a strange impression of an immigrant arriving at Ellis Island 150 years ago. Naturally I tried to make out what was written as I passed by, but no. The pages have kept their secret for a long time, by the look of it; I hope she found whatever or whoever she was looking for.On another day, another vaporetto, I discovered a brand of shoes I’d never heard of before: “Scarpa.” This is a very common Venetian last name (actually comes from Pellestrina). Kayak champion Daniele Scarpa won an Olympic gold medal. architect Carlo Scarpa is world-famous. That’s all fine till you stick it on a shoe. It means “shoe.”I thought it was runny paint and was going to file this in the “You had one job” folder. But it’s not paint; it’s soot from the coal fires of yesteryear that dribbled out with the condensation of humidity inside the chimney. Lino recognized it immediately. His father was a train driver for the state railway, back when the trains were still steam-powered, and one of his perks was an allowance of anthracite each month for their home. But people used many different grades of coal or charcoal.Everybody’s chimney looked like this, to one degree or another.Street of the Chimneysweeps. (Sorry I didn’t have time to wait for the sun to move; the word is scoacamini.) Lino remembers that they worked in pairs, and walked along the neighborhood streets carrying a ladder and calling out; if you needed them, you just nabbed them then. None of this making appointments. Many people walked around crying their wares; the gua, or knife-grinder, for example, or the old man who called out “Strasse, ossa o fero vecio da vender” (rags, bones or old iron to sell). You’d bring out a newspaper full of bones you’d saved, or some old nails you’d scavenged, and so forth, and he’d weigh them and pay you.I saved the best for last. I noticed this girl as we waited for the vaporetto. What struck me at first wasn’t her Anouk Aimee/Amal Clooney vibe but her legs. Was she tattooed? Scarred? I got up to look closer. No, it’s some design on the tights themselves. It’s … words?Words indeed: It’s Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. Written on her legs. First-rate gams that don’t need sonnetry to make you look at them, but I have to say that anybody who walks around with Shakespeare on her stems has reached a level of panache I can only dream of. For the record, she is a German university student who bought them somewhere here, and she shot my day into an entirely new orbit.
I found an Etsy store with something similar but exactly the same.
coline design. you can buy tights with The Raven by Poe, and Emily Dickinson’s poetry, too. Also Jane Austen?
life is odd.
Thanks so much for this! When it comes to my legs, I’ll be taking the tights that say “Nevermore.” I checked, and a search on Etsy of “women’s tights with poetry on” brings up all sorts of great things. https://www.etsy.com/search?q=women%26%2339%3Bs+tights+with+poetry+on&explicit=1 We’re missing Dickens, though; there should be tights with “It was the best of times” on one leg and “It was the worst of times” on the other.
Your anecdote about the chimneysweeps and street vendors of rags, bones, old iron reminds me to ask if you are familiar with William Dean Howells detailed description of Venice, written after being a minor consul there in the early 1860s. Alternately provincial and perceptive, it is full of genre detail about everyday things, such as how procurement of firewood worked. It is not a style of writing that is in fashion today, but once the reader gets into the cadence, its elegance of phrase becomes evident. I should have thought of it earlier, when the fog kept you indoors. Now, you’d rather be out and about, but it is still charming reading. You can find it on Gutenberg.org if you can bear a book that lacks the fragrance of old paper.
Howells’ book, “Venetian Life,” is one of my all-time favorites. Thanks for mentioning it, I’m sure others will treasure it too. Howells lived in palazzo Falier-Canossa, near San Samuele on the corner of the Grand Canal and the rio del Duca. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palazzo_Falier_Canossa_Canal_Grande_Venezia.jpg As for the fragrance of old paper, by now I do most of my reading online or on-Kindle. I already have so many books that it’s now a question of literal survival in the tiny space we inhabit.
Quick note, in case I wasn’t clear. At least in Lino’s lifetime, the rag/bone man wasn’t vending, he was buying in order to vend. (The cry “Rags, bones and old iron ‘to sell'” was misleading, but implied that the man was asking anyone who heard him that if they wanted to sell him these things, he was ready. In Lino’s neighborhood, near San Barnaba, he had a tiny shop or cubbyhole where you could bring your stuff, without waiting for him to make his rounds. Lino was sent any number of times with things to bring him; he remembers with profound regret how more than once he was delegated to take old rusty tools and things for which he was paid a pittance, that today would be worth real money. Who knew?
A plate of yellow food, streak’s on a wall, flower pots on a porch, trash, boy do
you need to get out of Dodge ….. or should I say ….. Doge
Ken
Napa valley
Oh Erla what a delightful read you have given us this morning, thank you, thank you, thank you 😊. In Venice one must always look up, down and into the nooks and crannies, there is history, arte and life at our beck and call.
Wonderful! Yet again you notice, record and organise the tiny details the rest of us miss or pass over.
We were chuckling by the time we got to the last images of those wonderful tights!
Going to give the polenta and parmesan dish a whirl – always got the cheese to hand somewhere in our kitchen.
Thank you yet again.
Bless the brilliant Ms. Zwingle for remembering Anouk Aimee (whom my wife looked a lot like when I was panting after her in Manhattan, way back in the day. And for teaching me a couple of new words. And for mentioning Lino’s father’s perk of anthracite, which — if I can recall from our coal bin — is the good stuff. I would walk around Venice with Erla endlessly, and have, and hope to again someday.
David Sedaris, radio raconteur and saintly trash collector, notes a common philosophical doctrine: rubbish which doesn’t touch the ground isn’t rubbish.
Thanks for a little Venice today. Waiting, waiting to return. Pennsylvania has allowed everything to open despite our state is one of the 5 with the cases rising.
Ignoring the elephant in the room.
Thanks for sharing,
Carolyn
Thanks so much for your wonderful newsletter.
I just thought you should know that Scarpa is an Italian company which makes all kinds of outdoor shoes from to climbing to mountaineering.
Thanks! I pretty much assumed that to be the case, I just thought it was amusing to see “shoe” stamped on a shoe. Now I’m off on the hunt for a company named “Shirt” that makes shirts….
21 Comments
I found an Etsy store with something similar but exactly the same.
coline design. you can buy tights with The Raven by Poe, and Emily Dickinson’s poetry, too. Also Jane Austen?
life is odd.
Thanks so much for this! When it comes to my legs, I’ll be taking the tights that say “Nevermore.” I checked, and a search on Etsy of “women’s tights with poetry on” brings up all sorts of great things. https://www.etsy.com/search?q=women%26%2339%3Bs+tights+with+poetry+on&explicit=1 We’re missing Dickens, though; there should be tights with “It was the best of times” on one leg and “It was the worst of times” on the other.
Perfect
Your anecdote about the chimneysweeps and street vendors of rags, bones, old iron reminds me to ask if you are familiar with William Dean Howells detailed description of Venice, written after being a minor consul there in the early 1860s. Alternately provincial and perceptive, it is full of genre detail about everyday things, such as how procurement of firewood worked. It is not a style of writing that is in fashion today, but once the reader gets into the cadence, its elegance of phrase becomes evident. I should have thought of it earlier, when the fog kept you indoors. Now, you’d rather be out and about, but it is still charming reading. You can find it on Gutenberg.org if you can bear a book that lacks the fragrance of old paper.
Howells’ book, “Venetian Life,” is one of my all-time favorites. Thanks for mentioning it, I’m sure others will treasure it too. Howells lived in palazzo Falier-Canossa, near San Samuele on the corner of the Grand Canal and the rio del Duca. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palazzo_Falier_Canossa_Canal_Grande_Venezia.jpg As for the fragrance of old paper, by now I do most of my reading online or on-Kindle. I already have so many books that it’s now a question of literal survival in the tiny space we inhabit.
Quick note, in case I wasn’t clear. At least in Lino’s lifetime, the rag/bone man wasn’t vending, he was buying in order to vend. (The cry “Rags, bones and old iron ‘to sell'” was misleading, but implied that the man was asking anyone who heard him that if they wanted to sell him these things, he was ready. In Lino’s neighborhood, near San Barnaba, he had a tiny shop or cubbyhole where you could bring your stuff, without waiting for him to make his rounds. Lino was sent any number of times with things to bring him; he remembers with profound regret how more than once he was delegated to take old rusty tools and things for which he was paid a pittance, that today would be worth real money. Who knew?
A plate of yellow food, streak’s on a wall, flower pots on a porch, trash, boy do
you need to get out of Dodge ….. or should I say ….. Doge
Ken
Napa valley
Oh Erla what a delightful read you have given us this morning, thank you, thank you, thank you 😊. In Venice one must always look up, down and into the nooks and crannies, there is history, arte and life at our beck and call.
Ah yes…Polenta-Butiro-Formaggio. Not soft…not hard. Butter from high in the Dolomiti. Long curls of Grana. A meal fit for S. Marco himself.
Love the tights! And the post! (Just a note: the treachery of images [this is not a pipe] is by Rene Magritte).
GAAAH! Thanks for the correction, and the reminder that I really should do that fiftieth proofreading. I’ve fixed it now.
I always look forward to your posts! Those tights look like a Calzedonia creation.
She mentioned a local shop but wasn’t sure of the name. Might have been Calzedonia.
Wonderful! Yet again you notice, record and organise the tiny details the rest of us miss or pass over.
We were chuckling by the time we got to the last images of those wonderful tights!
Going to give the polenta and parmesan dish a whirl – always got the cheese to hand somewhere in our kitchen.
Thank you yet again.
Make sure your butter’s the best you can get, despite the cost! That’s what’s going to send your dish to heaven or, you know, to the other place.
Bless the brilliant Ms. Zwingle for remembering Anouk Aimee (whom my wife looked a lot like when I was panting after her in Manhattan, way back in the day. And for teaching me a couple of new words. And for mentioning Lino’s father’s perk of anthracite, which — if I can recall from our coal bin — is the good stuff. I would walk around Venice with Erla endlessly, and have, and hope to again someday.
David Sedaris, radio raconteur and saintly trash collector, notes a common philosophical doctrine: rubbish which doesn’t touch the ground isn’t rubbish.
If it isn’t rubbish, then why are we throwing it away? Common philosophical problem…
Thanks for a little Venice today. Waiting, waiting to return. Pennsylvania has allowed everything to open despite our state is one of the 5 with the cases rising.
Ignoring the elephant in the room.
Thanks for sharing,
Carolyn
Thanks so much for your wonderful newsletter.
I just thought you should know that Scarpa is an Italian company which makes all kinds of outdoor shoes from to climbing to mountaineering.
https://www.scarpa.com/community/green-manifesto
Thanks! I pretty much assumed that to be the case, I just thought it was amusing to see “shoe” stamped on a shoe. Now I’m off on the hunt for a company named “Shirt” that makes shirts….