dogging Venice

I saw him yesterday morning: the Caucasian shepherd.  I don’t mean the human, I mean his monster dog covered with what looks like ten layers of hair, and standing as high as the man’s waist.  This dog exists to work in the wilds of the Caucasus, which Venice resembles in not even one way, though I guess if the city were really serious about limiting tourists they could station one at each vaporetto stop.

But no matter.  Venetians are crazy about dogs, and they have been this way for centuries.  One of my favorite minor entertainments is looking at Venetian paintings and finding the dogs.  They’re really easy to spot and they’re almost always more interesting than whoever or whatever is the official subject of the scene.

Here is some exegesis, thanks to a helpful blog from an English website.  https://artuk.org/discover/stories/painting-dogs-in-renaissance-venice

Here also are a few of my musings from days gone by https://iamnotmakingthisup.net/17742/dogs-ruling-the-roost/

In 2019 the Comune of Venice listed 7,023 registered dogs in the “historic center and the islands,” and 16,387 in the mainland municipality.  So dog-lovers have come to the right place.  When you get tired of museums and canals, you’ve got plenty of dogs to watch.  Here are a few from our little precinct:

Dogs look good with people too:

Unhappily, while dogs are almost always great, some of their owners absolutely are not.  Because dogs produce residue and not every owner feels obligated to deal with it. In fact, too many freaking owners pretend it somehow doesn’t exist.

One day a few years ago the Gazzettino published a small personal anecdote relating to this general subject.  I deeply wish I had kept it, but the story, told in the first person by a woman, was unforgettable. It went like this:

She came out of her house in Dorsoduro early-ish on a Sunday morning to discover an enormous dog pooping nearby.  The owner was patiently waiting, then dog and owner nonchalantly began to stroll away, leaving the material behind.

She called out to the owner to return and remove it.  He pretended not to hear and kept walking.

So she shut her door and began to follow them.  He quickly realized this and began to make sharp turns into and out of small streets in an attempt to shake her.  She stayed right behind him.  He sped up.  She sped up.  Clearly this could have gone on for hours, the two of them weaving their way through the byways of Venice, maybe over the bridge to the mainland, maybe to Milan, or Switzerland, but no matter — both she and the man knew that sooner or later he was going to have to return home.  She was implacable.

So eventually he gave in and returned to the scene of the crime and picked up the poop.  He was furious, of course, and I imagine that if she’s still alive she’s still telling this story at every family gathering, to the grandchildren, the nieces, the cousins… Vigilante justice with no shots fired.

And there are the random doggish situations or characters:

Here is my very favorite dog-adjacent story, told to me by a friend who witnessed the event.

Not so many years ago there was a butcher shop in Campiello Barbaro very close to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.  Hence very close to the famous grande dame herself.  It’s a matter of record that she adored her Lhasa Apsos (and their graves are in the museum garden).  Only the best for them, an emotion shared by most dog-owners, but unlike those others, she could easily provide anything for them that qualified as “best.”

So one day the great Guggenheim came into the shop as my friend was talking with the butcher (also his friend) and requested some morsels of filet for her dogs.  The butcher didn’t hesitate, but got right to work cutting, weighing, and wrapping up the delectable meat.  She paid and departed.

“You think I gave her filet?” the butcher scornfully asked my friend.  “For her dogs?”  You might think that scruples are unknown to any Venetian merchant, but sometimes there’ll be one who discovers he has a limit.  “I gave her an ordinary cut of beef, and I’m going to give the filet to whatever little old person comes in next.”

So many stories about dogs turn out to be about something else.