Perhaps word of this stunt has already reached you, but in case you were sleeping (as virtually everyone was when it happened here last night), two high-spirited couples from the mainland decided to pick up their friends in Venice after a night of diversion and liquid refreshment.
So they drove to Venice in the Volkswagen Polo belonging to T.V. (the Gazzettino is excruciatingly discreet), age 22, from Jesolo. When they got to Piazzale Roma, instead of parking and taking some other means of transport (vaporetto, feet) to get to wherever their friends were, the young blood at the wheel decided to drive over the Calatrava Bridge (excuse me, Constitution Bridge) and go get them.
So they did.
This snippet of film was obviously from the security video trained on the bridge, viewed in real time by the police. And they were indeed viewing.
Joining T.V. in this exploit were: A 40-year-old man from Trentino, a region bordering the Veneto but still pretty far from Venice; a 22-year-old girl also from Jesolo, and a 20-year-old girl from Motta di Livenza, which is beyond Jesolo.
I mentioned beverages? They were all from very to extremely drunk. Which might explain how blithely they proceeded, not only driving over the bridge, but proceeding to cross the large area in front of the train station, then down the rather narrow Lista di Spagna till they stopped in front of the Palazzo Labia.
The point isn't how far they went – a mere 645 meters (2,215 feet). It's how far they seemed to be prepared to go.
It isn’t explained why this was their destination — at that point they could just as easily have kept going, driving over the Ponte delle Guglie, heading toward San Marco till the first real bridge with real steps stopped them. It’s just a theory. Maybe nothing would have stopped them.
What did, in fact, bring them to a halt were the police and the Carabinieri, whose officers find nothing amusing, ever. They certainly didn’t smile when T.V. threw the car keys into the canal.
So off they trotted to the police station, where all sorts of paperwork awaited them, papers relating to drunkenness and something called ubriachezza molesta, which means roughly “annoying drunkenness.”
The car, which was probably sitting there in the dawning light wondering how the hell it was going to get home without keys or drivers, was loaded onto a boat and taken to the police station (as evidence, I suppose).
Then the firemen got to work examining the bridge, to determine if it also had been traumatized by this little stunt.
And the penalty for the perps? They have been forbidden to set foot (or Firestone) in Venice for three years. That’s it.
Far be it from me to comment on the wisdom of the magistrates. But it doesn’t seem like much of a punishment. I’m still not convinced they even knew they were in Venice at the time.
Well, they know now. And I don’t think the idea of seeing Venice is ever going to appeal to them very much, if it ever did And no more offers to give friends a lift, either. It’s all going to be different from now on. One can hope.
It's 26 miles (42 km) between Venice and Jesolo, and it's 36 miles (58 km) to Motta di Livenza. I have no idea how they all got home.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the first flight in Venice. This might sound like a quaint bit of trivia, if one didn’t know (which one is about to) how important Venice was in the history of Italian and also, may one say, European, aviation.
So pull your minds for a moment from the canals and consider the heavens. I myself am not a connoisseur of the aeronautical, but I am always interested in history, especially in “firsts,” especially if they actually mattered.
On February 19, 1911, Umberto Cagni took off from the beach in front of the Excelsior Hotel on the Lido in his Farman II airplane, and made six brief flights, in spite of the fog. (ACTV, please note.) On March 3, better weather encouraged him to fly, for the first time ever, over Venice.
A few months later, on September 19, 1911, the first airmail flight in Italy departed from Bologna and landed on the Lido. That is to say, Venice.
The symbol of an airplane just above the word “Lido” marks the location of Nicelli airport.
Geography is destiny, as Napoleon observed, and Venice’s position was obviously as valuable to air transport as it had been for centuries to shipping. At that time, the Lido was largely uninhabited, making it the ideal place to establish an airport.
The airport is open to visitors, especially those who want to take a helicopter ride over Venice and the Lagoon (www.heliairvenice.com).
The first was built in 1915, a military base on the northernmost part of the Lido, which was active during World War I. Then, in 1935, with some major variations, it became the Aeroporto Nicelli, and air became yet another way, in the march of progress, to get to Venice. Flights on Ala Littoria and Transadriatica connected the famously watery city to points scattered around Europe. Even to Baku, if you happened to be going that way.
Nicelli immediately became the scene of extremely glamorous arrivals, as movie stars deplaned on the grassy runway to attend the Venice Film Festival. This continued until 1960, when Marco Polo airport opened on the mainland.
As shown on the map displayed in the airport, Venice remained at the center of things into yet another century.
So far I may have made it sound as if all these things were accomplished by an occult hand. But of course many hands were involved, among which none were more important than those of the late Lt. Col. Umberto Klinger.
Klinger, a native Venetian, was already a celebrity by the time he created the Officine Aeronavali at Nicelli, a large workshop dedicated to repairing and maintaining airplanes.
A glimpse of Klinger on the cover of a book written by his daughter.
A highly decorated pilot in World War II, with more than 5,000 hours of flight to his credit, 600 of which were in combat, he earned 5 silver Medals of Military Valor. He also served as Chief of Staff of the Special Air Services of the Italian Air Force, not only organizing the activities of squadrons of Savoia-Marchetti S.75s (troop transports or bombers), but also flying them himself, often at night, over enemy territory. He was president of the first passenger airline in Italy (Ala Littoria), and four other companies. Far from being a mere figurehead, Klinger raised Nicelli to the level of the second airport in Italy.
So much for the history lecture. Now we have to move into the darkened halls of humanity, where to do justice to even the bare outlines of the story of Umberto Klinger you’d need to resort to dramatic opera. Verdi! thou should’st be living at this hour, but you’re not; to the people who knew him, though, the name of Klinger creates its own music. Especially those who remember his last day.
Lino, for example.
Lino went to work for the Aeronavali as an apprentice mechanic at Nicelli in 1954, at the age of 16. He often saw “Comandante Klinger,” and even spoke with him on various occasions. Right up to today, Lino pronounces his name with reverence and regret. This wasn’t unusual — Klinger was by all accounts a powerfully charismatic man admired for his courage, respected for his skill, but with a special gift for inspiring real love.
In 1925, Transadriatica was one of the first passenger airlines in Italy; its first route connected Rome and Venice. This poster promotes the link between Venice and Vienna.
The Aeronavali flourished, with hundreds of employees working on aircraft of all sorts, from the Italian Presidential plane to cargo and passenger planes of many different companies. When Marco Polo airport opened on the mainland in 1960, the Aeronavali moved to the mainland with it.
Then politics began to set in. The broad outlines of what is undoubtedly a hideously complicated story are that certain elements in Rome, wanting to gain control of the company in order to place it under state, rather than private, administration, began to create financial problems for Klinger. The Aeronavali kept working, but payments from the Ministry of Defense were mysteriously not coming through. And the unions, manipulated by the aforementioned political factions, began to stir up discontent.
Lino remembers the increasingly tense meetings of the workers and the unions. He remembers Klinger pleading with them to be patient as he struggled to reopen the financial flow. But the unions rejected any compromises on pay or contracts, however temporary they might be, compelling the workers to resist. They ultimately even went on strike for 72 hours. Celebrity or no, the man — who had looked after his employees with no less solicitude than he had cared for his pilots — was running out of fuel.
The Aeronavali worked on any sort of aircraft — Dakotas, Constellations, and the Savoia-Marchetti S.75, a 30-passenger plane also used as a bomber in World War II. These were Klinger’s specialty, comprising virtually all of the squadrons he commanded of the Special Air Services.
During these harrowing days, Klinger was heard to say more than once that what was needed to resolve this impasse was “something really big.” He ultimately thought of something that qualified.
Early in the morning of January 26, 1971, he went alone to the old hangar at Nicelli, by that time virtually abandoned. And he took a cord. A few hours later, when the guardian made his rounds, he discovered the body of Comandante Klinger. He had hanged himself.
Lino remembers the gathering at work that morning, when they were given the news. There was utter silence, he recalls, though if stricken consciences could make an audible noise there would have been plenty of that.
The first time I heard this story, I thought his was the despairing last act of a man who had run out of hope. Now I am convinced that Klinger’s suicide was an act of voluntary self-immolation in order to save the company — not unlike the Russian officers after the fall of Communism who, left unpaid, finally killed themselves so their widows would get their pensions.
And Klinger turned out to have won his gamble. Almost immediately, the overdue funds began to pour in.
The hangar, seen across the runway from the terminal.
The funeral, in the church of San Nicolo’ next to the airport, was attended by a huge number of mourners; many had to stand outside. Did any union officers come to pay their last respects? “Sure,” Lino said. “They were at the head of the line.”
Courage in combat — it isn’t needed only in the skies. Nor does it only involve things that explode, though they can still be fatal. Umberto Klinger deserves another medal, one which doesn’t seem yet to have been created.
Klinger, the way his employees remember him — in mufti, smiling.
Postscript: It’s very easy to visit the airport. At the central vaporetto stop on the Lido at Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta, take the “A” bus marked for “San Nicolo’ – Ple. Rava’.” (If the weather’s nice, you can just stroll along the lagoon embankment for about half an hour.) Get off at the last stop, in front of the church and walk a few minutes across the grass and up the driveway.
The terminal has been spiffed to a modern version of its former glory, with a cool retro-design restaurant, “Niceli.” Have lunch, or just a coffee or drink on the terrace. If you come toward the early evening in the summer, bring lots of mosquito repellent.
The lobby today.Or maybe the restaurant is named “Nicely.” I like the design, even if it is unclear.
Even if you were to speak Venetian, you may have occasionally overheard an expression being used that expressed almost nothing to you:
“No ti xe gnanca sangue da papalina.” (No tee zeh NYANG-ka sang-way da papa-EE-na.)
It literally means “You (or he, or they) don’t have even as much blood as a papalina.” It figuratively means, “There’s essentially no connection between us” — referring to relatives who are along the line of being a second cousin twice removed of the aunt of your stepsister. The underlying concept is that a papalina is so small that it contains perhaps two drops of blood, if that much.
So what, I hear you cry, is a papalina?
It’s a fish. It’s a member of the sardine family, and in English it’s called a sprat. If you like sardines (fresh, I mean, not canned), you will almost certainly love its modest but abundant little relative, if you can find it.
Because now that so many people have switched from the finny food of their childhoods to the fancy fins of today, it’s not easy to find papaline (the plural) in the fish market. They might occasionally be lying there on some intrepid vendor’s long icy counter, between their more glamorous cousins, the bigger sardines and the smaller sardoni, or anchovies. And besides being good, and good for you, they’re delightfully inexpensive. Mainly because hardly anybody wants them.
I’m writing this today because Lino’s quest was rewarded yesterday and he came home with a pound of the little critters. Lunch that day was an unprogrammed gorgefest.
These are papaline. Each is about three inches long and provides two enthusiastic mouthfuls. In our case, very enthusiastic.
There is only one truly correct way to eat them, and that is grilled. (You can do whatever you want, obviously — I’m just telling you.) And not merely grilled — you must eat them when they come right off the grill. Or, as the Venetians say, “a scotadeo” (ah scotta-DAY-oh). Literally “burning your fingers.”
Funny, they don’t say “scorching your tongue” or “searing your lips.” Venetians obviously reject the Japanese concept that if it’s too hot to hold (they’re referring to a cup of tea), it’s too hot to eat.
Unfortunately, the only place you’re ever likely to have the chance to incinerate your fingerprints will be at somebody’s house, or a picnic/party of some kind. You might find a few thrown anonymously into a mixed fishfry or even platter of mixed grilled fish at a restaurant. But it’s Not the Same.
There’s another comment which invokes this member of the Clupeidae family. It’s something only Lino says, and it comes from his heart: “You grew up eating papaline.”
He will utter this in an accusing way to the air as we pass the guilty individual. Sometimes he goes on, “You’ve forgotten when your nose ran all the time and you wiped it on your sleeve because you didn’t have a handkerchief.” Lino still sees some of this category of person around the neighborhood. “We were kids together,” Lino will tell me. “Now they’re eating LOBSTER and SOLE. But what can you say? They grew up eating papaline.”
He says this with a delicate blend of disdain and regret, because whoever he may be referring to has progressed far — too far — beyond his or her hardscrabble childhood, a life in which cheap fish and several tons of polenta were about all there was to keep you going till tomorrow.
Forgetting when you ate papaline means you’ve abandoned your roots, gotten above yourself, become mutton dressed as lamb. Rejecting papaline is the tertiary stage of voluntarily transforming yourself into something that may be real, but it’s phony. Kind of like Formica that looks like wood. It doesn’t have anything to do with how you dress, because there are plenty of people even in this neighborhood who have banished as many tokens of their past as they can. Their wives even have coats of some kind of fur. So it’s not about appearances, essentially, but attitude.
You get a pass because you never ate them in the first place, so you’re okay But if you should ever have the chance, I advise you to take it. Because in their own little way, the papaline are another Disappearing Venetian, like the itinerant knife-and-scissors grinder.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of what immediately precedes a flushing sound.
This is a trick photo because it only looks like something that ought to smell. But it doesn't, or at least not much, and definitely not the way you probably expect. I just wanted to set the mood.
For an astonishing number of people, this is the only odor that Venice brings to mind. But it’s not so simple. In fact, the aforementioned aroma is not all that frequent anymore, even at low tide, thanks to long and patient dredging of the canals, and the installation of septic tanks in most public buildings and many private ones. So let us not become fixated on biological byproducts.
While we're on the subject, however, this innocent-looking tube will be giving off a stronger odor than five average canals. It is the conduit of the contents of some septic tank. Happily, it's a job that doesn't take long.
The tube leads to a "honey-boat," which carries the material to the water-treatment plant. This smell is one of the few things I've never heard somebody complain about. If they're past 60, they may be remembering how home sanitation worked when they were children, which was a lot more direct.
Furthermore, I invite you to consider some of the daily smells in your average mainland city: The perfume of imperfectly combusted diesel wafting from buses waiting at traffic lights, for instance, or your overflowing dumpster under the sun. I’m not saying I prefer the stench of sewage – there, I said it – I’m just saying there is no city that smells entirely of lavender potpourri.
And another thing. Before someone Beyond the Bridge starts imagining what the objectionable smells might be out here, they ought to include in that list the much more frequent AND PREVENTABLE odor that too many people — tourists or otherwise — emit from their underarms on crowded vaporettos and buses in the summer. The fact that many of them (usually men, sorry) are clinging for support to something overhead just makes it worse. Often their shirts have no sleeves.
Continuing our sensual tour of Venice — or, as I think of it, enjoying Venice with your eyes closed — I’m going to state that smell may well be the sense that gives me the most pleasure here. A random walk with your nose attuned will almost certainly awaken you to either an activity, or a product, or a season, or a plant, or something defying categorization that is something that makes Venice beautiful.
Clean laundry. I realize that anyone just walking around the city isn’t likely to be able to inhale this exquisite aroma (though one blithe spirit in Cannaregio was recently discovered at night stealing somebody’s laundry off the line, for reasons that were never very clear.) But if you are here in the summer and in a position to wash some piece of fabric and hang it out to dry, you’ll have the pleasure of inhaling the air of Venice toasted by the sun. There is no product you can put in a clothes dryer that could ever match the perfume created by the sun and the breeze, not even if it were something labeled “Venetian Sun and Breeze.”
Yes, it’s tiresome to have to calculate the time needed to dry your clothes outside on the line, especially because that time may not be quite enough to get the job done. Then you have a little psychological struggle to decide whether that sheet is really dry, or if you just wish, really hard, that it were, because it has to be. But those are details. This is one of the best smells in the world and I suppose one of the few Venetian ones you could replicate wherever you live, if your neighbors didn’t care, which they probably do.
One excellent reason to go out for a walk before dawn is to be able, in certain streets, to smell the bread coming out of the oven.
Fresh bread. If you have never, or not for a long time, walked into or past a bakery really early in the morning, when large batches of bread have just been taken out of the ovens, you might think that this is just another aroma, one of those few that humans are able to detect. (Bloodhounds, if you care, have noses that are ten- to one hundred million times more sensitive than a human’s. And bears are seven times more sensitive than bloodhounds. Just to give some perspective.) Is it the yeast? The flour? The profound need of nourishment that our primitive organism requires? Warm bread. The limbic system rejoices even if you don’t happen to be hungry.
There are 33 streets in Venice either named “baker,” “bakery” or “bakeries” (forner, forno, forni), the word denoting strictly bread, as opposed to eclairs or cake or muffins or anything else. (When I try to imagine what an average neighborhood in Venice smelled like in the year 1200 — apart from whatever the horses, humans, and roaming pigs contributed — I have to imagine the waftage from that many bakeries. Not so bad.) When First Crusader Godfreyof Bouillon set about founding the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, he promised the Venetians that in exchange for their help in his little effort, in every city they conquered their merchants would have their own neighborhood containing “A street, a square, a church, a bath, and a bakery.” All the essentials, though I’d have started the list with a bakery.
One of my earliest encounters with this celestial aroma and its effect on me was in the dark of a winter dawn, when we were out rowing. We were headed south along the lagoon shore of the Lido, toward Malamocco, and my attention was mainly on the fact that there was so much fog that I could barely see where we were going. Suddenly I found myself in an invisible billow of warm-bread smell, drifting from a bakery somewhere behind the trees. It was beyond magical. And then it was gone, and we were back in the chilly, gunmetal gray world.
“Our daily bread” — it still means something here.
Pastry. Walk past certain corners early in the morning — especially Sunday morning — and you will pass through a delectable little cloud composed of the smell of warm butter and sugar. Come to think of it, I never notice any vanilla or almond or cinnamon tones, though you would expect them. It’s essentially just butter and caramelizing sugar that are doing the work and the aroma is as gorgeous as a bouquet of peonies. On a humbler note, you have an even better chance of smelling hot croissants just out of the oven of many bars and cafes — sweet, buttery, crusty. (I maintain that “crusty” is a smell.) Hardly anybody makes their own anymore; they buy them frozen. But the smell is delectable just the same.
Anything burning. Obviously I’m not referring to houses or boats here, though I think an incinerated plastic-resin boat (which I’ve seen from afar) must emit a smell that’s truly scary. And harmful.
Then there is the smoke from the motors on boats. This is, if possible, even more vile. There’s more of it, and it seems to contain 97 extra poisonous ingredients. Cruddy little boats backing up, big bruising barges stopping suddenly with a roar of the retro-rockets, and an assortment of geriatric motors belonging to men who grew up with the notion that it needs to “warm up” for ten or 15 minutes before departure. Like the old black and white TVs.
You have to imagine greasy gray smoke roiling around this object, which is also roaring away like a mammoth trapped in a tar pit.
And there are motors which have been removed from their boats. The man who lives across the street (about six feet away), conducted a late-autumn ritual the other day by putting his outboard motor onto a sort of metal trolley so he could clean it out by combusting all its fuel before putting it away for the winter. So the motor stood there for a good 20 minutes, roaring, excreting thick grey smoke. Of course this is against the law. I closed the windows.
I’ve often mentioned the allure of distant woodsmoke (another smoky smell that doesn’t make any fireman feel warm and cozy). I’m really thinking about food.
The aroma of cooking comestibles could be pork ribs over charcoal (at several saint’s-day festivals), or a batch of chestnuts (Lino does this at home, though I don’t detect anyone else doing it), or anything fishy –seppoline or grey mullet or sardines on the skillet. I’ve developed sufficiently to be able to tell the difference if I’m downwind of some intrepid cook. Mostly that would be Lino. I think people generally boil or bake fish because of the smell, though sometimes I walk through the cloud of somebody else’s imminent lunch or dinner.
This lady sells roasted chestnuts for a few weeks in the fall at the Lido, at the vaporetto stop. It's like the olfactory opening day of autumn.
When Lino was a lad, the smell of fish of any sort crisping up on a sheet of hot metal was one of the most normal smells around, so normal that people probably didn’t even notice it. Now it’s something that inspires comment, via voices like the ones I heard out the bedroom window from people passing in the street as we were scorching a batch of the little critters. If the people are past a certain age, their comments will be smoking with appreciation and desire. If not, the heck with them. Our onlycontribution to good will among men is to avoid cooking them when people have hung their laundry out to dry just above us, because we open the windows and much as I love fish, even I wouldn’t want my underwear to smell like foodsmoke.
The fish smells vary by season. Seppie (cuttlefish) are in the fall (migrating adults) and spring (their babies). Baby seppie (seppoline), as opposed to bass or shrimp, have some extra element that comes out on the griddle, maybe because they don’t have scales. I don’t know. It’s a slightly acrid, slightly salty, slightly bitter scent. It’s a fragrance that seems to connote a party, or at least a small but chaotic family gathering.
This long stretch of jasmine has such a powerful perfume that even though you love it at the beginning, after several weeks you can't wait for it to be gone. And it doesn't leave quickly, or willingly. By the time it's gone, you're saying "Thank God."
Flowers. In April and May Venetian flora goes berserk. Festoons of wisteria, then the magnolia blossoms, then dense bushes of jasmine andpittosporum saturate the air with a fragrance so powerful it verges on nauseating. (I said “verges.”)
Followed immediately, in early June, by the flowering of the lime, or linden, trees. I never knew this smell before coming here, and it is absolutely the most wonderful plant-perfume here (exception made for calicanthus).
I don’t need to see the linden blossoms, it’s enough for me to inhale their perfume, an exquisite mingling of delicate, not-too-sweet, utterly seductive elements. Somebody knows what they are and what they’re called, but I’m not interested. I just want to breathe it all in while I can. It doesn’t last as long as I’d like it to — maybe ten days. I’d willingly shift some of the time the jasmine hangs around and give it to the lime trees.
The lovely, creamy little blossoms of the pittosporum are actually lovely, creamy little perfume bombs. One is enough, no matter how much you may love it.This is a lime-tree in bloom. I wish you could smell it. If I even tried to describe it, I'd destroy it.
It had been so hot for so long that the rain had hardly begun to fall before we were walking through a Turkish bath.
Rain. The summer sun beats down on the masegni, or paving stones, day after day, and nobody notices until it rains. Especially if the rain isn’t very hard or heavy, the superheated blocks of trachyte release a mist of steam (usually invisible, though not always) that smells of equal parts water and stone. It smells of cool, it smells of relaxation. It must stimulate that little part of the brain that responds to the word “oasis” or “waterfall.”
Fog definitely has its own smell. It’s something sharply clean and faintly metallic, something resembling wet iron. Being hot augments the rain smell; being cold augment
Coffee. In the 17th century, an Arab judge, Hadjibun di Medina, was instructed by the Ottoman sultan to settle some social controversy concerning the benefits of coffee. (There was one intrepid subject who felt about coffee the way I feel about smoke, which created some temporary controversy.) The good Hadjibun issued this statement: “Oh you men of open mind, drink coffee and don’t pay any attention to the detractors who with denigrate it with brazen lies. Drink it generously because its aroma banishes worries, and its fire reduces to ashes the turbid thoughts produced by daily life.”
As my thoughts are dangerously prone to becoming turbid it’s a good thing there’s so much good java around. Even a whiff as I pass certain cafes on my daily rounds is an ethereal encouragement. Which keeps me going till I pass the next cafe.
It's worth a trip to Sant' Erasmo for their patron saint's festival in June just for the charcoaled ribs.
Calicanthus, in the market at Rialto before Christmas. Heavenly.
The nose now knows that Carnival is on the way. Our friend Dino Righetto had just made a houseful of frittelle, which were even better than the warm-oil-and-sugar aroma which will probably stick to the upholstery till Easter.
