One of the things I love about our neighborhood is that there are children here. Lots and lots of them, of every size and attitude. Shoals of them, migrating herds of them, like the wildebeest on the Serengeti.
If you walk down Via Garibaldi at around 6 on a summer evening, you will realize that this is one corner of Italy in which the word “birthrate” isn’t associated with “falling.”
But an unusually perceptive person would already have known all that from the scene I noticed outside one of the tobacco/candy/lottery ticket/toy stores here.
What these three alarmingly pink doll-size strollers reveal is:
That there are little girls living nearby.
That there are lots of them, enough to create an important market for toys, especially those designed for little girls, a market that requires serious inventory.
That they are extremely demanding customers, who require choice in the products they insist their relatives buy them, whichever relative has recently shown a weak spot that can be exploited.
That any color is good, as long as it’s pink.
I hope I’m here when they grow up, I really want to see how they dress.
As you recall, there has been quite a kerfuffle due to the perceived misstep of Giorgia Boscolo, who has just passed the first tiny step in the long road toward becoming the first woman gondolier, with regard to her behavior toward the press.
Several voices have chimed in, making a sort of quartet: Giorgia, her sister Alessia, Aldo Rosso (president of the Ente Gondola) and Roberto Luppi, head of the bancali, who are the heads of the gondola stations.
There was a brief attempt to climb aboard the situation by Eleanora Mingati, chief of the legal office of the Listening Center for Social Disadvantage, by claiming that this situation represented “maschilismo” (male chauvinism) by the gondoliers.
Mr. Rosso met it head-on. “The person who is making a distinction between male and female, not looking just at the person, is precisely this lady,” he told the Gazzettino. “The Ente Gondola deserves applause because it admitted Ms. Boscolo to the substitute gondoliers’ school. That means that she deserved it.” And no more was heard about that.
Alessia repeated the sequence of events as recounted by Giorgia: “What do you mean, ‘agent’ — I’m just her sister,” she said. “Giorgia asked me to give her a hand because she couldn’t deal with it all, phone calls, proposals, invitations. All she asked me to do was answer the phone. It’s true that I’m helping her — she’s got a husband and two little kids, she can’t handle the situation that’s developed after she was admitted to the school.”
Giorgia herself made a series of statements of varying degrees of distress and surprise, and had a meeting with Mr. Rosso and Mr. Luppi. “I’m not sure where I goofed,” she said, “but all this has fallen on me unexpectedly. I knew that a woman admitted to the gondoliers’ school would make news, but I never expected all the attention I got.”
The upshot: Mr. Rosso has said that Giorgia can certainly be photographed and interviewed by whomever she likes — it’s her life. “I merely reminded her that whenever she speaks, she’s speaking only for herself, not the entire category of gondoliers. Whether she’s paid for it or not, that has nothing to do with us.”
Mr. Luppi repeated that; she can do whatever she wants, but it’s on her own account, not representing the entire cadre. “I’d remind her to pay attention to what she says,” he said, “because she’s also going to be judged on her behavior. And that doesn’t apply only to her, but to each of the 22 aspiring substitute gondoliers.”
I have to say I feel a little better, and I feel safe in supposing she feels even better than I do.
Lino told me something that happened on the vaporetto yesterday which falls into my personal category of events I term “Venetian moments.” Actually, they could more generally be called “small-town moments,” but we’re here and besides, I still sometimes marvel at how many connections form the web that hold this city together. Kind of like a truss.
This lady isn't just admiring the boy's adorable little sibling. She's already gathering and filing away large amounts of information about the new arrival. The group behind her may be discussing the cost of mozzarella, but I'd be willing to bet that they're updating each other on their families and friends.
Venetian moments either need to involve a Venetian, or occur in Venice. They can happen to foreigners but only after they’ve been here for a while. And of course they’re usually fleeting little experiences (sometimes only glimpses, not even verbal). I love it when they happen to me and I think that Lino was secretly pleased about this one, though he didn’t make a big thing out of it.
So he was on the #1 vaporetto, the trusty local, headed uptown, and a little old couple got on at the stop nearest a nursing home called the Ca’ di Dio. He glances at them out of the corner of his eye, like you do on public transportation.
Then the little old lady addresses him in a tiny, bent-over voice:
“Lu no xe da la parochia dei Carmini?” (“Aren’t you from the parish of the Carmini?”) They continued in Venetian, but I’ll spare you and keep the thing going.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Because I’m from the Carmini too,” she continued.
“I’m Leda’s little brother,” he said. He didn’t need to bother adding a last name, or a street name, or any other clue. And putting it this way meant that he already knew that in her day (when he was a tyke) there was only one Leda in the parish.
“I thought I recognized you,” she said.
They exchanged a few little generic comments, and then he got off.
It isn’t surprising is that she recognized him; parishes were very tightly knit and usually were composed of plenty of large families. And people of her vintage have phenomenal memories for faces and names — they’re like anonymous little griots wandering through the supermarket, comparing the cost of tuna while brimming with memories of people, events, places, who knew/did/said what and where and also why. And with whom. Stretching back unto the fourth and fifth generation. They’re completely overgrown with the shrubbery of family histories, each one of which is a complete saga.
From across the canal it looks like a friendly early-morning chat between friends. That's part of their secret...
When neighborhoods were still intact, these little old ladies were plentiful, and they weren’t usually endearing — they were to be feared and placated with offerings because they knew everything about you. They knew things about you that literally nobody knew, nobody could know. Things not even you knew about yourself. This amount of knowledge and diabolical skill at using it is one of those primal forces, like the atom, capable of life or death. Or, as Lino puts it whenever he might be tempted to drift into something like nostalgia for the old days, “Those little old ladies knew how many hairs you had on your ass.”
In this case, it didn’t matter that he’s now 71 and probably hasn’t been seen by her since he was 22 and moved to another neighborhood — he was imprinted on her memory and will be there for eternity.
They're almost always in three's. It must be something occult.
Speaking of eternity, don’t think that this knowledge will disappear when she dies; she’s going to take it with her so she can find her friends up there and sit around all afternoon talking about people who aren’t there to defend themselves. It’s true that they acted as a steady underpinning to the life in the courtyard, a sort of 24-hour neighborhood watch. But as Lino also says, “Their gossip destroyed whole families,” and he’s not joking.
The bow that tied up this moment was the fact that he remembered her too, though by name, instead of face. “She’s gotten really old,” he remarked. Still, they were landsmen, that’s the point of it all.
If there were a code word or a secret handshake for the people of the Carmini, they’d have used it. He was struck by the fact that she identified herself according to parish, in the old way. Back then, people didn’t identify themselves so much according to their sestiere, or district, the way they do now since everything’s gotten all stretched out of shape. They went by parish. If somebody asked where you lived, you’d say “I’m from the Carmini,” or “Anzolo Rafael,” or “San Cassan.” That’s the way it was.
It’s obvious, once you know it — or even stop to think about it — that the pipes and cables carrying water, gas, electricity and so on are under the paving stones of the streets.
Work underway in Campo San Vio. The site looks remarkably like an archaeological dig -- the water pipe alone appears to be a relic of an early Iron age cult.
(When they have to cross a canal, they cling to the underbelly of the nearest bridge in a marsupial kind of way.)
What happens with the water pipes is that they leave traces — not of the water itself, but of the condensation they cause because of the difference in temperature between the water in the pipe and its surroundings.
Example: It’s deeply hot now in Venice, the days are dazzling with heat and sun, though the air, thank God, isn’t very humid. At night, things cool down somewhat, and in the early morning, this appears on the fondamenta near our house:
In the winter, the opposite phenomenon occurs, as you see:
Nothing revolutionary here, I just find it diverting.
