Boatworld | Venice: I am not making this up

See you in September

August 31, 2009 1 Comment

There are two months here — well, two and a half, if you count the 12 days of Carnival — which are the most intense (polite way of saying “difficult”). They are May and September.

A brigade of lions could help with crowd control. This one doesn't look like leadership material, though. Worry has already taken a toll.

As we’re on the verge of September now, I can say I already feel its ponderous impetus, in the same way a river lifts at the unseen approach of a heavily laden barge.

On September 2 the Venice Film Festival begins (runs till September 12). This world-class event overwhelms the Lido, where our boat club is, which means that going to row and getting home again is going to be hard. The Lido is 6 miles [11 km] long and something like 1/3 of a mile [500 meters] wide, which comes to about two square miles [5.5 square km]. That’s not a lot of space for thousands of visitors all at once. True, most of those thousands spend most of their days (and nights) indoors, at hotels or bars or most of all, screening rooms. But they do come out occasionally, especially to go have a look at Venice, and I leave the rest to your imagination. The vaporetto stop at the Lido is like the fall of Saigon.

Then there is the Campiello Prize, an important national literary event whose peak moments will occur on September 5 and 6. So we add all the literati to the streets and vaporettos.

Fangs and claws. Now we're getting somewhere.

Then we throw in the Regata Storica, or Historic Regatta, which is always the first Sunday of September and this year will be on September 6. This draws mostly day-trippers, or people who are already in town for some other reason. I don’t believe many non-Venetians do more than come in for the day, and many more now stay home and watch it on television. But it does majorly disrupt some of the vaporetto service, seeing as the Grand Canal is blocked for about six hours for the races. Trying to decipher the official timetable for the day is like solving one of those innocent-seeming problems in logic which eventually unhinge you, problems which posit A, B, C and if not A but only B, or if A and C but not B, and so on. It doesn’t bother me because I’ll be out in a boat most of the day and into the night, but yes, there is disruption.

Or cannon. A bronze lion with a cannon might be all that's needed to keep the vaporettos in order. And quiet, too.

Then — because the foregoing wasn’t enough — an international show-jumping event, the Venice All Stars, is planned at the stable next door to our rowing club. This will be September 16-19. Workers have been slaving away at primping up the general area, since it is usually in a state of resigned degradation. The major arteries of the Lido (both of them) will be sclerotic, I imagine, with vans and horse trailers and cars. Equine events seem to involve more wheels than hooves, when you think about it.

But all these mammals, however many legs they may have, will require fodder. So to the restaurants (and also hotels), I wish a hearty mazel tov, this is your big (only; last) chance to recoup whatever losses the skimpy tourist year has inflicted on you. And I have no doubt that recoup you will. Then we’ll spend the next three days reading articles in the paper about how expensive Venice is and how people have been carried out on stretchers after getting the bill for a pizza and a beer.

This dude has got the right idea. He's not taking anything seriously. He ought to get to know the bronze lion, who is probably more stressed out than a carnivore with a cannon ought to be. — This dude has got the right idea. If he's serious about anything, he's seriously mellow. He ought to get to know the bronze lion, who is more stressed than a carnivore with a cannon ought to be.

I did in fact just make that last part up. What does happen, however, is that they get the bill and then go to some office and make a formal protest. Complaint. Denunciation. Assorted Venetians read these accounts and go, “Bummer, man.” Or the Venetian equivalent, which doesn’t immediately come to mind.

And on we go.

Boatworld, Problems, Tourism

Gondoliers gone wild

August 20, 2009 8 Comments

Not only have gondolas changed fairly radically in the few hundred years since this image was made, but so have the gondoliers. Boatmen have always gotten into arguments; under the Venetian Republic there was even a special code of laws designed specifically to adjudicate boat-borne conflicts. Maybe we should bring them back.

Last Friday an unfortunate event occurred which not only did not shed honor on the worshipful order of gondoliers, it did way, way the opposite, and then some.

The two gondoliers involved have not only been suspended for five days till the jury decides whether to suspend them for three months (“You are so grounded!!”), but three sopping American tourists have been hauled out of the canal, and I think most of their personal effects have been recovered by the fire department divers.

For all its elegance, complexity, and historic value, in some ways the gondola is just another working boat in a city where most of the work involves a boat somewhere. Just like the blue cargo barge and the green garbage truck, the black gondola is here to make a living. What the passenger brings to the experience is kind of up to him or her.

In the early afternoon of the aforementioned Friday, two gondoliers based at the stazio near Piazzale Roma came to blows. I have to say that having heard their location, what followed didn’t come as a total surprise, seeing as the gondoliers here generally are not of the type you can imagine drinking tea with their pinkies extended. It is also fairly evident that conflict between the two men had already been on a low boil for some time now.

Gondolier A was boarding three Americans for a gondola ride. To do this, the gondolier ties his boats to some slim pilings next to a wooden platform with descending steps, and helps the passengers aboard.

Gondolier B approached and, seeing that the embarkation point was occupied and that the people were taking too long (in his opinion) to get aboard, was seized by a fury that impelled him to leap off his boat without even tying it up, and head straight for Gondolier A. The enraged bellowing, threats, imprecations, etc. that flew between the both of them did not need subtitles or any other form of translation; the Americans, seeing an ugly fight approaching, got scared and all stood up together to get off the boat immediately.

Sudden simultaneous movements, which involve weight as well as motion, especially all concentrated on the lower starboard side of a flat-bottomed gondola, are Not Good. The tourists know that now, because suddenly all three were in the drink and one was at least momentarily sort of stuck under the capsized gondola. This is Extremely Not Good.

Happily, at that moment a motor launch was passing, carrying some firemen back to the firehouse. Firemen here are almost always involved in nautical rescues, so they got right to it. People saved, boat righted, sunken objects (including a video camera) eventually retrieved. Gondolier A gets to washing and drying the boat, and peace — or the opposite of rage, anyway — descends.

Needless to say, the Ente Gondola (the gondoliers’ organization) is now taking steps, which will be determined after all the meetings have concluded.

An isolated incident between two men who haven’t had their rabies shots? Not quite, it seems. Because the scene now shifts to Sunday morning (two days later), at the Rialto area.

A batch of us had rowed over from the Lido, as we like to do on Sunday mornings, and had tied up our eight-oar gondola to the platform at the Erbaria, an open sort of small square facing the Grand Canal.

Being a popular tourist area, the Rialto is a place where some gondoliers tie up to await potential clients. Even to entice passersby to become clients. But not today. Enticement was not in the air.

The young gondolier kneeling on the stern wiping down his boat with a chamois cloth suddenly started to roar at a passing tourist who had stopped to make some snaps of him at work. “I’m not paid to be photographed,” the gondolier yelled, using plenty of vulgar phraseology and making some threatening motions that implied he might be ready to come ashore to demonstrate how much he meant it.

The tourist fled. We stood there, aghast. Lino was outraged.

“The gondola and the tourist are a gondolier’s bread,” he said. “If there’s one thing a gondolier depends on, it’s tourists. This shows that not only is he incredibly rude, he’s even willing to shoot himself in the foot.”

Say what you will, it's hard to think that this gondolier is feeling very much in tune with the romance and glamour the public might imagine was his lot. It can be a very demanding way to make a living, as you can surmise by imagining the frame of mind of a gondolier like this one, preparing his boat for a cold and possibly not very profitable day -- here, on New Year's Day at 9:00 AM.

Lino wasn’t shouting or gesticulating but I think he was angrier than the gondolier. Because the gondolier was merely responding to some random neural firing somewhere in the limbic system of his brain, whereas Lino felt offended as a Venetian on behalf not only of the gondoliers who aren’t insane, but the image of the city as a whole. It’s painful to him to think that people go away with an idea of his city as a place where you take your life (and your wallet) in your hands.

Let’s see if these two events turn out to have been merely some bizarre coincidence and we can all go back to sleep. Otherwise, I don’t know whether it makes more sense to approach a gondolier wearing a life vest or a bullet-proof jacket.

Boatworld, Events, Food, History

Redentor — how it went

July 23, 2009 1 Comment

The festival day actually started the evening before, with a huge storm. (Everyone agreed, obviously, that it was better to have had it Friday night than Saturday night.) It was inevitable; we’d spent the whole week under a hot, wet woollen blanket of weather, one of those classic mid-summer heat waves that makes you hold very still and concentrate on breathing.

At around 7 — actually, earlier — a large swath of gray-black clouds began to draw itself across the sky and the breeze picked up, but we knew the storm would (couldn’t, in fact) hit until the tide turned. So we were inside, around 8:00, when the first raindrops began. Big, heavy, aggressive raindrops, smashing into the pavement one by one. Then the rain really hit. And then it turned to hail. I love the hail, it hits the canal so hard the water looks like it’s boiling. The bits of ice blew and cracked and bounced against the Venetian blinds. And the air turned cool and we could breathe again.

Lino said, “Anybody who’s out on the water in a boat right now is a coglion (male anatomical part which is commonly referred to when needing to describe a person who is a dangerous mixture of stupidity and incompetence at a level which can create inconvenience or even danger to those around him.) This storm had been threatening since 4:00 and Lino has very little patience with people who can’t take care of themselves on the water due to ignorance of what, to him, are the most elementary elements of survival. Kind of like somebody who might sit down to read “War and Peace” who wasn’t too steady with the alphabet.

Saturday morning, the Big Day, 8:30 AM: I went to the cut-rate supermarket behind our place to get some last-minute supplies. I wasn’t the only person who had thought of getting a head start on the day; there were at least five people in line ahead of me.

As it happened, the late- middle-aged man in front and the attractive middle-aged woman behind me knew each other, so they were schmoozing over and around me, in a friendly sort of way.

Man: “Remember when we used to decorate the boat with the frasche (small leafy tree branches), and the paper lanterns with candles in the them. That was really beautiful.” (The yet older man ahead of him chimed in, “Really beautiful.”)

Man: “One year when we were boys we went and rented a boat to go out to watch the fireworks.” That was still the era when the late, lamented affittabattelli were in business. “There were about five or six of us. And we had bought fireworks, too, which we stashed under the prow of the boat.”

Tied up next to us were several sampierotas, so named because they originated in San Pietro in Volta.

The boat was something like a sampierota, whose prow is covered; it makes a very useful storage place, which is precisely why it’s made that way. I guess you have to be a 12- or 13-year-old boy to understand the point of bringing fireworks to a fireworks display.

“Then we saw a man on the fondamenta in a tuxedo. He asked, ‘Hey, I’m late to get to the galleggiante — can you ferry me over?” “We said, Sure. So he got on and sat down on the prow.”

(“The galleggiante” literally means “floating thing,” and specifically referred to a large heavy platform which years ago on the night of the Redentor moved slowly around the Bacino of San Marco, festooned with lights, carrying a band playing music. They have attempted a version of it the past two years, but I think it may have lost its true beauty when everybody became capable of bringing their own music aboard their boats. Or maybe it cost too much. Remember: No ghe xe schei.)

The story continues: So the boys were rowing across from here to there and somehow all the fireworks under the prow ignited. Which means “exploded.” I never heard what set them off, but once they start, that’s it.

“The man in the tuxedo had to jump in the water and swim,” our guy continued. “In fact, we all did. It was like a powder magazine going up. The boat pretty much caught on fire and just kept burning.

“It took us two years to pay off that boat,” he concluded. “We’d go by and pay the boat-renter 5 franchi, 10 franchi, whatever we had.”

What did your parents say? I had to ask.

“Oh we never told our parents,” he answered.

This was a fantastic start to my day.

The rest of the festa went pretty much as anticipated:

Our own little ship of fools, ready to party down.

Beauty. Merriment. Friends — some 14 of them, assorted. Food: the strictly traditional bigoli in salsa (whole-wheat spaghetti with anchovy sauce), sarde in saor (fried sardines in sweet-sour onion sauce), and bovoleti (tiny snails in oil and garlic). Some non-traditional meatballs, too. Lots of wine. And shortly before the fireworks began, we slaughtered the watermelon — there must be watermelon, it’s non-negotiable. The next morning you can still see shards of watermelon rind floating around.

The fireworks started 15 minutes late. This put a serious brake on the merriment, which is emotionally calibrated to the start of the uproar. At least I personally am so calibrated. Fifteen minutes is too long to keep your anticipation at its peak, especially if it’s practically midnight.

One of the most beautiful parts of the spectacle isn't the fireworks themselves, but the panorama of all the boats on the still water, and all the silent people looking upward in the bursts of light, entranced, like the animals who come out of the forest when they hear the magic flute. — One of the most beautiful things about the spectacle isn't the fireworks themselves, but the panorama of all the boats on the still water, and all the silent people looking upward in the bursts of light, entranced, like the animals who come out of the forest when they hear the magic flute.

I will say that while there are no bad fireworks, there are those which are great and those which aren’t. These were not great. The Gazzettino reported the next day that they were “probably the best there had ever been,” which is preposterous. Last year they were the best that there had ever been, and ever will be. This year we had lag, and long pauses, and repetitions. I can say they were louder than usual, but I don’t give points for loud. The hailstorm the night before was much more exciting.

We rowed the caorlina back across the dark lagoon, as other homeward-bound boats chugged past us. Put the boat away, policed up the campground, so to speak (many bottles and other detritus to dispose of), and then home. Which on the Lido means waiting for the night bus, which is not frequent, and then the night vaporetto, ditto.

It was a fine Redentor, but I wouldn’t put it up in my top five, if anyone is keeping score. Apart from last year, the only other truly unforgettable one was the year we heard that a friend of ours had just “come off,” as climbers put it, a mountain in the Dolomites the afternoon of the Redentore. I’ll never forget sitting in our little mascareta that night, not eating, the fireworks all blurry, throat hurting. Poor Giorgio. I think of him every year.

The doge's vow didn't mention anything about balloons, but it's obvious that without them this would be a pretty puny festa.

But the next day happiness reigns once again, as the sun pours itself all over the city and down on the three afternoon regatas, and the stands in front of the church selling balloons and candies in alarming colors, and then the solemn mass and blessing of the city by the patriarch.

Of the three races, the One that Counts is the third: gondolas raced by pairs of men. Back in the barely rememberable past the racers were all men who were not exactly athletes; in fact, the broad sash each rower wears (matching the color of his boat) originally functioned as a sort of truss, I think you’d have to say. Nowadays the competitors train in a seriously focused way, and so instead of having a race in which the battle lasts for the first five minutes, and then everyone just stays where he is till the finish, as it once was, now you have battles to the death all the way through. Especially between two specific pairs of men whose rivalry has reached a level not far from blood feud. I refer here to the brown gondola (Ivo Redolfi Tezzat and Giampaolo D’Este) and the yellow (Rudi and Igor Vignotto).

Two minutes till the finish and any joking is over. (The brown boat won.) (Unfortunately.)

The patriarchal blessing is bestowed on the city from an ecclesiastical station assembled at the entrance to the church of the Redentore. The current patriarch, Angelo Cardinal Scola, seems to like the vantage point. But there are plenty who remember other patriarchs of Venice, who were also cardinals, then popes, then saints, who did it differently.

Both Pope John 23rd (“Papa Roncalli”) and Pope John Paul 1st (“Papa Luciani”), when this was their humble parish task, took the ciborium containing the consecrated Host and walked to the middle of the votive bridge and intoned the benediction first facing the San Marco side, then turning and facing upstream. One can debate the various merits of each approach if one wishes. One can debate anything, but the old way was more beautiful and more appropriate. I have spoken.

Boatworld, Events, History

Redentor — redemption by fireworks

July 14, 2009 No Comments

One of my friends was telling me about what was probably his favorite Redentor, and it had nothing to do with the fireworks.

The church of the Most Holy Redeemer and the votive bridge stretching across the Giudecca Canal.

“Redentor” means “redeemer” in Venetian. (“Redentore” in Italian.) But what it really means is one of the great all-time festivals still walking the earth, and while the sacred day is always the third Sunday in July, the mega-party is the night before.

The third Saturday in July, therefore, is what history has come to know as “la note famosissima,” the most famous night, and this celebration has been made every year since 1577. Boats! Food! Fireworks! But behind all the festivity is a black and horrific story.

On June 25, 1575, someone in the parish of S. Marziale died of plague. Not uncommon in Venice, it being a major seaport, and some epidemics had already been terrible. In this case, the infected rat, so to speak, was later identified as having been a man from Trento who was visiting a certain Vincenzo Franceschini. In a little less than two years, 51,000 people (some accounts say 70,000) had died, more than one-third of the entire population. It was a hecatomb.

In that era pestilence was regarded as a form of divine punishment, so on September 21, 1576 — after having spent a year watching their city begin to disappear before their eyes — the Venetian Senate approved the proposal of doge Alvise I Mocenigo to make a solemn vow: If the Lord God Almighty would remove this scourge from them, they would build a church ” which their descendants would solemnly visit…in perpetual memory of the blessing received.”

When you study this phrase, you grasp that they weren’t merely promising a church, which the Lord presumably already had plenty of, though another one is always nice, but eternal gratitude expressed in a tangible way forever. That’s different.

The church — more correctly termed a votive temple — would be dedicated to the Most Holy Redeemer, and would be built on the Giudecca. The commission was given to Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, otherwise known as Palladio, who was the chief architect in the service of the Republic, and the seriousness of their intention was shown by laying the first stone on May 3, 1577, when the plague was still raging. They had made a vow and they were going to stick to it.

Only a few months later, on the third Sunday of July, doge Sebastiano Venier declared the city free of plague. A temporary wooden church was hastily constructed for the celebrations, and a bridge was laid across a line of boats stretching across the Giudecca Canal — like the one today, it was roughly 1,082 feet long. This bridge enabled the doge and the Senate to arrive in solemn procession at the church for the big ceremony.

And so it has gone, every year since 1577, and every doge and mayor has been there with the exception of doge Leonardo Dona’ in 1612. He snubbed the ritual because the city was mad at him and I gather he shared the sentiment, but staying away didn’t help him much because then people started going around saying, “The day’s going to come when he’d like to go to church, and he won’t be able to.” It makes an annoying little rhyme in Italian. He was an amazing doge, actually; I’m sorry they couldn’t all get along.

Temporary pilings anchor the votive bridge.

I myself wouldn’t consider it Redentor without walking across the bridge at least once. They’re working to get it finished even as I write. Not many days left. Seeing the bridge slowly take form (after boats, they switched to pontoons, and a few years ago a new system was adopted by which the sections are impaled on pilings) adds a great deal to the sense of anticipation.

The bridge is officially opened with a modest ceremony at 7:00 PM on Saturday, and closed at 10:00 PM on Sunday. The life-span of a fruit fly, essentially, which makes it all the better.

Back to that favorite episode of this epic-yet-homely tradition. It took place somewhere back in time, because he went to Nino at Campo San Boldo to rent a boat. There are no more affittabatelli (boat-renters) in Venice, but when he was a lad, and even up till the Sixties, the city was full of places where you could rent a Venetian boat — sandolo, mascareta, caorlina, even a peata — for whatever task was at hand, something like the Zipcar of its time.

So he rented a batela a coa de gambaro (“shrimp-tail boat”), which is the second clue that we’re in the fairly distant past, because now there is only one, which I occasionally see being rowed around by two girls. Lino says it was made by the legendary late boatbuilder “Nino” Giupponi, who devised the framework by studying a painting, perhaps by Canaletto, who was great with boats. In any case, it’s not like the original ones. For one thing, it’s smaller, which you can well believe if the group in question numbered more than ten.

Then he and his friends constructed the customary framework to support a kind of temporary roof made of assorted branches. And they strung the usual paper lanterns along it. The lanterns swing and bob with the motion of the boat in a very cheerful way.

Twilight is almost the best moment of all, with the church of San Giorgio in the background.

Then they set up a table in the middle of the boat, the ladies brought the food, and of course wine, and they were good to go.

The evening took its usual course, which it will also take this year: You row (or motor) in your boat to whatever spot looks good to you, as long as it generally corresponds to the official map which divides areas according to the size of the boat. The Venetian boats (those which are rowed, I mean) have been awarded a spot near the Punta della Dogana, where we all cluster together in our own little world.

Yo'd be amazed how many boats can fit into the colored spaces. The important thing is not to get too close to the fireworks barges. The police and firemen are out patrolling; they'll be sure to tell you if you're too close.

As you see, an open space of about 650 feet is maintained around the fireworks-laden barges. You throw the anchor, or tie up to another boat. The aquatic pilgrimage begins in the early afternoon, as big fishing boats from down-lagoon places like Pellestrina and Chioggia chug in, loaded like third-world ferries with hordes of people who have clearly made the most of their time in transit getting started on the party.

We go out around 6:00, row across the lagoon from the Lido. and about 7:00 we get to the Punta della Dogana (Customs-House Point, the tip of Dorsoduro where the Grand and Giudecca Canals meet). We tie up and pull out the vittles.

You eat, you drink — some people swim, because it’s usually pretty hot — eat, drink, and repeat as necessary. You laugh and sing, if you’re in the mood, or if somebody near you starts it. You wave to your friends and call out remarks. This goes on for hours.

At 11:30 PM, when you’ve been out long enough for an evening chill to begin to suggest itself and sleep is washing up against you like the water around the boat, the fireworks start. Some years they’re great, some years they’re actually kind of boring; last year they were astonishingly gorgeous, brilliant, dazzling; they were so thrilling that they actually brought tears to my eyes.

Good or otherwise, they explode overhead for a solid half-hour. That may not sound like much, but it’s the visual equivalent of an opera by Wagner. It just goes on and on. At the stroke of midnight the holy day begins, which means the party’s over, the bar’s closed, go home. Which we do. Carefully. Because when thousands of boats operated by people who have been eating and drinking for hours (or maybe not so much eating) start to move around in the dark, occasionally faster than they need to, it can be tricky.

So the shrimp-tail boat was ready and so was everybody else. “Me and the family, and some friends — there were 13 of us, including the parish priest and his brother.”

“After the fireworks, we rowed to the Lido and went swimming.” (Technically, this also is part of the tradition, but not many people still do it anymore.) Of course it was great, except that “You never get dry after you swim in the sea at night.”

“Then along toward dawn we began to head home. I remember it as if it were now — the guys would alternate to row in the prow, I was rowing astern, and by now we all groggy” (he closes his eyes almost all the way and mimics languid, somnolent rowing, as if each stroke is the last one before you stop completely).

“All the women and kids and everybody was sprawled all over the table, their heads on their arms, sleeping, or dozing, anyway. A few were sort of singing a little bit under their breath. The tide was coming in, and as the sun came up we just sort of drifted back to the city.”

By now I’ve heard this story fairly often, usually in July. It’s one of a number of his reminiscences that I love to hear just as much as I did the first time around. It’s not only because it’s such a beautiful scene and I wish I’d been there, but because every time he tells it, he looks really happy.

He occasionally also refers to the way Redentore was in general, when he was a boy. And this account does not make him look happy, because like so many things here, what once was almost completely Venetian has mainly become just another thing to lure the tourists.

First of all, when he was a boy the fireworks weren’t over the Bacino of San Marco, but upstream, over the Giudecca Canal, near San Basilio. Up in the nabe, where people lived, as it were. And it seemed like everybody came out in their boat (as per today) but “everybody” meant 3/4 of Venice, which meant 3/4 of the people you knew. Now most of the boats are big motorized vehicles with people from somewhere else, back in the hinterland.

“You could walk across the Giudecca Canal on the boats,” he told me. When the fireworks were shifted downstream, that was the first sign that Something had Changed. And change, here, is usually away from something that’s fine the way it is and toward, well, Something Else.

As for the songs and the food that are both optional and required for this event, I’ll tell you about those next week, when I recover.