Fireworks anywhere look great, even if they're not over Venice.
If you had been here, you could have done any or all of the following to celebrate the Night of Saint Silvester, as it is also known here.
You could have ingested a festive dinner at Harry’s Bar for a trifling 500 euros ($662) per person. It was marked down at the last minute from 1,200 euros ($1,590) because times are hard. I’m not sure how much profit they made at that price considering that the menu covered champagne, caviar, truffle ravioli, tournedos and so forth. Maybe they downgraded from Beluga to Sevruga. That’s what we’ve certainly done.
And yet, the transcendent Arrigo Cipriani, owner, scion, and namesake of this legendary establishment, has not only made it sound as if he has slashed prices more drastically than a tire/mattress/car salesman, he also made it known that in spite of the hard times, almost all the tables were already taken, so you had to book fast. I guess I understand that. Make it sound like a sale and people automatically think they’re saving money.
After you had reveled in your Lucullan repast, you could have gone around the corner to the Piazza San Marco not only to watch the fireworks but create your own (metaphorically speaking) by throwing in your osculatory lot with all the other couples thronging the piazza who have been primed by weeks of publicity to come here to kiss each other at midnight.
It’s the third year that this experience has been offered and it was an immediate success; it is now referred to as a tradition. Four thousand lips beating as one.
Two years ago a family from Milan lost their golden retriever in the crush and the city was plastered with their appeals for months, complete with photo (was her name Molly? Lucy?). Eventually she was found, which kind of surprised me, but not how long it took. Considering how many dogs there are here, she must have been having the best time of her life.
Then there will be the homemade explosives set off around town. Usually here they aren’t big or dangerous enough to blow away arms and put out eyes and all the rest of what happens in Naples and other places addicted to New Year’s ordnance.
Speaking of things going crash and boom, Lino remembers when people here still marked midnight by throwing out the window everything they wanted to get rid of. “Everything!” he repeated when I asked for examples. Dishes. Glasses. Chairs. Toilets. (I did not make that up.) He says that people in Rome and Naples still do it. I’m making a note of it on my “Not To-Do” list. Right next to my note that says “Wear black fishnet stockings, hard hat.”
Otherwise, though, he says that, until the Seventies, New Year’s Eve wasn’t regarded as an event to celebrate in any particular way here. “At midnight, all the ships in the port blew their horns. Otherwise, people just went to bed like any other night.” Making their own pyrotechnics.
Wherever you were, I hope your celebrations were just what you wanted, no less, and certainly no more.
Here the holiday season breaks down roughly into three categories: Food, Religion, and Santa. (I include “presents” under “Santa,” unless you’re giving somebody gold, frankincense, and/or myrrh.) I can’t think of any component which wouldn’t fit in at least one of those columns.
Santas are everywhere, especially for sale.
My impression is that the adults respond to the first, children to the third, and somewhere in there religion jostles to find a place, as if it were stuck inside a vaporetto churning toward December 25 and can’t manage to get off at the right stop because everybody is blocking the aisle with their strollers, shopping carts, enormous bags, and equally enormous selves. Yes, it’s a project here, as in many places, to feel that Christmas is anything other than a big blobby holiday everybody loves or hates for their own reasons.
This is not to say that people don’t acknowledge any religious aspect of the day — they do. By the admission of many, it’s one of the few times a year that they pass through the church doors. And virtually every church boasts its own Nativity scene, many of which are appealingly homemade. I don’t know if the big mega-shopping centers on the mainland display the Nativity in any form other than in a box with a price tag — I have never gone over there before the holidays and I don’t feel like risking what remains of my equilibrium by trying it.
But if I’ve never gone, why do I assume it’s bedlam? Two words which apply to life on the mainland: Kids and cars.
Here is our order of march for the festive three days (yes, we get a bonus, thanks to St. Stephen).
Buy groceries/send cards/clean and decorate hovel. Seeing that we have no space for anything larger than a paper clip, we skip the tree. I drape some festoons around the heavy forcola made for rowing in the stern of a balotina. I call it the Christmas Forcola and I really like it. And after all, it was a tree once.
The first year I did this, Lino regarded it as a possibly ominous sign of an incurable urge Americans are known to have to come up with impulsive, unorthodox, possibly unnecessary, vaguely embarrassing stunts. These are generically called americanate (ah-mer-i-cahn-AH-teh). Americanate of any sort fly in the face of The Way We’ve Always Done It and are sure to draw more ridicule than appreciation. Even if you commit one of these acts in the privacy of your own home, your Italian consort will still feel that the Natural Order of Things has been disagreeably disturbed. I learned early on that they’re not worth it. But the Christmas Forcola stays.
Christmas Eve: Big dinner. It is always based on fish, and more precisely, in the manner of Venetian families since the Bronze Age, the menu is this:
Antipasto — anything you like and can afford, which in our case rules out baccala’ in most forms but does allow space for smoked herring, anchovies, and some Ukrainian caviar we were given.
These are the lagoon gobies known as go'. They are approaching their moment of glory, if they but knew it.
First course: Risotto of go‘. You may remember we scored a small trap for snaring these lagoon fish, but we’ve also fished for them by looking for their lairs and then inserting an arm (Lino’s arm, I’ll admit) down into it till the fish is grasped. For years the go’ was one of the many humble and abundant fish on which families relied, and was consequently very cheap. In that era, sea bass and bream were elite creatures which cost three times what you’d pay for go’. Now the situation is reversed: Thanks to fish farms, bass and bream are sold at fire-sale prices (7 euros a kilo, or $5 per pound), and go’ now costs 18 euros a kilo ($12 a pound). Lino can’t get over it.
Anyway, risotto of go’ is a profoundly Venetian dish, so profound that you hardly ever find it on restaurant menus. The memory of this comestible has almost disappeared under the onslaught of Norwegian salmon and French turbot.
Second course: Roasted eel. You could also simmer your pieces of eel in tomato sauce, but throwing chunks of this creature on the griddle and then opening all the windows to let out the smoke from its burning fat is part of Christmas. It is extremely delectable and I have come to count on it as part of the holiday tastefest.
Pieces of eel neatly removed from their bone, ready for the griddle.
And I realize how blessed we are to be able to eat it, considering that Lino remembers there were people, when he was a lad (and for centuries before, probably), who were so poor that they would go to the fish market on Christmas Eve and ask the vendors for the offal — the heads and innards of the eels — to have something to make their risotto with. I did not make that up and neither did he.
Yes, you can have bass or bream or canned tuna or whatever else you might prefer. But eel is the Ur-fish for Christmas Eve. Just for the record.
Then we eat some pieces of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, which is the perfect antidote to the fish taste lingering in your mouth. (Actually, we eat its humbler cousin, a cheese called grana padano. Sorry, but it’s just as good.)
Now you can get panettone that is iced and festooned. Where will it end?
Then some radicchio from Treviso, either chopped as a salad or grilled on the stove. The bitterness perfectly offsets the cheese flavor lingering in your mouth.
Yes, it’s all been figured out and would be very hard to improve on, in my view.
Then there’s a free-for-all involving nuts, fruit, and nougat (soft? hard? with almonds? peanuts? it’s up to you). And if you like — and I certainly do — a few spoonfuls of mostarda, which comes in various styles but which is essentially applesauce that has been debauched by the sharpest mustard imaginable, studded with pieces of candied, flaming-flavored fruit. If you remember Red-Hots, you only have to imagine them as nuggets of fruit.
This, and opening the presents, gets you to the verge of midnight, and it’s off to mass. They tend not to do pageants, but there is a smattering of Christmas songs which tag the event as festive. You wouldn’t know it by the songs themselves; if you hadn’t been informed that it’s Christmas, the music would lead you to suppose that the ritual was something between Ash Wednesday and the Day of the Dead.
I will resist the temptation to express my views on how the glorious traditions of music have deteriorated in the old Belpaese; I’ll just say not to expect to be hearing soaring cantatas or any of the sublime compositions with which the great masters, many of them Italian, blessed the world. If you think of church music here nowadays, at least at the parish level, you must imagine peeling plaster set to two guitars and a piano played by someone who hasn’t yet taken his second lesson.
The congregation does sing “Adeste Fidelis” and “Silent Night,” but in the most lugubrious way possible. If it were any more lugubrious, the singing would come to a complete stop. There is also a special Christmas song (undoubtedly there are more, but it’s the only one I hear around here) called “Tu scendi dalle stelle“ (You came down from the stars) which in its sincerity and simplicity could really squeeze your heart. Unfortunately, this too is sung as a dirge. Happily, I have found a version which gives much more of a sense of the beauty of this little carol; the translation isn’t very good but it’s better than nothing. Meanwhile, though, I think the music will have the desired effect.
You get home past 1:00 AM but don’t think you’re headed straight to bed: First you have to eat some slabs of panettone and drink some prosecco.
Eating and drinking: What an original idea; it’s only been two hours since we hauled ourselves up from the table.
Then it’s off to bed, so we can sleep until it’s time to get up on Christmas morning. Which means going to mass (again), but this time at the basilica of San Marco, followed by MORE FOOD.
Christmas lunch! Tortellini in broth, an elixir made yesterday by simmering beef and chicken and a couple of hefty beef bones along with onion, celery and carrot. It’s going to be heavenly, I can tell just by looking at it.
For Lino as a lad, and for mostly everyone else, Christmas was food. “Who knew anything about presents?” he recalled rhetorically. “We hardly had a tree, either. At Christmas you ate — you ate things you didn’t have at any other time of year.” His mother made the pasta herself, and then the tortellini. Then came hunks of the boiled meat. In the evening, veal roast with polenta. Lest you imagine his Christmas as something Dickensian, he knew people — they lived upstairs — who didn’t have meat, period. I know some elderly Venetians who recall that the crowning moment of any holiday meal was chicken.
We will be preparing something radically different for Christmas evening (but not so radical as to qualify as an americanata): Roast pork with fennel seeds. Oddly enough, this unusual recipe got the official stamp of “Well, let’s give it a try” approval. This decision was pushed over the top by my enthusiasm for roast pork, which I think he may never have tasted. I hope my memories have not deceived me, as they so often do.
This is verging dangerously close to being an americanata. That, or the house is inhabited entirely by children.
But it’s not over: The next day is the feast of Santo Stefano, a national holiday not unlike Boxing Day in England. There are no rules about the menu, but it’s not composed of leftovers. Generally, assorted configurations of relatives get together for this too. Hours and hours spent sitting at a table; even if you eat just one bite (well fine, two bites) of what’s offered, you will go home feeling like one of those inflatable punching clowns.
Back in the Great Days, the celebration of the feast of Santo Stefano was remarkable, even for Venice. When the body — the entire body, not just a tidbit — of Christianity’s first martyr was brought to Venice from Constantinople in 1009 AD, it was placed beneath the high altar of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. (Yes, there is a church of Santo Stefano, but it was built later and by then, everyone was used to the relics being elsewhere.)
The story goes that the people rushed to implore doge Ottone Orseolo to go venerate this relic on the feast of Santo Stefano, and to require their descendants to do likewise every year. He obliged, and this event became a national holiday (of the nation of Venice, obviously).
In fact, the ducal visit became two: One on Christmas night, and one on the following morning. The reason for this has not been revealed to me, but I can report that the nocturnal visit (the one time in the year that the doge was allowed to leave the Doge’s Palace at night) became an event that was spectacular, even for Venice.
In her classic work, Origine delle Feste Veneziane, Giustina Renier-Michiel outlines this moment (translated by me):
As soon as the Christmas mass was ended in San Marco, it was already getting dark. The doge boarded his magnificent barge [note: not the Bucintoro, but a slightly smaller craft known as a peatona], accompanied by his counselors, the Heads of the Quarantie [several bodies including the Supreme Court and the Mint], and other administrators, as well as the 41 men who had elected him doge.
He was preceded by boats carrying lights…and followed by innumerable small boats of every type, also supplied with lights, all together they covered the space between San Marco and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. This area was illuminated also on the right and left by certain floating lamps called ludri, made of rope impregnated with pitch, which made a brilliant effect visible from far away, and whose reflections on the water produced a magical effect.
When His Serenity disembarked, he passed under an elegant covered gallery which had been specially constructed, all the way to the church door. On this occasion…the Dalmatian troops were lined up, gorgeously dressed, with the banner unfurled, the military band playing…
The doge was received at the church door by the Abbot; they exchanged greetings and entered the church together.
In the meantime, the Venetian noblewomen were disembarking from their gondolas, all of them dressed in black dresses with long trains, and their heads, necks, bosoms and ears were all adorned with precious jewels, their faces veiled with the most delicate black lace. Then they too entered the already crowded church.
Then of course the whole thing was repeated as everyone left the church and returned to Venice.
I can tell you that the holidays will not be resembling much of that — though I think I can dig out a fragment of a precious jewel somewhere. But it will be very close to that in my spirit, and I hope in yours also.
The best Nativity scene ever: Floating on a platform in front of the boathouse of the Generali Insurance Company rowing club.
It’s not exactly the swallows returning to Capistrano, but a few mornings ago saw the arrival of a modestly historic moment in the calendar: The amusement park began to set up shop.
One of the ferryboats that normally plods between the Lido and Tronchetto makes a special run (and there will be more) loaded with trucks that are going to turn into irresistible rides, games and food stalls. Irresistible if you don't mind the cold weather, and the prices.Admittedly Venice, in its long history, has often seen its embankments loaded with heavy objects destined for commerce -- timber, marble, and bricks come to mind -- but there is something a little startling about trucks.
The rides and games, not to mention the stands selling cotton candy, fried dough slathered with nutritional hot-air balloons such as Nutella, caramelized peanuts, and anything else that can emit a powerful odor of imminent obesity, started to disembark, all folded up inside the trucks, on the Riva dei Sette Martiri at the head of via Garibaldi. They will be open for business on Saturday and will remain until the end of Big Famous Bloated Carnival, which this year will be March 8.
Just to avert any possible misunderstanding, BFB Carnival is known here as, well, Carnival, or if you prefer, Carnevale. This little county-fair assortment of playthings is generically called a “Luna Park.” Probably after an Ur-version somewhere bearing that name which I have been unable to identify. It’s no competition for Coney Island or the Prater in Vienna but as everyone knows, available space in Venice is calculated in millimeters.
Till last year, this annual event was set up on the Riva degli Schiavoni between the Arsenal and the next canal on the way to San Marco. But the residents’ complaints about noise, confusion, smells, and garbage finally overrode the carny-people’s desire to be as close to the center of the touristic hurricane as possible.
You can't just drive ashore -- you must prepare the way very, very carefully with damage-blunting boards. Even so, the fondamenta when they're gone is pocked with cement patches where the stones have somehow disappeared.
So last year they were moved just a little bit downstream, to an area beyond the invisible demarcation line separating Tourist Motherlode and Just Somewhere Else in Venice. Hence we now have residents here in this new strip of space that are just as unhappy as their predecessors were over the way, plus unhappy carny-people because they’re missing out, they believe, on loads of business.
They probably have a point (and they ought to know, considering that they’re the ones standing out there in the freezing cold for hours waiting for customers). Whatever their dreams may be of cashing in on the typical tourists, my impression is that this amusement park is frequented almost exclusively by locals.
Which means: Parents and grandparents with small children, and shoals of bored teenagers who will go anywhere in any weather as long as they can hang out with each other and not be home. Of course weekends are the prime moments, but the stands are open every day from mid-afternoon till about 8:00 PM, even though there are few things on earth as unappealing as an amusement park in the middle of a weekday afternoon. The magic of this extraordinary collection of stuff and stimulation, at least for people over ten years old, is that it happens in the dark under glowing, flashing lights. Otherwise this wonderland is just Norma Desmond before her coffee, so to speak, even if it is in the most beautiful city in the world.
This is so much what the stand-owner doesn't want to see. He's thinking about making it up on the weekend, and during Christmas, and Epiphany, and the two weeks of Carnival.
In any case, next year, if the plan is fulfilled, they will move to yet another location, at Tronchetto. This will have the advantage of offering more space, and will solve the problem of irritating the locals with the noise, etc., because there are no locals. I have deep doubts that they will make anything like the money they do here, because Tronchetto is about as convenient to everybody in the city, tourists as well as Venetians, as Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.
I’ll be sorry to see them move away, because no matter how funky it may be, this Luna Park does a lot to sparkle up the winter atmosphere, at least in a neighborhood like ours where the minute you go out the door you run into the same old people doing the same old things making the same old comments. I can tell you that it’s as much fun to watch all the goings-on as it is to participate (I speak as a veteran of the kiddies’ roller-coaster, who last year appalled and offended the two little girls in the car ahead of me not only because I’m an adult but because I screamed on the turns. One of them turned around and asked me scornfully, “Aren’t you a little old to be on this?” This made me laugh, which by the look on her face was not her intention).
Correct answer: Of course I am. So sue me.
Sunday afternoon during Carnival in the sunshine. This is more like it. Marie Antoinette is training for Monza.
But even if after three months you've grown completely used to it, an amusement park in Venice is still a very curious thing to have.
Of course you already know that “La Madonna della Salute” does not mean “Our Lady of the Salute.” She is Our Lady of Health, and every year on November 21 everyone in Venice who can walk, and even some who can’t, make the pilgrimage to her church to offer a candle and say however many prayers are filling their hearts.
Just as at the feast of the Redentore, a votive bridge is installed -- here spanning the Grand Canal. It is intended to carry the faithful piously over the water, but it's also an excellent vantage point for snapshots.
Yesterday was not a propitious day, meteorologically speaking. For two or three days the Gazzettino had been feverishly predicting acqua alta of 120 cm [four feet] that morning. (It didn’t happen.) There was plenty of water, however, in the form of a frigid rain. It wasn’t heavy, but it was determined, the kind of rain that isn’t thinking about anything else. And it got dark early.
Perhaps they look innocent enough to you. That's because you can't smell them.
There had also been an anxious sub-theme, which began circulating several days early, on the impending castradina famine. Castradina the basis of the traditional dish for this festival, a soup made of cabbage and a haunch of mutton which has been dried, smoked, aged, slathered in dark malodorous spices, and possibly even beaten with sticks and dead-blow hammers. It’s an impressive little piece of meat.
But this year, the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, or Festival of Sacrifice, fell in the same period. Which meant that the general supply of castradina — which has never been huge, seeing as the tradition had fallen into general disuse — had suddenly shrunk to almost nothing. I have now learned that Muslims favor this foodstuff for their religious observance, and that they offered a better price to the few remaining wholesalers who carry it.
This is amusing, in a way (it takes so little to amuse me), because for years many people didn’t care about castradina. We’ve had Venetians over to dinner who had never eaten it. We’d see these hunks of black flesh hanging in the butcher shops and would wonder what they did with the ones they didn’t sell.
But in the past year or two, castradina has come back into fashion. So Venice, according to the Gazzettino, was pullulating with desperate people seeking castradina by any means, in any place, at any price. I can’t think of a credible substitute. You couldn’t fake it even with tofu.
Getting ready for the big day doesn't mean just cooking castradina. It means getting the area ready for every contingency.
Back to the weather. It was cold, dark, and wet. Just what I think of as perfect weather for this feast, though the women in the mink coats were thwarted by the rain. As you know, they come out in force on this day even in the driving sun. The need to show off their fur is just too strong. If you’re wearing beaver or seal, fine. But minks do not like rain any more than their humans do. I kind of missed seeing these self-contented matrons in their luscious garb. They do love it so. Lino calls this the feast of Our Lady of the Fur Coats.
And the delivery of several hundredweight of neatly boxed candles.There are at least five stands and they all sell exactly the same thing. I don't get it.
This year, to my surprise, we got into the church without having to battle a rugby scrum, and we walked right up to the candle-lighting station and handed over our candles. This was an odd but very pleasant sensation. Last year there was such a crush of people that I honestly thought we’d be trapped there holding our candles till Christmas Eve.
Then, as usual, we joined the file of people who elected to walk past the high altar and venerate the little Madonna on the other side, crossing themselves and tossing some cash, and walking out through the sacristy. We found two seats in the heavy wooden choir stalls and sat down to watch people go by. Even though there weren’t massive crowds, the flow was steady. So far, so normal.
You can’t force pious thoughts. If you try, they just slide off your brain. So I sat there not thinking at all, somewhat lulled by the rosary recitation floating over from the other side. And then a thought came to me — more a realization than a thought. I realized that we were being faithful.
All those thousands of frantic, distraught Venetians had been watching people die of the plague all around them till all they had left to offer in exchange for their lives was to promise the Virgin that if she would intercede and save what was left of the city, they would build her a church and come to offer her candles and gratitude every November 21 forever. And after 380 years, people (us) who are so far away from the original promisers that their vow could be thought of as symbolic, or even meaningless, are still maintaining that vow.
Crumpled-up little old people, children of every shape and temper, families of various nationalities, teenage boys, an assortment of tourists — anybody who was there formed another link in the chain tying us to those helpless, despairing people who made a promise that they believed we would keep.
After you had reveled in your Lucullan repast, you could have gone around the corner to the Piazza San Marco not only to watch the fireworks but create your own (metaphorically speaking) by throwing in your osculatory lot with all the other couples thronging the piazza who have been primed by weeks of publicity to come here to kiss each other at midnight.
