Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) was not only a rockstar navigator/explorer, he was also a Venetian citizen and lived in what I consider to be something of a rockstar house: Palazzo Caboto. You’ve seen it at the top of via Garibaldi, dividing that street from the Riva Sette Martiri. And I wouldn’t be writing anything about him or the riva if I hadn’t had the chance to go inside it not long ago, thanks to an exhibit that was part of the Biennale.
Some sources maintain that his family was originally from Gaeta, near Naples; another source says that “John Cabot’s son, Sebastian, said his father originally came from Genoa. Cabot was made a citizen of the Republic of Venice in 1476; as citizenship required a minimum of fifteen years’ residency in the city, he must have lived in Venice from at least 1461.”
So much for the basic background on the indomitable Caboto.
For the first two months or so of the Biennale this year the house was hosting an exhibition by Korean artist Shin Sung Hy. My interest in contemporary art is skittish, but it was my first chance to see the house itself. So I invited myself into what was designated Gallery Hyundai.
But I like the angles better.
Let’s have a look at the rooms. As you would expect, they are cut into small eccentric shapes.
I could stop here, but as we consider how many renovations and alterations the house has undoubtedly experienced since Sig. Caboto last quaffed here whatever his preferred quaff was, I think he’d be most amazed by what has happened outside his two or more streetward doors in the intervening 500 years or so. Actually, I mean the last 150 years.
On the lagoon side of Cabot’s house, though, yet bigger changes were on the way. Because until the 1930’s, water was still lapping at its wall.
But as thought Napoleon, so did Benito Mussolini. I don’t refer to politics, but to reshaping Venice. There is undoubtedly massive history behind these decisions, but in my own tiny mind I summarize the Duce’s thought as “Piffle! Away with the grotty shipyards, we want a promenade. Actually, what we want is a long stretch of pavement ideal for mooring ships. Preferably battleships, and many of them. It can also be a promenade, or whatever we want to call it, in its spare time.” And so it was.
I didn’t intend to reduce the invincible Giovanni Caboto to a mere bystander at a waterfront playground, yet that’s what happened. My apologies to his descendants, wherever they are. One could have made a good case to name the riva after him, but that didn’t happen. We’re going to pretend we did right by him via the two plaques and — bonus! — Calle Caboto, a small cross-street mortised into the maze between his wonderful house.
So I now walk away from the curious fresco crowned by the streetlight, and focus my attention on the streetlights themselves. We take them for granted, but lighting up Venice was an endeavor that went on for centuries and involved no granting at all.
For centuries the streets had been illuminated to a feeble degree only by the faint flickering from the little lamps (cesendelli) at shrines on various street corners. “Be home by dark” really meant something because by 1128, due to the inordinate number of corpses found lying around the streets in the morning, the government began to take seriously the need to create real illumination.
Enter the ferali, or also farai, of various sizes, providing a great new line of work for their makers, the feraleri (not to mention the oil merchants). The parish priest was responsible for maintaining them, but the expense was covered by the government. By 1214 there were enough feraleri to merit their own scuola, or guild, and their devotional altar was in the nearby church of San Zulian. Fun fact: There is an osteria in Dorsoduro named Ai Do Farai, Venetian for “at the two streetlamps.”
But there were still plenty of dark streets to navigate on your way home from the theatre, or to secretly visit your lady- or boyfriend, or whatever you were up to after sundown. In 1450 the Venetian government had become so exasperated by the nocturnal carnage that it passed a law requiring people to carry a light– candles, lanterns, torches — when they were out at night. (Yes: We order you to protect your life! See: Seatbelts.) Not only was this a good idea in itself, but it was equally good as a job.
Enter the codega (CODE-eh-ga). He was a very poor hired man who waited with a lantern outside theatres, gambling houses, or other festive places, or was available on call, to light your way to wherever you were going next. Sometimes the lantern was suspended from a long pole.
In 1719 a nobleman named Stefano Lippomano is regarded as being the bright spark who convinced the shopkeepers around San Marco to put an oil lamp near their shops between the Mercerie and the Rialto. Did they need much convincing? (“You’ll make more money this way…”.) This worthy idea spread through the city to the joy of everyone except — naturally — the codeghe.
In 1726 a proclamation bearing the seal of the Signori di notte al criminal (the police magistrates) denounced the habit that the humble lantern-carriers had developed of smashing the streetlamps and carrying away their wrought-iron supports. It would be no comfort at all to the embattled men to know that one of the most prestigous international awards for innovation in lighting today is called the Codega Award.
Fun fact: Between San Marco and Rialto is the Hotel Al Codega. Presumably well-lit.
But smashing the lamps was futile — streetlights were the future. Crime was down at last, and between 1721 and 1732 the Signori di notte al criminal created a system of 834 public streetlights — not a lot, but it was a start — paid for by voluntary contributions. There were private lights on palace balconies, but the public lamps were lit by a public lamplighter, paid for by the magistrate.
Everything settled now? Not even close. The problems in organizing and maintaining this municipal necessity were endless. By 1740 there were 1,046 public streetlights, but those voluntary contributions weren’t nearly enough to cover expenses and so a tax was levied on every “head of family.” The astonishing inequality of this tax burden (indigent widows paid the same as patrician clans) led to its abolition in 1756.
Flaws and defects in this worthy undertaking abounded. Service was terrible. The lamplighters didn’t always light (or keep alight) the lamps; the oil destined for burning turned out to be of an even lower quality than agreed (and paid for), and also was somehow inexplicably often in short supply, except for that time when the inspector general made a surprise visit to the warehouse and discovered 40,000 more liters of oil than were listed on the register; the lamps themselves weren’t especially sturdy, being made of sheet metal, often tin; the feraleri were not always of a consistently high level of skill or reliability (not charlatans, exactly….); and the fragility of a flame floating in oil facing wind and storms was all too evident. The brightness of everybody’s hopes was faint in comparison to the reality of, well, reality. The Serenissima kept trying to improve the situation by giving out new contracts to suppliers and artisans but graft and corruption reigned. The courts were full of complaints and denunciations, and those were only the most serious cases. But there was no going back.
Despite all these problems, Venice at night had become something phenomenal. Carlo Goldoni, returning to Venice in 1733 after some time away, was astounded by what he found.
“Independent of the street illumination, there is that of the shops that stay open in all weathers until 10:00 at night and a great part of them don’t close until midnight, and plenty of others don’t close at all.” I pause to let that sink in.
He goes on: “In Venice you find at midnight, just as at midday, food being sold in the open, all the osterie are open, and beautiful dinners prepared in dozens of hotels and neighborhoods; because it isn’t so common in Venice that the diners are of high society dinners, but rather the really cheap little places (ritrovi di lira e soldo) are where you find the groups of the greatest liveliness and liberty.” In other words, the regular folks out there living it all the way up.
He concludes: “In summertime the Piazza San Marco and surrounding areas are busier at night than during the day, with men and women of every sort.”
By 1775 there were 1,778 public streetlights. Still not enough. On September 7, 1796 the magistrates proposed installing at least “one lamp every hundred paces.” So 1,145 additional lamps were set up, and duly noted in the register (catastico) that hadn’t been updated since 1740.
I’m sure this improvement got compliments from the French when Napoleon arrived less than a year later, and thereafter from the Austrians who moved in. There were more than 2030 lamps around the city by then. For any trivia maniacs, at the beginning of the 1800’s there were 12 on the Giudecca, 27 in the Ghetto, 76 in the Piazza San Marco, and 1915 scattered elsewhere around the city. The Austrian occupiers’ shiny new department responsible for “police, streets, canals and illumination of the city” found itself stuck with the same problems that had bedeviled the late great Republic for centuries. Because, you know, people.
The lights in Venice, in the houses as well as on the streets, ran on gas produced by burning coal — coke, to be precise. Italy is full of decommissioned “gasometers” like the two left abandoned near San Francesco de la Vigna. (There was also one at Santa Marta, across the canal from where the prison currently sits.) Providing this crucial industrial service right next to a 16th-century church designed by Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio, and its adjacent Franciscan monastery, seems pretty crazy, but the land was there and space in Venice is valued far above rubies.
In 1969 came the switch from coal gas to methane, and the future of these relics of industrial archaeology has become as Byzantine as everything else here. The neighbors want a sports center for the kids (three high schools within a very tight radius); a German company proposed converting them to luxury hotels but got tired of waiting for the bureaucracy to conclude its Byzantine operations, and now luxury apartments have been mooted. As long as it’s luxury, that’s all that matters. After all, somebody is going to have to pay the cost of cleaning up the century of environmental horror in the soil.
To recapitulate: Lighting Venice evolved over the generations from pig fat to methane. The world is amazed by building a city on water, but I have to confess that illuminating it was not much less impressive. If you were to want to read more — much more, and better — I recommend the lavishly illustrated “The Lights of Venice,” an extraordinary book published online in 2022 by the Fondazione Neri. I’d gladly have read it all myself, but I still haven’t finished War and Peace. But at least “Lights” has a happy ending.
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Unfortunately today is also the beginning of Carnival, which makes anybody who cares even a little bit about one or the other — or worse, both — feel a tad awkward.
But I’m proceeding with Remembrance Day because it is an especially appropriate moment to remember doctor and professor Giuseppe Jona, once known as the “doctor of the poor” for his charitable care of indigent Venetians of every, or no, creed.
He didn’t limit his attention only to sickbeds. Among many other things, he was also the president of the Jewish community, and on September 15, 1943 he cared for his endangered people by making the ultimate sacrifice. In a sense he was killed by the Nazi occupiers of Venice, but he got one step ahead of them.
No need for me to be melodramatic. The facts are enough to delineate a person whom it’s unlikely anyone reading this could imagine emulating, but who must never be forgotten.
Giuseppe Jona (pronounced YOH-na) was born in Venice in 1866, the fourth of five children of a middle-class Jewish family, his father a doctor. He graduated from the University of Padova in Medicine, and served as professor of Anatomy at Padova as well as working at Venice’s hospital. Over the course of 40 years he became head of the department of Pathology (1905 – 1912), and Medicine (1912-1936).
Unmarried, he “lived for his brothers and nieces/nephews,” says one article about him, “for his students and colleagues, for social projects and scientific research.” Above all, he was dedicated to developing young doctors at the hospital’s “Practical School of Medicine and Surgery,” founded in 1863 to enable department heads to prepare young doctors by taking them on rounds in the wards. He also introduced a methodic approach to performing autopsies, and served as an auxiliary doctor in military hospitals during World War I.
His world stretched far beyond medicine, though. He became a member of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, and was president of the Ateneo Veneto (the supreme intellectual group in Venice, I’m going to say) from 1921 to 1924. He founded a circulating library. He founded a museum of anatomy at the city hospital. I’m leaving out enormous masses of information but the point is that he was known and esteemed by Venetians in many different fields and levels.
Now we get to the heart of the man. Along with his sister, he always sought out the neediest patients in several hospitals, convinced that it was a human obligation to try to mitigate social inequality regardless of religion or belief. He then opened a medical studio where he treated the poorest patients free of charge. He came to be commonly referred to as “the doctor of the poor.”
He resigned his position at the hospital in 1936, probably intuiting that what became the “racial laws” in 1938 were already on the horizon, edicts that would have required his expulsion from the hospital, followed by expulsion from the scientific and cultural institutions to which he belonged. In 1940, along with every other Jewish physician, his name was removed from the official register of doctors, thus being forbidden to care for any patients whatever. (He continued to visit them at night, wrapped in a vast cloak and hat.)
At that moment, the rabbi and council of the Jewish congregation, perfectly aware that Jona had never attended the synagogue and wasn’t known even to be a believer, elected him as president of the Jewish community. With his sensitivity to ethics and as a sign of respect to his parents, he accepted.
Of course matters became steadily worse. Friends and colleagues urged him to leave Venice and flee to hiding in the countryside; he refused.
In the autumn of 1943 the Nazi occupiers, under orders from Captain Franz Stangl (already commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp), ordered Jona to submit the names and addresses of the 1,350 Jews in Venice. Their fate was essentially sealed.
Giuseppe Jona had already written his will, in his tiny, precise handwriting, leaving his 1,684 books to the city hospital, and his money and belongings to an extraordinary assortment of groups and organizations serving the poor and needy. He also made a bequest to the family’s elderly servants, who could never have found other income.
It was the night of September 15, 1943. Certain that he would not be able to withstand the torture that would follow his refusal to provide the list, he destroyed every document that could identify members of the community. And then he gave himself a fatal overdose of morphine. His body was found on the 16th, and the death registered on September 17. The entire city was in an uproar; the startled Germans forbade a funeral cortege and basically waited for it all to blow over.
And the 1,350 Jews on the list? In some manner he had enabled 1,100 of them to escape.
Reader Christopher has written the following Comment: I am perplexed and maybe you can help me. The Chiesa di Sant’Elena was built in as early as 1060 by some accounts. Saint Helen was brought to the lagoon and interred in her eponymous church in 1211. It’s curious that the church is not shown on the earlier maps. Any idea why this might be? ….
If I understand your question to be why isn’t the church dedicated to Sant’ Elena shown on maps prior to the arrival of her remains, I can only reply that I think there could be several reasons.
One reason is that there aren’t many maps of Venice prior to 1211, and those that do exist are not very detailed. Even 17th-century maps don’t show everything. Also, Venice has plenty of churches named for saints whose remains are not in residence. There’s no reason why a mapmaker with limited space would choose to show a church if it didn’t contain its tutelary saint. Which raises the interesting question, which I had never considered till now, as to who decides what to include in a map and what to leave out.
As to the dates you mention, “…the first chapel dedicated to St. Helen was built in 1028 and entrusted to the Augustinian order, which constructed also a convent. In 1211 the Augustinian monk Aicardo brought to Venice from Constantinople the presumed body of the empress. Following which the Augustinians enclosed the chapel within a larger church.” More confusion arises from the statement that there was a “hospital” dedicated to her, built in 1175 — 36 years before the saint arrived — maintained by the Augustinian order, for the care of the poor.
In the 15th century the convent and the church passed to the Benedictine monks, who rebuilt it in 1439. A century later, in 1515, the church was consecrated by the bishop of Aleppo and became an important religious center, with vast property and notable works of art. So evidently three centuries, all told, had to pass before her church (or let’s just say “she”) became sufficiently important to warrant identified inclusion on a map.
These sources don’t identify where the church was located, but I’m going to suppose it was on the island of Sant’ Elena.
Some maps, from the 1400’s onward, show at least part of an island floating off the eastern shore of Castello, just below Olivolo, where the church of San Pietro di Castello stands. So something was there, even if it isn’t identified. Yet if her eponymous original church was there, it does seem strange that so many cartographers didn’t show it, or if they did, why they didn’t always label it.
I think it’s evident that no map except Dei’ Barbari’s (1500) could claim to show everything. A good number of maps show only a smattering of churches, even though we know that there were many more. But he gives a only glimpse of the island, going so far as to cover half of it with a cloud-bedecked cherub. And yet the island, not to mention the mother of the Emperor Constantine, were hardly a secret.
If I ever find out why she was snubbed so often, I’ll let you know.