History

introducing my Venetian wodewose

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Ca’ Bembo-Boldu’ faces Campiello Santa Maria Nova. Just another palazzo, you think, then you look up. Up, in that niche. What…..?
A man holding a shield isn’t the most surprising thing to see. But then you look closer.
Have you met my wodewose?  This is not Giovanni Matteo Bembo (the Bembos aren’t furry), but he put him there.  What’s going on?

The wodewose is not some tiny creature burrowing into the walnut paneling.  It’s the Middle English term for a character that has been around since the ancient of days: The “wild man,” or Wilder Mann, homme sauvage, or in Italian uomo selvadego, “forest man” (the same etymology of wodewose).  If anyone is keeping track, this personage was first seen as “Enkidu” in the Epic of Gilgamesh c. 2100 BC.

The forest man (sometimes a woman) was well-known in the art and literature of medieval Europe.  They are generally shown as large, covered with hair, and living in the wilderness or woods.  They usually wield a club or hold an uprooted tree as a staff.  They’re more of a mountain phenomenon; you don’t tend to see them around Venice.

By 1499, when Albrecht Durer painted this portrait of Oswolt Krell, using wild men to carry a family’s coat of arms was already a firm tradition.  (Yelkrokoyade, Wikimedia Commons)

All this wondering started one morning when I was innocently loitering in Campiello Santa Maria Nova and noticed what I supposed to be a very hairy Bembo perched on his eponymous palace.  Note to self: If you’ll just put your dang phone away for a few minutes and look around, Venice is one place in the world where you can count on discovering something a little, or even a lot, wild.

Giovanni Matteo Bembo (1491-1570) was reasonably remarkable, but that seems not to be why he commissioned this monument.  This is not a literal portrait, you understand; it may represent Saturn, or Time.  He was known to be very interested in alchemy, and this construction contains recognizeable references, not only for the depiction of an old man but the scallop-shell shape of the top of the niche, and the shell beneath the marble tablet at his feet.  Alchemists used the scallop shell as a coded sign of recognition among them, symbolizing their search for universal consciousness. Or so I’ve been told.

Although wild men often carried the family coat of arms, G. Matteo Bembo seemed to be aiming at something more cosmic.  So he called on Sol Invictus, Unconquered Sun, the official state sun god of the late Roman empire.  Lest you sneer, remember that our week begins on Sunday.  But back to the wodewose.
The sun symbolizes divine power, life, glory, kingship, and protection.  Also divine favor, royal lineage, and a radiant, powerful presence in battle as both guidance and defense for warriors or nations.  I can’t say what has been done to the nose.  Corrected deviated septum?

I’m all for mythic elements, but patting yourself on your back was very un-Venetian; whatever you did was for the glory of Venice, not you.  The inscription at his feet gives the game away.

DUM VOLVITUR ISTE Iad. Asc. IUSTINOP.  VER.  SALAMIS  CRETA IOVIS TESTES ERUNT ACTOR.  Pa.  Io.  Se.  Mo.  It’s the summary of his most notable postings in the service of the Serenissima.

Interpretation: “As long as the sun turns around the poles, the cities of  Iadera (Zadar), Ascrivium (Kotor), Iustinopolis (Capodistria), Verona (Verona), Salamis (Cyprus), and Creta Iovis (Crete, the cradle of Jove) will testify to his actions (Actorum).”  The final four abbreviations are for the names Paolo Iovio, or Giovio, and Sebastiano Munstero, who in their histories had mentioned Bembo’s accomplishments.

Alchemy aside, Bembo was a conscientious and capable administrator.  As governor of Heraklion, the capital city of Crete (“the cradle of Jove”), he showed himself at his best.  Between 1552-54 he built not only the city’s first aqueduct but also this lovely and very useful fountain in Cornaro Square.  It was the first time that running water was seen in the city, so big respect to him for this.  Anyone who has ever spent a blazing summer day in Greece doesn’t need to be told what a glorious thing this fountain was.  Note: Undoubtedly there was water already in the city, probably via wells.  Not fountains.

The Bembo Fountain no longer supplies water, alas.  Note: No significance to the headless man, it is a recycled Roman statue. (Rigorius, Wikimedia Commons)

But back to our man on his plinth.

Why so hairy?  The wodewose represents the Id, the indomitable antagonist of culture, civilization, rationality, and his pelt perfectly symbolizes his animalistic nature.  Unfettered, untrammeled, un-whatever you want.  He is humanity’s natural self — raw strength, passion, aggression — the opposite of civilized society, but also embodying deep, primal energy, an image of our darker, instinctual side.  You know — before razors.

A wild man as gargoyle at Moulins Cathedral, France (Vassil, public domain)
Knight saving a damsel from a wodewose (ivory casket, 14th century, Metropolitan Museum, public domain)
Some early sets of playing cards had a suit of Wild Men. Some of the earliest European engravings were cards created by the Master of the Playing Cards, who wored in the Rhineland  1430-1450.  This is the five of Wild Men. I’m guessing this was a very strong card.

I’m glad I discovered a worthy Venetian and his equally worthy alter ego.  A day without learning something useless is a day just thrown away.  And I’m guessing that woodwoses (wosi?) throw nothing away.

She said she’d like me better if I shave my legs…..
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History

the phantom cemetery

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There used to be a cemetery here, but you’ll never guess why.  Our first and only hint is carved onto the lintel of the small door to the left of the big door.

It’s not that I go out looking for trivia, it just seems to drift into my lane.  And by the way, I’m not convinced that “trivia” deserves its negative connotations.  Mount Everest is made of atoms, after all, and it appears that much of life is composed of trivia.

There once was a cemetery in the campo next to the basilica of Saints Giovanni and Paolo.  Plenty of churches here had cemeteries, but these dear departed weren’t Venetians. They were Ledrensi, people from the Ledro valley near Lake Garda.  (Not to classify them as trivia.)  Six hundred years ago they had become so important to Venice and its Arsenal that they were given many important privileges, up to and including their own burial ground.  I can’t tell you why the Ledrensi would have chosen to spend eternity here rather than their home parish up in the mountains, but let’s be impressed that the Venetian government wanted to bestow this honor on them.

This is a pretend door.  The lintel, though, is genuine; it was moved here from the wall that used to enclose the cemetery.
The cemetery wall is clearly visible on the map of Venice drawn by Jacopo de’ Barbari in 1500.  This legendary and inexhaustible fount of knowledge can be seen in the Correr Museum.  For private delectation, you can download the map here.  Knock yourself out zooming on it.
Nothing to see here.  The cemetery, which had been in the area behind the tall statue, had been removed by the time Canaletto painted “Il Campo di SS Giovanni e Paolo a Venezia, col monumento di Bartolomeo Colleoni  1736/1740.”  (Wikimedia Commons)
Just gone.

The people in the Ledro Valley enjoyed a few important advantages — geography, for one thing. The valley offered the fastest route between the area near Lake Garda and Brescia, and this was of huge strategic importance to Venice during the war with the Visconti, the lords of Milan.  (Of course you remember the Lombard Wars that went on for an invigorating 31 years from 1423 to 1454.)  Furthermore, the Ledrensi fought for Venice in a few important battles up in their valley.  As early as 1426 doge Francesco Foscari, in recognition of their valor, granted them various benefits and exemptions that were confirmed in 1440 and 1445.  Venetian troops remained in the Ledro valley till 1509.

Google Maps doesn’t realize that the light-blue route is exactly the one that the Venetians were trying to avoid — it’s the western, dark-blue path that took them safely from the northern Veneto to Brescia.
The orange area was Venetian territory in the late 1400’s, but if you were at war with Milan you wouldn’t have traveled to the battlefield on the easy straight east-west line we use today on the highway. That would have forced you to cross enemy territory, the Duchy of Mantova.  The mountains were safer.
Another view of how Lake Garda divided the Venetian territories (green).

But the Ledrensi’s greatest advantage was their forests.  Venetian archives show that from the 1200’s there were workers in Venice from the Ledro valley, but by the 1500’s the relationship had evolved.  Venice depended on the Ledro valley for the resin tapped from the area’s larch and Scots pine.  By  the 1600’s the town of Tiarno di Sopra had become famous for its clay ovens that transformed the resin into pitch, essential for caulking the ships in the Arsenal.

More and more men of Ledro — also referred to as the Trentina Nation, as coming from the area near Trento — began to migrate to Venice to work.  They were allowed to work as bastasi and cargadori (porters and stevedores) in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the association of the Germanic merchants.  Even more important, they worked in the Arsenal as segadori (sawyers reducing tree trunks to planks for building ships), and as ligadori, exclusively responsible for loading and unloading of the ships in the Arsenal.  And of course, as caulkers.  Some of these men didn’t return to the mountains but stayed in Venice permanently, becoming better-off certainly than they’d been back home.

I suppose it’s not strange that they’d have wanted to be interred in Venice, which had been for some a sort of Promised Land.   At least we still have the lintel.

“Cemetery of the Nation of the Valley of Ledro.”

This hidden jewel of Venetian history was carefully explained on a site I discovered by chance, and I offer sincere admiration to its creator.  His name is Alfonso Bussolin and his life’s work is Conoscere Venezia (know Venice).  If you read Italian you’re going to have a fabulous time wandering around this man’s research.

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History, Venetian History

Steaming ahead

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The title says “ahead” but in fact I’m going to take you back a few years, well within living memory, to the epoch when you traveled by train and the train traveled by coal.  I mean steam.

Venice’s fascinating past isn’t limited to Carnival and Casanova; there are plenty of people (Lino, for example) who still vividly remember when the mighty steam locomotives ruled the rails, and the Santa Lucia terminal was at work, day and night, with the coming and going of these behemoths.  (Spoiler alert: Lino’s father was a macchinista, or train driver, so I am relying on Lino for some information.)

My curiosity awoke some time ago, when we were passing through Castelfranco Veneto on the train and Lino casually pointed out this rusty derelict beside the station tracks.

“See that?” he asked. “That was what they used to fill the steam trains’ tanks with water.” A monster faucet, in other words.
Compared to Castelfranco, the city of Feltre has a much keener appreciation of its old train relics.
Like animals, the locomotives needed food (coal) and water.  These were often, though not always, carried in a tender, the vehicle attached to the engine.  “Acqua” is water and “carbone” is coal.  Excuse me if you figured that out. The water was topped up at important stops along the way by means of the trackside apparatus shown above.  One source states that a roundtrip (distance not specified!) locomotive in the Thirties consumed 771 pounds/350 kilos of coal and 528 gallons/2000 liters of water, transporting a maximum of 80 passengers.

Let’s say trains don’t interest you much.  But you might be surprised to see how many traces remain around the area of the station, if you know what you’re looking at.

First, a bit of background.

This is the church of Santa Lucia; it stood for centuries on the Grand Canal until it was inconveniently in the way of the structure that was needed by the trains.  It was demolished between 1861-1863.  The church of the Scalzi is still in place, a few steps further on.  (Francesco Guardi, c. 1780).
Perhaps not the most memorable facade of the many Venetian churches, but it was fine until it wasn’t.  But at least the name “Santa Lucia” was preserved in the name of the station.
The train station looked like this from the 1860s to the 1940’s. After the Second World War the project was to build today’s station. When he was a boy Lino knew the area as one big construction site as this station came down and the new one emerged.
Now we have this.  Although today’s station was designed in the Thirties (this is evident), it was built in 1952.

So much for setting the scene.  Back to the trains themselves.

Let’s imagine we’re in the Venice station on any ordinary day back in the first half of the 20th century.  It was full of colossi like these.  In fact, for several generations there wasn’t anything else.

I am not a train connoisseur, but I know massive when I see it. This locomotive steamed into the Santa Lucia station the night of October 29, 2021, as the “Train of Memory,” retracing the route of the coffin of the Unknown Soldier to Rome a century earlier.
This wouldn’t have impressed anybody back in the day. It was normal.  And really noisy, too, between blasts of steam and assorted screeching whistles.  And let’s not forget the mayhem of the crowds when the families were leaving for their summer holiday in the mountains.  The trains were so full that sometimes people were passing their kids into the carriages by the windows.  Not made up.  My source was one of those kids.
Steam trains were still normal in Venice in 1973, here arriving at Santa Lucia (Wikipedia, not credited).  The last steam locomotive in Italy was decommissioned in 1976. It operated a daily passenger service and some freight services on the Udine-Cervignano route (in Friuli). Since 2008 some steam locomotives are back in service, but only for historical trains on special occasions.
This was the engine that Lino’s father drove (that is him in the photo.) His usual route was up the Valsugana, from Venice to Trento and, obviously, back again.  But he could also work the shifts required to reposition the locomotives and/or carriages into the configurations needed for the next day’s trains.  That went on all night; his shift went from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM.  Note that this train didn’t use a tender for the water and coal, which went into the black box just in front of him.  (Do not ask for details; I don’t have them.)  The first passenger carriage is clearly right behind him.

So where did all this maneuvering of the rolling stock take place?  As close to the station as the water allowed.

The red lines are bridges, yellow are where tracks were or bits still are; green is where the trains were reshuffled.  Ignore Tronchetto, for the purposes of this discussion; it wasn’t built until the 1960’s.
A military photograph c. 1915 shows the area marked in green above when it was full of trains.  The station is on the right side of the frame, and the bridge to the mainland is in the upper right. Those long lines that look like perforations are trains-in-waiting. The central area was used for the locomotives.  (Available from Il Cantuccio del Collezionista https://ilcantucciodelcollezionista.it/index.html)
A detail of the photograph, just to make those little dots clearer.  I repeat: Each of those is a train carriage.  Perhaps not as impressive as Milan or Rome, but frankly they made better use of their limited space here in Venice than I’ve ever been able to do at home.
This is the deposito, or train-sorting area, today.  We discovered this morning that the tracks strewn around for years, if not ages, are being removed.  I imagine it will create more parking space.
A better view of the tracks on the left (drawn in yellow on the map) leading toward the Marittima.
Leftover tracks that were easier to just pave over than remove.
This bridge connected the station area to the right with the train yard.  Fun fact:  Decades ago the rectangular space just to the right of the bridge was used as a pool by the Rari Nantes swimming club.  There was a similar setup along the Zattere for swimming in the Giudecca Canal.  Not made up.
The same bridge seen in real life.  The Santa Lucia station (with red train) is just on the other side of the Grand Canal.
One of the perks of working for the railway was the allotment of coal you were given for your own use, and it was distributed in the area on the right side of the bridge.  The railway workers would come in their (or someone’s) boat — rowed, no motors — and tie up five or six deep parallel to the embankment when they went to collect it. One reason for doing it there may have been because the station where the freight trains were handled was on that side.
This was the building where the organizing of the freight train maneuvering was done.
Freight trains carrying fruit and vegetables would slide onto the special tracks along the waterfront facing Piazzale Roma.
The trains stopped along the edge of the embankment and off-loaded the fruit/veg onto boats (again, not motorboats, but big boats such as caorlinas or battellos that were rowed) that took the produce to the neighborhood vendors.  The building served as a warehouse for whatever had not been taken away that day.
The railway bridge connecting the station to the deposito seen from the water.
That’s a serious underbelly.  It would have to look like this if it was going to support countless tons of iron machinery 24 hours a day.

Let’s shift our attention to the tracks that carried the freight trains to and from the waterfront at the Marittima area (Santa Marta and San Basilio).

This bridge enabled the freight trains to cross from the yard down to the Marittima.
Here is a look at the bridge indicated on the map just above.  We’re heading toward Santa Marta.  The top bridge carries the little “People Mover” train that connects Piazzale Roma on the left to the parking area at Tronchetto (and until just a few years ago, to the cruise-ship Venice Passenger Terminal, now empty and useless).  The middle bridge is a simple footbridge for the people going from their parked cars to the city.  And the third bridge carried the freight trains to San Basilio.
A closer look at the ex-railway bridge, as we proceed toward Santa Marta.  The flat roofs are part of the Venice Passenger Terminal complex at Tronchetto.
The same bridge as seen when going toward Piazzale Roma.
A general view of the Santa Marta waterfront, where the tracks used to be.  A group of the houses to the left of the University IUAV were built expressly for the families of the train workers.  The only catch was that when the worker died, the family had to move out.  Logical!  And awful!
Flanking the Scomenzera canal, the tracks are just behind that transparent wall.
That zone behind the wall is something of a railway graveyard.
But when the trains were working, the tracks just snaked their way around the church of Santa Marta.
This was Santa Marta when the trains and the port were working at full capacity (c. 1930).

The warehouses and offices at San Basilio are now almost entirely dedicated to non-maritime pursuits.
Lino’s father’s official train-driver’s watch is still running. The plastic case was crucial protection from the coal dust blowing everywhere.
This is the watch in its natural state.
The caption says this scene was at the station, but Lino says it was in the deposito area where the trains were assembled.  The process of electrification has begun, as the cables show.  I’m not romanticizing anything.  Just saying that the trains were a huge part of Venetian life.

 

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History

Santa Barbara does everything

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Your neighbors annoy you?  Be glad you don’t live on the Street of the Bombardiers.

Well, she doesn’t do EVERYTHING.  But Santa Barbara carries quite the sanctified payload, meaning no disrespect.  I first made her acquaintance because she is patron saint and protector, among many other things, of the Italian Navy, and I have enjoyed the regata organized in her honor over the past 20-some years.  As noted here and here.  Now I discover she’s everywhere, even up to and including your hospital bed.

A quick review of her responsibilities, apart from the Navy, which would be a full-time job for most people/saints, reveals the special attention she gives to: Miners, firefighters, tunnelers, artillerymen, armorers, fireworks manufacturers, chemical engineers, prisoners (see: tunnelers?), and protection from lightning. Although they do not celebrate her special day, she is also the patron saint of the US Navy and Marine Corps Aviation Ordnancemen. As I summarize it in my own mind, protection against anything that goes boom.  Hence lightning.

But these very specific dangers don’t stop with mere explosives.  Barbara also offers protection from sudden death.  Diseases that strike and escalate suddenly and are “intense to the point of lethality” are called fulminant (in Venetian, matches are called fulminanti, just to maintain the theme of flame).  And while a number of diseases can appear in fulminant form, the worst for Venice was the plague.

Which brings me to the street of the bombardiers.  If you turn down this short, narrow and dark street you will find not one, but two tablets carved in relief honoring Santa Barbara.  I have not yet discovered if this street is so named because it was the site of their scuola — I can only hope it wasn’t the site of their storeroom.  But where I went for bombs I discovered pestilence.

Morning is the only time you can make sense of this small masterpiece on what is a very gloomy street.  We can discern a few of her typical symbols (three-windowed tower, where her cruel father imprisoned her for her faith; the palm frond indicating her martyrdom, beheaded by the aforementioned cruel father; the arrow representing lightning, as in the lightning that struck her cruel father dead).  But the date above it surprised me: 1575, the year of one of Venice’s two worst plagues, the one that inspired the construction of the church of the Redentore on the Giudecca.  Between 1575 and 1576 some 46,000 people died, almost 30 percent of the entire population.
Barbara earned a second tablet just a few steps further on down the street. No date on this one, so perhaps it was intended as a salute to the bombardiers rather than the plague victims.  As for the depiction, I realize that the centuries have worn this away, and that nobody knows what she looked like because nobody can swear that she ever even existed.  I can only say I’m sorry that the bigger tablet gives her a head that looks like Emperor Constantine on a beat-up coin, and this version brings the Elephant Man to mind.  But no matter.  If you’re a saint, nobody cares about these things.  The point is what you can do, not how you do your hair.  Non-saints could also keep this in mind.
And then you exit by the sotoportego of the bombardiers and you’re back under the watchful eye of whichever saint you adhere to.

Turning from Barbara’s concern for disease and back to conflagration, consider the problem of gunpowder.  It was kept in the Arsenale until two disastrous explosions (all it took was a spark!) — in 1476 and then 1509 — made it clear that it belonged out on some nearby islands instead.  One still bears the name Sant’ Angelo delle Polvere (Saint Angelo of the Powder).  On August 29, 1689, lightning struck the magazine there and 800 barrels of gunpowder exploded.

Faith in Santa Barbara remained firm, however, meaning no disrespect.  Despite certain small derelictions of duty, as noted above, until the invention of the lightning rod in 1752 she was the best everyone could do.

Fun fact: The gunpowder storeroom on warships is called the santabarbara.  Is that a somebody’s idea of a dare?

The chapel of Santa Barbara is on the island of Burano, next door to the church of San Martino.  (The chapel is the beige building dead ahead in the sunlight.)  They say that her relics are kept here. You might think that there would be ceremonies on her feast day (December 4), but no.  Until either plague or gunpowder strikes, it appears they want to leave her in peace.

“The sacred remains of Santa Barbara virgin and martyr of Nicomedia donated by the devotion/reverence of Giovanni son of Doge Pietro Orseolo II and for about a millennium in temples of the lagoon of Rialto of Torcello and of Burano.  Conserved and venerated in this chapel restored by the Comune perpetuate the light of heroic faith.”  The discharged Venetian sappers remembering the work of their member Vittorio Maraffi in the redemption of this building.  These stones positioned by their hands are devotedly consecrated to the Patron of the corps.  The kalends of October 1957 Reconstructed by the Section of Veteran Combatants of Venice 1998.  The “kalends” was the first day of each month of the Roman calendar and is a very elegant/archaic way of citing a date.  However, there is a common expression here when you want to predict that something will never happen — you say it will occur on the calende greche, or Greek calends, which on the Greek calendar don’t exist.

 

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