introducing my Venetian wodewose
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
the phantom cemetery
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.
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.
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.
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.
Steaming ahead
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.
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.
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.
So where did all this maneuvering of the rolling stock take place? As close to the station as the water allowed.
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).
Santa Barbara does everything
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.
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?
