Carnival: Fat Thursday
As if we needed any excuse — or permission — to gorge on food loaded with fat and sugar, today it’s take no prisoners. I haven’t found any special dispensation that promises that the fat and sugar consumed today will do less, or no, damage as they make themselves comfortable in their new home on your hips and in your arteries. But we can pretend. It’s Carnival, after all. No rules.
So the short version of today’s amusement can be summed up as: Fritole and galani. Venetians say that “El Zioba Grasso tute le boche lica” (“On Fat Thursday everybody licks their mouth”). More broadly translated: gorge, scarf, devour. Or my new favorite, “englut.” Makes me feel slightly sick without having eaten anything.
But even eating ten kilos of fritole and galani can’t match the excitement that was reserved for today back in the Olden Days.
The Venetian Republic made a fetish of commemorating important events in its life — every single victory, it would appear, and even some defeats. It all worked to keep Venetians united in their Venetian-ness and reinforce how very special, important, and amazing that was. And naturally any people who regard themselves and their city/nation/world in that light is bound to enjoy really laying it on when recalling certain events.
Take that little business of Ulrich of Treffen, Patriarch of Aquileia. No need to lose ourselves in the maze that was Venice’s relationship with ecclesiastical power; let’s just say that for centuries religious disagreements were more commonly (and certainly clearly) expressed in political and military terms. Or, conversely, political and military projects almost always involved some highly placed representatives of the Prince of Peace.
So the Patriarch of Aquileia, after a decisive battle in 1162, was taken prisoner and carried off to Venice along with his 12 canons. They offered an unusual ransom for their freedom: A bull and 12 fat pigs, which they promised would be provided every Fat Thursday for 200 years. And so it was.
Thus every Giovedi Grasso, to recall this glorious victory/humiliation, the public festivities involved the slaughter of the bull (the patriarch) and the fat pigs (the canons). Nice! I’m not referring to the aspect of blood, I’m referring to the aspect of insult. And everybody enjoyed it so much that it continued even after the 200 years were up.
In the early days of this entertainment, the bull was killed by the doge, and the pigs by the senators. (No comments, please.) Eventually Andrea Gritti (doge from 1523 to 1538), he of the palace which has become famous as a luxury hotel, decreed that the pigs be killed by members of the Butchers’ guild, while the bull would be dispatched by “the most robust member of the Ironworkers’ guild” with a single blow of a massive sword, a titanic decapitation in which the sword wasn’t allowed to touch the ground.
Even today, a common Venetian way of saying “Let’s get to the point” is “Tagliamo la testa al toro” — let’s cut the head off the bull. I hazard that “cut the bull” might be an Anglo-Saxon relative of the phrase and its meaning, but let’s move on.
So what did the doge and Senators do while the gore was flowing? They took clubs in hand and attacked 12 towers and a church made of marzipan, which they bludgeoned to smithereens.
Me, bludgeonless, I went to the Societa’ di Mutuo Soccorso dei Calafati e Carpentieri for their fritola-fest this afternoon. This mutual-aid society, formed by the erstwhile Caulkers and Carpenters of the Arsenal, makes a specialty of sometimes organizing little neighborhood parties, almost exclusively intended for the kids. Although — from what I’ve seen — each kid seems to arrive accompanied by a phalanx of voracious relatives, none of whom appears starved for fat or sugar, and with the phrase “Me First” invisibly tattooed on their foreheads.
When we walked out the front door at 4:45, the voluptuous perfume of just-fried fritole suffused our little street. Looking around, we discovered that they were being turned out in the taverna two steps away. A taverna here isn’t anything like in Greece; here the word connotes somebody’s (usually a guy, often old) haven that’s something like a cross between a garage and a rec room, usually with some kind of primitive kitchen set-up. Evidently one of the caulkers was frying up a fresh batch for the refreshment table.
It was a wonderful little interlude, out in via Garibaldi. The fritole were the best I’ve ever had, delectable little blobs, not too big, containing just the right amount of candied fruit and covered with a little more than the right amount of sugar. The galani were heavenly, shards of deep-fried dough thinner than onionskin, under clouds of powdered sugar. If there’d been more of a crowd I’d certainly have gone back for thirds, and fourths, and fifths. But I didn’t want the guys to start thinking, What — her again?
What I really want to know, though, is where the leftovers ended up. I want to go there and help dispose of them as nature intended.
Carnival: I just met 12 girls named Maria
One of a couple of events which the organizers of Carnival have revived after rummaging around in Venetian history is a beauty pageant which is based on one of the more dramatic exploits in the city’s entire life story. And a beauty pageant.
It is called the festa delle Marie (ma-REE-eh), which is plural for Maria. There were 12, actually or temporarily named Maria, and what happened to them was not only an exciting demonstration of the fledgling republic’s developing power, but a great way to add a party to the calendar.
The story begins around the year 943, though documented accounts date from 1039. Some details remain open to scholarly debate, but the outline of the episode goes like this:
On the annual feast of the Madonna Candelora (February 2, also known as the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary), Venetians not only went to mass, they also organized an entertainment disguised as an act of municipal and Christian charity. Or vice versa. In any case, they were very good at this, I want to say without sarcasm — a skill that civic leaders today might consider acquiring.
Taking the established custom of blessing girls who were newlyweds on February 2, somebody thought it would be wonderful to choose 12 poor girls and include them in the event.
These twelve damsels had to be poor (otherwise the charitable part of the operation would be meaningless), obviously had to be engaged, and of course they had to be divinely beautiful — or at least more beautiful than any other poor engaged girl in their district.
The patrician families in their respective districts took up a collection to provide them with dowries; the doge lent them masses of jewelry of gold and precious stones from the state treasury, and they went in a procession of boats to the church of San Pietro di Castello, where they were blessed by the bishop in a sumptuous ceremony in the presence of the doge himself and all the noble families (on February 2, obviously).
The girls then resumed their procession, going to the Doge’s Palace (which it’s entirely possible they had never even seen; until recently, life here was generally limited to your own little neighborhood), where they were the centerpiece of a magnificent reception. Then everyone climbed aboard the Bucintoro, the doge’s ceremonial barge (in those early days it did not resemble the elaborate final version made famous in paintings by Canaletto, but still — the doge’s barge) and, followed by innumerable boats, went up the Grand Canal to the Rialto, then down the canal of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi to Santa Maria Formosa, where more solemn ceremonies awaited them in the church.
Things had gone along like this to general rejoicing until the year 943, when a crew of pirates — led by a certain Gaiolo, an Istrian pirate notorious for stealing Venetians and making slaves of them — burst into the church with his trusty marauders and made off with the girls. The Marias may have had a certain commercial value, but their jewelry must have been utterly amazing.
The doge — Pietro Candiani III — hastily organized a band of hardy men (I am not making this up) and they went racing off in hot pursuit, doge included. They caught up with the pirates near Caorle, slew them to a man, and carried home the brides (and their jewelry) in triumph.
If there had been a festa before, from this point it became ever more elaborate; not only to celebrate the 12 girls (as before), but now to commemorate the daring rescue of the 12 girls. Each February 2 the chosen girls were temporarily re-baptized with the name Maria, they were invited to all sorts of parties and receptions and balls and even mass in the major churches of the city. Venetians considered it good luck merely to be able to get near them. All this went on for nine days.
But it’s hard to keep anything up at that level of organization, cost, enthusiasm — whatever it is that makes festivals work. By 1272 the 12 girls had been cut back to four, then to three, because the cost had become annoying to the state as well as the noble families who were funding the event. There was also a big and expensive war going on with Genoa, the War of Chioggia. Can’t do everything. Can’t pay for everything, either.
At that point somebody conveniently decided that it was wrong for people to have become fixated on this festival as a great way to ogle some beautiful babes when they should have been focusing on the religious aspect of the day.
So they eliminated the girls altogether and substituted figures made of wood — specifically, large slabs of wood cut out along the silhouette of a beautiful poor girl. Think paper dolls.
People hated it, and threw stones and vegetables at the wooden Marias when they passed. So the government passed a law, in 1349, forbidding the throwing of stones and vegetables at the wooden Marias. But the festa was obviously destined to die, and in 1379 it was suppressed altogether.
But not everywhere. The reviled wooden stand-ins, called “Marione de tola” in Venetian (big Marys made of planks), were taken up by the French in reduced form, and before you can say zut alors, they had become known as Marionets or petits Marions, and then marionette.
Now it’s Venice, February 7, 2010, and the Marias are back. For the past few years, part of the opening festivities of Carnival has been the Festa delle Marie, a procession of costumed re-enactors accompanying 12 beautiful girls which wends on foot from San Pietro di Castello to San Marco. The girls are chosen by a jury from many, many applications, and I doubt that they have to be either poor or engaged anymore. But they do need to be beautiful.
For a few years, back in the Nineties (I seem to recall 1996), there was another element: the Regata delle Marie. Rowing races were historically part of any important Venetian festivity, and this one was intended for pairs of women rowing mascaretas. The idea was that both women (or girls) had to be amateurs, rowers who had never participated in the official city races.
I joined in either the first or second edition, with an Argentinian girl named Magdalena. We were all nobodies; it was great. The starting line was just on the other side of the church of San Pietro, in the Canale delle Navi. We raced along somewhere toward Sant’ Erasmo — I wasn’t paying too much attention to the landmarks, especially after the purple boat veered across our bow and we kind of ran into it.
But we disentangled ourselves and rowed like Istrian pirates being pursued by an angry doge, and back up into the rio di Quintavalle to the finish line in front of the church. After all that, we actually came in fourth, which meant we won a pennant, which is all that matters. I also remember that experience because the second we crossed the finish line, Magdalena said, “I’m never racing again.” I never asked her why.
The race did well enough for a couple of years, then people began bending the rules into all kinds of weird shapes till the participants were basically the same people on the official roster. So the race, like the original festival, fizzled out, at least as part of Carnival. It’s now held in June, in honor of San Pietro. Nice thought, but nothing to do with pirates and doges.
But back to Carnival. The procession of happy, heavily costumed Marias is fun, at least when the sun is shining. Where else can you dress up and be carried for a mile on a wooden platform by gondoliers while thousands of people take your picture?
And it’s fun for the onlookers too, because — some things never change — they get to look at beautiful girls in fancy clothes.
Carnival, the first stage
I’m not a big fan of Carnival in Venice. The only bigness I can evince where this annual demolition derby is concerned is a jumbo-size package of the old Aristotelian pity and terror.
That’s not completely true: I don’t feel pity.
But this year I decided to take a different approach. When Carnival erupted last Sunday (after several premonitory tremors) I thought I’d imagine it was something that could be fun, amusing, diverting, worth the trip. Not for me — I’ve figured out how to make it fun for me but it doesn’t involve costumes or the Piazza San Marco — but just going with the idea that it could be entertaining for the thousands upon thousands of people who come to Venice expecting to enjoy themselves, at least, if not enjoy everybody else.
By which I mean, enjoy being squashed like a grape in a winepress by your fellow humans.
So far, it’s working. I had a fine time on Sunday afternoon. But that’s because I made a point of not going to the Piazza San Marco. The Gazzettino reported that some 90,000 people were there. They certainly didn’t need me, even if there had been room.
The first years I was here I did go, at least a few times, to the Piazza San Marco, the gravitational center of the festivities. It was all so new and strange, and memory reports that there weren’t quite so many thousands. Memory may be lying but it was fine anyway. Perhaps the novelty of the situation carried me over the crush, as it may well do to people today.
Then there was a hiatus, partly because I didn’t enjoy the winepress experience and also because what was going on there seemed strangely unfestive: Loads of people in costume (95 percent of which seemed to be identical), walking around just looking at each other, striking attitudes, or taking pictures of each other with or without tourists posing next to them. The nadir is occupied by the people in costume who charge money for allowing themselves to be photographed with your cousin or your kid. And they can make a bundle.
Then we came to Castello and I discovered something of the way Carnival was, decades ago, before the event was trampled by the tourism behemoth. Kids and families and dogs, and relatively few tourists. And did I mention the kids?
Perhaps I’m going senile, or perhaps it’s because the confetti-throwing and occasional Silly String-spraying and strolling around have no evident commercial focus, but I think the downtown version of Carnival beats San Marco in straight sets. Here, if you see somebody taking a picture of a person in costume, it’s almost certainly a besotted relative.
I
If you start to look around, you begin to notice how little it really takes to dress up and play Carnival. There were people who were looking great with only a hat, or a wig, or a moustache or whiskers scribbled on with a black marker– even the simplest mask imaginable just barely covering the eyes. No plumes, no sequins, no layers of painted papier-mache. It really works.
The first Sunday of Carnival (February 7 this year) was Opening Day, one of the maximum moments, as you can imagine. The others are Fat Thursday (Giovedi’ Grasso), and Fat Tuesday (Martedi’ Grasso). And the weekend between them. If the weather is beautiful — as it was on Sunday — it can feel like a party even if you don’t do anything special. If it’s really cold, overcast, windy or rainy, obviously the merriment becomes shredded and forced. This isn’t Rio.
Next chapter: I’ll be tossing out a few festive fistfuls of history, gathered from a large bag of brightly-colored bits of trivia.
Here’s a sample. “Confetti” here refers to the sugared almonds which are given to wedding guests. What speakers of English (and French, German, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch) call confetti — brightly-colored bits of paper — here are called coriandoli (ko-ree-AN-dolee). Why?
Because back in the Olden Days, Carnival revelers would toss all sorts of things around or at or on each other — eggs full of rosewater was one hugely amusing toy to everybody except the women who were on the receiving end. People would also toss various tiny edibles, particularly coriander seeds, which were used in pastries. Then they became bits of sugar pretending to be coriander seeds. Only much later — in 1875 — did flakes of paper begin to be used instead, which is an entirely different story. People who had always called the flying fragments of food “coriandoli” merely transferred to term to the newer-fangled form.
Groundhog-mas
While Americans are watching Punxsutawney Phil, February 2 here in Venice is still known as the feast of the Madonna Candelora (can-del-ORA). Or Candlemas, according to its very old English name, or the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the medium-old locution, or the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple today.
You’ll be startled to hear that it does not involve special food, songs, costumes, or any other acts or even thoughts, although down here at the waterline there may be some fragments of litany or dogma I haven’t come across. This general silence may be because Carnival has overwhelmed it, a festival famous for its lack of litany and dogma.
However, this baby step toward spring is still recognized in an old saying you hear around, which goes like this:
Ala Madona Candelora/de l’inverno semo fora/Se xe piove o xe vento/de l’inverno semo dentro.
“At the Madonna Candelora/ we’re out of winter/ But if it’s rainy or windy / we’re still inside it.”
No mention of how long the extended winter might be (one of Phil’s more helpful services, the six-more-weeks footnote). The canny Venetians may not have wanted to commit themselves. Or the Blessed Virgin.
I have discovered by other means, though, that the feast was mentioned in a document dated 380, and celebrated on February 14. Later modifications by popes and emperors brought it to February 2; Pope/Saint Gelasius (492-496) finally suppressed the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia (also involving purification), and connected it to respect the calculation governing the Jewish ritual of a woman’s purification 40 days after giving birth (hence in the Christian calendar in the West it falls 40 days after Christmas).
Some (not all) scholars also assert that the feast was instituted to replace, smother, or otherwise push off the road the rites honoring the ancient Italic goddess Cerere (borrowed from the Greeks’ Demeter), goddess of growing things, particularly grain.
Speaking of Cerere, a few years ago I was researching an article on the myriad peoples, lumped together under the rubric “Italic,” which were doing just fine in Italy prior to the Roman domination (“Italy Before the Romans,” National Geographic, January, 2005). One of these peoples, the Samnites, occupied the territories in and around Campobasso, in Molise.
I came upon a fountain surmounted by a statue of Cerere in the square of Baranello, a small town of 2,745 souls six miles from Campobasso. It was clearly not ancient; in fact, it was created in 1896. Perhaps the harvest was a disaster that year — I’m just guessing. Then again, maybe they’d had a bumper crop and didn’t want to appear to take it for granted. I suspect that farmers tend to be belt-and-suspenders people.
The inscriptions on the statue’s pedestal (translated by me) state:
(Front) I dedicate this fountain in honor of the farmers of Baranello who with work and sobriety contributed to its well-being
(left) Almo Sun, who with your shining chariot makes the day rise and disappear and returns to be born, different but the same, may you contemplate something larger than this town. May the earth, fertile with fruit and flocks, give to Cerere a crown of wheat-ears and may the salubrious waters and the nimbus of Jove nourish the people
(Right) O Gods, grant honest customs to docile youth, to old age placidity, and to the Samnite people give wealth, progeny, and every glory
Lest you think that this effusion represents the apex of Victorian nostalgia — the anonymous donor clearly beat Mussolini to the public declaration of worship of their Latin forebears — let me note that a statue of Cerere also stands atop the Chicago Board of Trade, as well as appearing on the Great Seal of the State of New Jersey, holding a cornucopia. These notions die hard. Or not at all.
Back to our — with all due respect — meteorological Madonna. The forecast for February 2 is for brilliant sun all day. I’m ready.
