All three flags, each flying its own way. It's very Italian.
At 10:00 AM yesterday — as you recall, the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy — I went to the Piazza San Marco to watch the ceremony of the alzabandiera, or flag-raising.
Or, I suppose, flags-raising, since there are always three: The gonfalone of San Marco (the historic flag of the Venetian Republic), the Italian flag, and the flag of the European Union. There is a rule now that the national flag can’t be displayed without the EU one by its side. That’s your bit of useless information for the day.
This is probably a larger flag than Lino carried when he was this boy's age, but it may be that he carried his with more emotion.
Most of the Piazza was cordoned off, so the spectators were pushed far to the edges. I was around the corner, in front of the campanile entrance, where the procession of veterans representating each of the armed forces was forming up.
There were a few distant speeches from the invisible platform bearing the mayor and other notables. There was lots of music by the band of the Bersaglieri (bear-sahl-YAIR-ee), who as always arrived and departed at a brisk trot. This, along with their extraordinary feathered helmets, is their trademark.
And there were flags of all sizes carried by people of all sizes. Not thousands of either, but a comfortable amount that made it clear that the spectators cared. The band played the national anthem, and some in the crowd also sang it, though there wasn’t exactly a roar of a myriad voices, swearing the oath of the Horatii. Oh well.
The bersaglieri play even better than they run. Or the other way around.
A bersagliere, whose steel helmet is covered with wood grouse feathers. If he's not trotting, this is how you can recognize him.
Half an hour later, the bersaglieri went trotting out, followed by their confreres in approximate formation. The rest of the uniformed participants — assorted notables of varying grades of notability — wandered away in little clumps. This is typical. I realize that we’re not at a state funeral, or some other occasion that calls for sharp edges and crisp behavior. But the formless wandering always does something to reduce the atmosphere of the event in a small way.
This is what a procession looks like, leaving a ceremony.And this is what wandering looks like, though if you're a carabiniere in full dress uniform you can do anything and still look amazing.
In the afternoon, a large procession formed up at San Marco, dedicated to around the carrying of an improvised longest (perhaps) -tricolore-in-the-world. This creation was borne along the Riva degli Schiavoni, up and down bridges, along the Riva dei Sette Martiri, and ultimately came to rest at the monument to Garibaldi. They strung it around the fence that encloses him, his faithful soldier, and the regal, if wingless, lion at his feet.
The three long strips of cloth were more or less the right colors. The important thing was that it was long.
That was it for any public activities that I was aware of. There may have been others elsewhere, but I was cold and tired of standing up. I realize that Garibaldi’s indefatigable troops wouldn’t have succumbed to a few drops of frigid rain and a gray, determined breeze, nor did they ever complain about their feet, at least not around him.
I didn’t complain. We just went home.
The florist was one of several merchants who three-colored-up via Garibaldi.There. This ought to keep that pesky flag from flapping around upside-down. This girl brought her project home after school.Our flag proudly mounted on the door of our little hovel.
Italian flags have been appearing on windows, balconies, even people -- a dazzling change from the usual bring-it-out-only-when-there's-a-soccer-game mentality.
Today, March 17, there is cause for rejoicing in the old Bel Paese. In fact, it’s a national holiday. Some political parties have been bickering — you know how they love to bicker –about exactly how much joy is justifiable, but I think most of their shenanigans are going to be drowned out. It’s just too big a deal.
What? One hundred and fifty years ago today — March 17, 1861 — Italy was born. The process of labor had lasted 41 years (120 years, if you count the uprising in Genoa on December 5, 1746 as the start), but here it finally was: A whole country with one name where before there had only been jostling, homicidal kingdoms, duchies, princedoms, and the occasional city-state such as Venice and the Papal States, each loaded with greed and heavy weaponry and ruled by people whose characters were so stuffed with ambition that there wasn’t much room left for scruples. Mostly.
Revolution: Italy wasn’t a country for most of history, recorded or otherwise; it became a country as the fruit of heroic and idealistic travail, a period known as the Risorgimento. This process involved not a few bloody and horrific battles, conducted by people whose names deserve to be read aloud in every public square today. Actually, every day. They believed in a unified Italy with passion and conviction (like most revolutionaries), and certainly more strongly than a lot of people today believe in anything, considering that they were willing to die for it. In fact, there were no fewer than three Wars of Independence which led ultimately to the country we associate so happily with pizza and “O’ Sole Mio” and Vinnie and Guido.
So today is known as the anniversary of the “Unita’ d’Italia,” the unity, or uniting, of Italy. Let us pause briefly for the national anthem, and I hope any of you hecklers can look these people in the face.
The National Anthem: It goes by several names : “Inno di Mameli,” “Fratelli d’Italia,” or the original title, “Canto degli Italiani.” This stirring piece of 19th-century patriotic romanticism is crammed with historic references , each of which plays a specific symbolic role. Goffredo Mameli composed this poem in 1847 at the age of 21. not long before his untimely death. The text exhorts Italians to awaken, reclaim their historic pride, and struggle till independence is achieved. Even I know the first of its five verses.
The most moving passage begins the second: “For centuries we’ve been trampled and derided, because we’re not a people, because we’re divided. Let us all gather under one flag, one hope, to fuse ourselves together….” The term is the same one used for producing alloys of metal.
The Great Men: The struggle for independence was led by the even-then-legendary General Giuseppe Garibaldi and his noted partner, General Nino Bixio, and many other patriots, particularly Mazzini and Cavour.
The maximum monument to Garibaldi, near his eponymous street in Castello. His is one of those names, like Bolivar, that's bigger than ten ordinary people.
And what founding a nation be without certain mythic phrases? Every child learns them and they become part of the common vocabulary, even if you don’t use them. More or less like I cannot tell a lie.”
Garibaldi, at a certain crucial point in the struggle, is supposed to have turned to Bixio and declared, “Nino, qui si fa l’Italia, o si muore” (Here one creates Italy, or dies). He probably didn’t say that, scholars point out; the rallying cry that is documented also has a certain ring to it: “Italia qui bisogna morire!” (“Italy, here we need to die,” the sense being the need to make a desperate assault, once and for all, without thinking of survival).
There is also his equally famous reply to King Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoia, who commanded him to halt his imminently victorious advance on Trento: “Obbedisco,” said Garibaldi. “I obey.” It’s hard for me to come up with a one-word response so freighted with meaning, one that isn’t profane.
Every revolution needs at least one philosopher, and Giuseppe Mazzini was it. Considered one of the fathers of the nation, he now watches over the vaporettos milling around the Rialto stop.
While these terms might not be needed every day, it’s more common to hear somebody describe a thing that’s been done, created, thrown together, really fast, as having been done “alla garibaldina” — like a soldier of Garibaldi. This isn’t to disparage a man who was universally admired, even by his enemies, for his courage and discipline, but to express how his troops had to keep improvising in order to keep going.
Unity Today? You might think that unity would be something nobody would argue with today, but you would be in error. The politicians governing some Italian regions (what correspond to our states), are all tangled up in snarly disputes about how valuable it really is to be part of one whole country with one name. (Sorry, Garibaldi, I guess all those men of yours died for nothing. Oh wait — they died so that politicians could argue later about whether what they did ever mattered. Impressive.)
In the Piazza San Marco, this almost totally unnoticed plaque says: "Garibaldi here greeting free Venice expressed his hope that Rome be made the capital of Italy. February 26 1867." His wish was fulfilled in 1871.
The Northern League wants the northern regions to secede, for example, and when its intensely right-wing members look at the unified Italy they see only disaster and bankruptcy of every sort (financial, moral, political, etc.) where many people from beyond the borders notice only a great country with a great history and great food and great art and and great music and so on.
And speaking of music, the League doesn’t even like the national anthem. And they don’t just nag about it, some politicians have even left their city council meetings when the anthem was played. Apart from being moronic, it shows some invigorating hypocrisy. They seem to have forgotten (or dismiss) the fact that when most of them fulfilled their compulsory military service (until the draft was suspended in 2005), they swore a solemn oath to defend their country. Sounds a little strange to say later, “Oh well, we didn’t mean THAT country.” Second, they got elected to governmental bodies of some sort, which to me represents a sort of agreement to the system as organized by the Constitution. Put more crudely, they’re happy to have the gig, and now they’re going to waste time talking about how stupid it is.
Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of Italy, always ready to attack at San Zaccaria. Italy remained a kingdom until 1946, when a referendum determined that it would become a representative democracy.
What I think: While flaws and defects and even derelictions of duty may abound (this being a country populated by people and not by angels, though the gross tonnage of paintings and statues of the winged beings might make you doubt it), this is a country that deserves all the admiration usually lavished on more famous peoples and revolutions, such as the French, or the American, or the Russian. Furthermore, until a person can say “I could have done everything they did, and I’m willing to die, just tell me where to stand and what to have on,” that person would do well to take several deep breaths and change the subject, because comments from people who can’t say that matter less than a sack of dried split peas.
The Soundtrack: Like most children of his generation, Lino also learned, along with kilometers of poetry, a slew of the patriotic songs which were composed and sung during the Risorgimento. He can still sing verses and verses of them — it’s extremely cool. He vividly recalls being taken, with the rest of his class, to the Piazza San Marco on April 25, 1946 (Liberation Day). He was eight years old, and the teachers had armed everybody with little Italian flags to wave. He remembers singing “O Giovani Ardenti,” among various pieces, and as you’ll see below, it practically sings itself.
I’d love to translate all of these songs for you, but I suspect you can interpret the main words, which are the ones you’d expect in songs such as these (independent, liberty, union, battle, sword, slave, and so on). “Camicia Rossa” refers to the emblematic red shirt worn by Garibaldi’s soldiers; “Suona la Tromba” is a call-to-arms rally, and “La Bandiera dei Tre Colori” (or “La Bandiera Tricolore“) is plainly about the flag, the most beautiful in the world.
So a big shout-out to all my Italian friends in the US, of whatever generation they may be: Camilla, Bill, Ben, Francesca, and Nicolo’. I hope you’re proud as all get-out. I am.
Since I’ve been here, all sorts of dates have become staples of my annual pilgrimage through the months — dates which never had any significance for me because they didn’t have anything to do with me. Like most dates, today excepted.
Take May 5. No, I don’t mean Cinco di Mayo. It’s not Florence Nightingale’s birthday. Not the first publication of Don Quixote. Not the invention of WD-40. All events worth observing but they don’t have much to do with Venice.
Death mask of Napoleon (Library Company of Philadelphia).
May 5, just so you know, was the Death of Napoleon. In case this still doesn’t matter to you, your city probably wasn’t starved, raped, mutilated, and then sold into slavery. Probably. So anyway, May 5 is, in fact, a day worth remembering, however briefly.
But, I hear you cry, this is March, not May. I realize that. I just wanted to say that March 5, which comes to nobody’s mind except Lino’s (and now mine), claims just as important a place in my calendrical memory. And I wasn’t even there.
March 5, as Lino tells me every year (“Who knows why this date has remained so fixed in my mind?” he asked this morning), was the Battle of the Great Frozen Eel.
On the night between March 4 and 5, he went out in the lagoon to fish.
“There was hoarfrost in the bottom of my boat,” he starts out, to set the scene, and to point out how cold it was. March is famous for pulling tricks like that — it snowed here day before yesterday.
Neither sleet nor snow nor fog nor gloom of night stays the letter carriers, and should the gondoliers be less than they?
He fishes for a couple of hours out in the lagoon. “I got all kinds of great stuff,” he says (I’m freely translating). “Seppie. Passarini [European flounder]. And an eel.”
The fact of there being an eel isn’t so remarkable — the lagoon version has a lovely pale-green belly — but considering that he fishes with a trident, they’re pretty tricky to spear. So this was a sort of bonus.
All the fish are tossed into a big bin. He continues fishing. It continues to be really cold.
Finally he rows home, lugs the bin upstairs and dumps the contents into the kitchen sink.
The eel makes a clunk. It’s frozen solid in the curled-up shape it was forced to assume in the bin. “That didn’t happen to the passarini,” Lino adds, “but the eel was hard as stone. So I began to run tepid water on it to soften it up.”
“All of a sudden” — (I love this part, it’s like a fairy tale when the witch or prince or stolen baby appears) — “all of a sudden, I see its gills begin to move.” He makes a slowly-moving-gills motion with his hand.
“My God! It was still alive!” Astonishing, if you believed, as I — and obviously Lino — would have, that freezing would kill a creature. But the gills were definitely moving. And shortly thereafter, the rest of the eel was also moving. A lot.
“You should have seen what that eel was doing in the sink,” Lino goes on. Naturally it’s slithering like crazy, trying to get out, but naturally it is failing. And naturally Lino is trying to grab it, but it cleverly has a slippery skin to prevent that.
“Finally I took a dishtowel and grabbed it using that,” he says. “It still wasn’t easy. I managed to pin it down and made a couple of cuts” (in whatever part of the body was convenient). Then, when it began to slow down, he continued with the usual procedure of dispatching and cleaning eel, which I will not describe to you. Anybody who wants to know can write to me.
So remember March 5, sacred to the memory of the gallant eel who didn’t realize he was better off frozen hard as stone.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the first flight in Venice. This might sound like a quaint bit of trivia, if one didn’t know (which one is about to) how important Venice was in the history of Italian and also, may one say, European, aviation.
So pull your minds for a moment from the canals and consider the heavens. I myself am not a connoisseur of the aeronautical, but I am always interested in history, especially in “firsts,” especially if they actually mattered.
On February 19, 1911, Umberto Cagni took off from the beach in front of the Excelsior Hotel on the Lido in his Farman II airplane, and made six brief flights, in spite of the fog. (ACTV, please note.) On March 3, better weather encouraged him to fly, for the first time ever, over Venice.
A few months later, on September 19, 1911, the first airmail flight in Italy departed from Bologna and landed on the Lido. That is to say, Venice.
The symbol of an airplane just above the word “Lido” marks the location of Nicelli airport.
Geography is destiny, as Napoleon observed, and Venice’s position was obviously as valuable to air transport as it had been for centuries to shipping. At that time, the Lido was largely uninhabited, making it the ideal place to establish an airport.
The airport is open to visitors, especially those who want to take a helicopter ride over Venice and the Lagoon (www.heliairvenice.com).
The first was built in 1915, a military base on the northernmost part of the Lido, which was active during World War I. Then, in 1935, with some major variations, it became the Aeroporto Nicelli, and air became yet another way, in the march of progress, to get to Venice. Flights on Ala Littoria and Transadriatica connected the famously watery city to points scattered around Europe. Even to Baku, if you happened to be going that way.
Nicelli immediately became the scene of extremely glamorous arrivals, as movie stars deplaned on the grassy runway to attend the Venice Film Festival. This continued until 1960, when Marco Polo airport opened on the mainland.
As shown on the map displayed in the airport, Venice remained at the center of things into yet another century.
So far I may have made it sound as if all these things were accomplished by an occult hand. But of course many hands were involved, among which none were more important than those of the late Lt. Col. Umberto Klinger.
Klinger, a native Venetian, was already a celebrity by the time he created the Officine Aeronavali at Nicelli, a large workshop dedicated to repairing and maintaining airplanes.
A glimpse of Klinger on the cover of a book written by his daughter.
A highly decorated pilot in World War II, with more than 5,000 hours of flight to his credit, 600 of which were in combat, he earned 5 silver Medals of Military Valor. He also served as Chief of Staff of the Special Air Services of the Italian Air Force, not only organizing the activities of squadrons of Savoia-Marchetti S.75s (troop transports or bombers), but also flying them himself, often at night, over enemy territory. He was president of the first passenger airline in Italy (Ala Littoria), and four other companies. Far from being a mere figurehead, Klinger raised Nicelli to the level of the second airport in Italy.
So much for the history lecture. Now we have to move into the darkened halls of humanity, where to do justice to even the bare outlines of the story of Umberto Klinger you’d need to resort to dramatic opera. Verdi! thou should’st be living at this hour, but you’re not; to the people who knew him, though, the name of Klinger creates its own music. Especially those who remember his last day.
Lino, for example.
Lino went to work for the Aeronavali as an apprentice mechanic at Nicelli in 1954, at the age of 16. He often saw “Comandante Klinger,” and even spoke with him on various occasions. Right up to today, Lino pronounces his name with reverence and regret. This wasn’t unusual — Klinger was by all accounts a powerfully charismatic man admired for his courage, respected for his skill, but with a special gift for inspiring real love.
In 1925, Transadriatica was one of the first passenger airlines in Italy; its first route connected Rome and Venice. This poster promotes the link between Venice and Vienna.
The Aeronavali flourished, with hundreds of employees working on aircraft of all sorts, from the Italian Presidential plane to cargo and passenger planes of many different companies. When Marco Polo airport opened on the mainland in 1960, the Aeronavali moved to the mainland with it.
Then politics began to set in. The broad outlines of what is undoubtedly a hideously complicated story are that certain elements in Rome, wanting to gain control of the company in order to place it under state, rather than private, administration, began to create financial problems for Klinger. The Aeronavali kept working, but payments from the Ministry of Defense were mysteriously not coming through. And the unions, manipulated by the aforementioned political factions, began to stir up discontent.
Lino remembers the increasingly tense meetings of the workers and the unions. He remembers Klinger pleading with them to be patient as he struggled to reopen the financial flow. But the unions rejected any compromises on pay or contracts, however temporary they might be, compelling the workers to resist. They ultimately even went on strike for 72 hours. Celebrity or no, the man — who had looked after his employees with no less solicitude than he had cared for his pilots — was running out of fuel.
The Aeronavali worked on any sort of aircraft — Dakotas, Constellations, and the Savoia-Marchetti S.75, a 30-passenger plane also used as a bomber in World War II. These were Klinger’s specialty, comprising virtually all of the squadrons he commanded of the Special Air Services.
During these harrowing days, Klinger was heard to say more than once that what was needed to resolve this impasse was “something really big.” He ultimately thought of something that qualified.
Early in the morning of January 26, 1971, he went alone to the old hangar at Nicelli, by that time virtually abandoned. And he took a cord. A few hours later, when the guardian made his rounds, he discovered the body of Comandante Klinger. He had hanged himself.
Lino remembers the gathering at work that morning, when they were given the news. There was utter silence, he recalls, though if stricken consciences could make an audible noise there would have been plenty of that.
The first time I heard this story, I thought his was the despairing last act of a man who had run out of hope. Now I am convinced that Klinger’s suicide was an act of voluntary self-immolation in order to save the company — not unlike the Russian officers after the fall of Communism who, left unpaid, finally killed themselves so their widows would get their pensions.
And Klinger turned out to have won his gamble. Almost immediately, the overdue funds began to pour in.
The hangar, seen across the runway from the terminal.
The funeral, in the church of San Nicolo’ next to the airport, was attended by a huge number of mourners; many had to stand outside. Did any union officers come to pay their last respects? “Sure,” Lino said. “They were at the head of the line.”
Courage in combat — it isn’t needed only in the skies. Nor does it only involve things that explode, though they can still be fatal. Umberto Klinger deserves another medal, one which doesn’t seem yet to have been created.
Klinger, the way his employees remember him — in mufti, smiling.
Postscript: It’s very easy to visit the airport. At the central vaporetto stop on the Lido at Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta, take the “A” bus marked for “San Nicolo’ – Ple. Rava’.” (If the weather’s nice, you can just stroll along the lagoon embankment for about half an hour.) Get off at the last stop, in front of the church and walk a few minutes across the grass and up the driveway.
The terminal has been spiffed to a modern version of its former glory, with a cool retro-design restaurant, “Niceli.” Have lunch, or just a coffee or drink on the terrace. If you come toward the early evening in the summer, bring lots of mosquito repellent.
The lobby today.Or maybe the restaurant is named “Nicely.” I like the design, even if it is unclear.
