My personal account of living real life in real Venice, and more
A few days ago I was expatiating on the nature of trash/biological refuse disposal here. Or lack thereof.
One reader who shares my outlook on many things was moved to send me the following photo she made of one means of poop-disposal left by a Neanderthal somewhere in her ambit. Not her back yard, I’m pretty sure.
We mustn’t begin to smile at these things. But then again.
As you know from many situations which I have described ( even if I cannot explain them), the indigenous people inhabiting our little lobe of Venice have their own way of doing things. The most mundane things, I mean — not things which are exceptionally demanding intellectually or morally. Not things which require Deep Thought, or Serious Reflection, or even sneaking a peek at the answers at the end of the chapter. Things which I, in my own small way, consider obvious, seem to present impossible complications to a certain sort of person here.
I never see these people, of course, but they leave their unavoidable traces. Or their dogs leave the traces for them. All over.
Here are a few brief examples of the cultural development of some individuals here — either whole clans of them, or only a few who are at it 20 hours a day.
Consider (briefly) dog poop. There are responsible owners who responsibly retrieve it and place it in a little plastic bag and tie a very tight knot, just the way they’re supposed to.
Then they drop the bag on the ground and walk away. These abandoned little bags can sit around for days, waiting for some garbageman to consider them garbage. But hey. You’re supposed to clean up after your canine? Done and done.
Some dog-owners defend this practice by pointing out that there are no containers in which to deposit these daily objects. I’m not defending them, but this is true. So it means that the municipal garbage-and-trash-collecting system is to blame for unpleasant trash?
Not at all! There’s a reason why you can’t find a single trash bin between the vaporetto stop at San Pietro di Castello and the Ponte de la Veneta Marina all the way at the end of via Garibaldi, a distance of 3,031 feet (924 meters), or more than half a mile.
The reason is that the trash bins were removed because the specimens of citizens we’re examining here were using the bins for their bags of kitchen/domestic/ personal garbage here, which is totally against the law. And also kind of crazy.
Why this is crazy is because residents pay a tax for trash removal based on the dimensions of their dwelling and the number of people living there. They have to pay it whether or not they ever put out so much as a beer can to be taken away. So what could possibly be the point of carrying your garbage somewhere outside, probably under cover of darkness, maybe even in the rain or snow flurries or blasts of the simoom, to leave it somewhere else?
Forget the bins, whether they exist or not. This species of person leaves their bag of garbage (this is important, but you can skip ahead if you want) anywhere and everywhere the spirit moves them. Like on a step halfway (halfway!) up a bridge on a Saturday afternoon, where they know it will rest until Monday morning. Or putting it outside their door at night (also forbidden) when acqua alta is due to come ashore and float the bag around the neighborhood for a while.
The knowing, the seeing, the caring about it, all this shorts out their mental circuits faster than you can blow a fusebox.
Up until a few decades ago, many Venetians tended to throw their trash into the canals and let the tide deal with it. That was the simplest method of all, because all you had to remember was gravity. Every so often you can still hear an anonymous, furtive splash.
But sometimes they make me laugh.
This morning we went to pick up a batch of the free paper bags the city provides to contain paper to be recycled (pickup Tuesday and Friday). Paper bags to contain paper. Retain this thought, tricky as it may be.
The same little distribution point also gives out labels to stick onto the plastic bag into which you have stuffed items made of glass, metal, or plastic (pickup Wednesday and Saturday).
The labels say (in Italian, obviously): GLASS PLASTIC CANS. Not heroic hexameters, not any sentence by William Faulkner. Just that.
“But there are people who take the paper bags,” the man giving out the bags and labels this morning told me, “and put the labels on them.”
When we, and a few others waiting their turn, stopped laughing, I thought it over.
Italy, at 98.9 percent, ranks as 47th on the literacy scale of 180 countries, so I’m assuming that reading isn’t an obstacle. So that’s out.
It’s true that you could easily put glass, plastic and cans into a paper bag for disposal. But that’s like the people who throw out their paper to be recycled by stuffing it into a plastic bag.
It’s two ideas that are mismatched socks: Each one fine by itself, but they don’t belong together. And while you can close your eyes and pretend you’re not wearing socks of different colors, there’s no way you can pretend that plastic in a paper bag makes any kind of recycling sense.
But as an example of an overwhelming sense of inertia, it’s excellent.
We’ve been having fog of various densities and persistence over the past – I’d have to check, it seems like a month or so. Or year. A long time, anyway. And the predictions are for more.
“How romantic,” I hear you thinking. And I agree. Fog can be hauntingly lovely here, all drifting shapes and softening colors and the complete evaporation of the horizon.
But if you need to move beyond the visual and into the practical, fog can be a pain in the gizzard. Acqua alta may get all the emotional publicity, but I can tell you that acqua from above, in the form of atmospheric condensation, can be just as inconvenient. I suppose nobody makes the same sort of fuss about it because fog doesn’t come into your house. Or shop.
Example: Yesterday morning I was forced to abandon my plan to go to Torcello to meet somebody for an interview (assuming I do, or do not, succeed in re-scheduling said meeting, I will explain who, what and why in another post).
Like many plans — Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, say, or New Coke — it looked perfect on paper. Take the #52 vaporetto at 8:10 to the Fondamente Nove, change to the LN line at 8:40, change to the Torcello line at 9:35, and faster than you can recite the Gettysburg Address, I’d be there. Actually, you’d have to recite it 36 times; door to door requires an hour and a half, but I don’t mind. It’s a beautiful trip, assuming you can see where you’re going.
But once again, I discovered — standing there without a Plan B — that the real problem isn’t the fog itself, but the way the ACTV, the transport company, deals with it. The ACTV seems to have wandered beyond a reasonable concern for public safety and into the realm of phobia: “An irrational, intense, and persistent fear of certain situations, activities, things, animals, or people.” I don’t think the ACTV has a fear of animals. Otherwise, fog fits the phobic bill. The solution? According to the dictionary, “The main symptom of this disorder is the excessive and unreasonable desire to avoid the feared stimulus.” In this case, fog.
But the ACTV exists to be outdoors. Much as it might wish the case to be otherwise, it can’t function anywhere else. And more to the point, by now almost all the boats have radar. Yet it seems that the the more radar the company installs, the less willing the company is to trust it.
May I note that there were a good number of people out rowing in the fog yesterday morning, on their way to a boating event at Rialto. I myself have been out rowing in the lagoon with a compass, as has Lino, as have plenty of people. Lino rowed home one time in a fog so thick he couldn’t see the bow of his boat. Just to give you some idea of what is, in fact, feasible.
In yesterday’s case, all the vaporettos were, as usual, re-routed up and down the Grand Canal, even those — like the one I wanted — which normally circumnavigate the city’s perimeter. If I’d known in time that the fog was that thick out in the lagoon (as it wasn’t, outside our hovel), I wouldn’t have walked all the way over to the vaporetto stop at San Pietro di Castello. Because once I realized that the boat wasn’t coming, it was too late to activate the most reasonable solution: Walking to the Fondamente Nove to get the boat to Burano. Although there again, even if service were maintained to the outer reaches of the lagoon, it would almost certainly have been on a limited schedule. Like, say, once an hour.
Pause for the sound of the perfect plan drifting out to sea, and the first stifled shriek of the day.
I can’t understand several things. If the boats have radar, why does it not inspire confidence in its operators? And more to the point, if the vaporetto captains can manage to navigate along the shoreline and up the Grand Canal, with or without radar, why could they not, by the same token, circumnavigate the city? The route outside takes them just as close to the shoreline as it does inside — in other words, whichever route they take, they’re not exactly out on the high seas, but within eyeshot of any palaces or pilings or any other landmark that they need to keep track of.
Once again, my sense of logic has run aground in a falling tide on the mudbanks of municipal management.
But one last question: If the city (and by extension, its transport company) is so willing to confront a temporary meteorological situation (fog) with the attitude, “Suck it up, people,” why has it not been willing to confront another temporary meteorological situation (acqua alta) with the same panache?
Answers do suggest themselves, but they are cynical answers, composed of bitter little thoughts about human nature. Best to leave them unexpressed.
Note to people flying, not floating, yesterday. I’m sorry if your flight was delayed. I realize that flying in fog is stupid and dangerous. But slowly driving a boat in fog, hugging the shoreline, isn’t.
As I may have intimated, we didn’t plan on being in the Piazza San Marco at the stroke of midnight, and we in fact stayed home until midnight when we walked out to the waterfront to watch the fireworks over the Bacino of San Marco.
This isn’t to say that our neighborhood was empty — au contraire. There were plenty of kids out, and assorted adults, and the kids, at least, were intent on making things explode. Here these variations on the firecracker are generically called petardi (a petardo here is not something you would be want to be hoist with, even if it was your own) and they make a seriously loud bang and leave black smears on the street.
The first things to be called “petard,” I discover, were not used for entertainment. They were small bombs used to breach walls and blow in doors. The term derives from Middle French and/or Latin, from the word invented long before gunpowder to mean “fart.”
But turning to more serious detonations, you probably know that Thomas Carlyle famously said that “The three great elements of modern civilization are gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.” My calculation is that there is an inverse relationship between the quantity of gunpowder in a place or time and the quantity of civilization represented thereby. I understand that fireworks to mark the birth of a new calendar are common in many places and cultures and are loaded with symbolic meaning. I only wanted to remark that I myself don’t regard pain and mutilation as being especially civilized, no matter what else your culture may have discovered or invented.
Here is the New Year’s morning balance sheet from the merrymaking that involved things that go boom in Italy:
500 people wounded (four of them seriously, and 68 under the age of 12), and one person killed, almost exclusively by fireworks of the homemade variety, some of which could create explosions rivaling those we read about occurring in foreign marketplaces. It’s too bad that my first reaction when I read that was “Great! Only one person died!” It’s nothing to be pleased about, especially when I learned that he was killed by a stray bullet when he went out in the courtyard with his friends to watch the fireworks. Guns are becoming a new way here to make noise and threaten life to welcome the next 12 months.
And various people have lost eyes and hands. It’s the same every year.
At San Marco, at least, there were no damaging cannonades. The mass celebration there seems to have gone without any particular hitch (or lost dogs). The reports describe its dimensions:
60,000 people went to the Piazza to drink Prosecco (or whatever they brought), watch the fireworks, and share a kiss at midnight. I’m not going to try to calculate how tightly these people were packed together; the Piazza is big, but not unusually big, and I can imagine that once they locked lips it took some time for there to be enough space to unlock them again. Concerning the clip below, unless you’re a total crowd-and-fireworks maniac, skip to the last two or three minutes. Just a suggestion.
As for trash (here the Countryside Code doesn’t apply — people don’t mind leaving their footprints and garbage behind), there was plenty. To festivize properly seems to require discarding material, kind of like the solid rocket boosters falling away from the Space Shuttle at T plus two minutes.
At 2:30 AM the trash collectors took over — 120 of them, filling 140 garbage “wagons” (or 104, the accounts aren’t consistent, but anyway, 40 wagons were loaded in the Piazza alone), the contents of all of which were dumped into 40 garbage barges. By 5:00 AM the Piazza was clean again and I give everybody loads (two bargefuls) of compliments.
What was left behind in our little hovel was not smashed bottles or busted firecrackers, but there are still large amounts of great food sitting around, including homemade cake and cookies, which are going to make that New Year’s Resolution — you know the one I mean — that much harder to fulfill.
But I’m feeling hopeful about virtually everything at the moment, which is an inexplicable but very welcome byproduct of starting a new year, not to mention a new decade, and I’m going to try to make it last as long as I can. The feeling, I mean. Not the year.