August: May I have this trance?
August in Venice is remarkably similar to August in many other cities — European ones, anyway. The urb seems to go into a sort of trance. There aren’t any major festivals, though modest local events continue to be scattered around, the kind that you can mostly take or leave alone. It’s a desultory sort of month just lollygagging along the line, if there is one, between languor and lethargy.
Yes, there is still heat, sometimes too much of it, but the heat doesn’t quite match that hellish torridity of July. For us city-dwellers (as opposed to farmers, or families on beach vacations), the occasional thunder- or hailstorm serves mainly as entertainment, a little break in the estival monotony. I love watching the hail crashing into the canal outside, cosmic handfuls of ice hurled earthward making the water jump and bounce and froth. I wish it would happen more often. And then, after the storm passes, the limitless space of sky over the lagoon can be covered with enormous, dense clouds that look as if they must have been squeezed out of some colossal can of Cloud-Whip.
Fine — I hear you thinking — but what about All Those Tourists? No need to ask; tourists, like the poor, shall never cease from the earth. Of course there are tourists. And while there are always more visitors than residents, most Venetians, few as there may be anymore, are even fewer now. They’re on vacation, and that means they’ve mostly gone to the mountains. If you want to see some Venetians, you’re going to have to head for Baselga di Pine’ or San Martino di Castrozza.
But what’s different in August is that the tourists seem to fade, in a curious way, and crowded onto the vaporettos, many of them look as if they’ve been thwacked by a two by four. In fact, the whole city seems as if it has faded. Shops shut. Restaurants close. Pharmacies are reduced to a skeleton supply, thoughtfully displaying a sign on their barred doors with the name and address of the nearest open drugstore, which will not be near. The market at Rialto retains only a few, seemingly symbolic, vendors. The sea may be teeming with fish, but the fishmongers don’t care. Pastry-makers go hiking in the Alps, I guess, because they’re not interested in making delicacies containing cream and butter in this heat, nor are there any customers interested in buying them. The only dairy product anybody cares about is ice cream.
So a sensation of scarcity and torpor suffuses the city. If you need some object or service (the lab report on your biopsy, a replacement door to your front-loading washing machine) you can just make up your mind to wait, because factories or warehouses will close. Delivery people will disappear, and that includes letter-carriers. (Not made up.) The post office hardly even hires substitutes. Everything just gets left where you dropped it until September.
Tourists will continue to find what they need. Ice-cream shops (I did mention ice cream, didn’t I?), souvenir vendors, and museums will all be lolling in the shade, waiting for you. But many places that you would assume would be panting for floods of customers just pull the grate across the door and a tape hand-lettered sign to it. There.
There are only two events that make the smallest indentation in the rich layer of silence that has been smoothed over the city. The first is August 15, or Ferragosto. It dates from antiquity to mark, among other things, the end of the harvest, and was recognized officially by the emperor Augustus in the year 18 A.D. Many Catholic countries, since Pope Pius XII’s edict of November 1, 1950, observe it as a religious festival as well as a picnic-at-the-beach festival. (It’s especially beloved in the years when it falls outside a weekend, thereby requiring you to extend your vacation.)
Even after all this time, Ferragosto still doesn’t make much of an impression on me. It’s kind of like observing your second cousin’s mother-in-law’s wedding anniversary. But once you’ve experienced the desolation of most big cities on this day, you can really get how funny the moment is in a little movie whose name escapes me, in which the only son’s elderly mother, living in the center of Rome, begs him to get her fresh fish for lunch on Ferragosto. It would be like asking someone to go out and bring you a fresh piece of moon rock on New Year’s Day.
The only other noticeable August event — for me, at least — are the time trials to winnow out the racers for the Regata Storica (Historic Regatta), which is always held on the first Sunday in September. Not that anybody notices or cares about the eliminations except for the 126 aspiring racers, who have to stay here to continue training up to and, if they pass, after. And of course the judges, such as Lino, care, because they have to organize their hanging-out time around eliminatorie duty, spending endless hours out on the lagoon by Malamocco watching the boats go by at two-minute intervals for what feels like five forevers.
You wouldn’t think anybody had the energy to be strange, but still I’ve noticed little slivers of slightly puzzling behavior. Such as the man sitting on the bench at Malamocco one meaningless afternoon, looking out at the water. Well, the bench itself is odd enough, even without the man, because someone decided to place a lamppost right in front of it, so close that it seems to be a direct challenge to you to decide which is really more important, rest or light. But this man had decided he wanted rest and shade, of all things, and even though there were ample dark patches under the trees where he could have been slightly cooler, he had sat down in the center of the bench in such a way as to benefit from the one narrow strip of shadow it cast. He was sprawled there, straddling the shadow, sun baking him on each side, with a strip of shade going straight up his middle.
Or there was another man (sorry, so far I’ve only noticed the XY chromosome category) who was sitting on the vaporetto in front of us one morning, heading toward the Lido. He looked like a local, well into retirement age, with a hefty little paunch. It was a rare cool morning with little spits of rain and breeze. I was wearing a sweater.
He, on the other hand, was wearing beach flipflops, denim shorts, and a tank top — three-quarters of him was skin. But the rain hadn’t caught him by surprise, because he was wearing a rain hat, a neat little classic made of some form of plastic, and it looked very new. Almost as if he had just bought it.
I sat there looking at him, trying to grasp what instinct could have prompted him to protect his head when the rest of him was destined to be drenched. Let’s assume he was taken by surprise by the sudden turn of meteorological events. Wouldn’t a cheap umbrella have made slightly more sense?
I can’t explain how I find the strength to dwell on these things. Me, I’ve been trying for four days now to decide if I want to polish my toenails and I still can’t make up my mind. It’s just too much to think about.
Secrets? Where?
Someone told me the other day that I should look at a blog called Venezia Nascosta (Hidden Venice),so I did. It’s as attractive as several others which are more or less on the same beam, but it appears to concentrate primarily on history. I’m as interested in Venetian history as the next person, perhaps even more than many (if I may say so), but not when it’s the same old history that turns up in so many books, over and over, like the turkey for weeks after Thanksgiving. And adding a title which is even more trite only makes it worse. “Hidden.” Oy.
But what has driven me to mention it is because it’s yet another in an infinite series of examples of the insatiable need people seem to feel to refer to Venice as “hidden.” “Secret.” “Mysterious.” Despite scores of other worthy adjectives (I like “peerless,” though “incomparable” is also good), people can’t resist using these exhausted banalities to describe a city which evidently was built, not on a batch of marshy wetlands, but on quivering Jungian swamps of the unknowable. Maybe it’s Carnival, with everybody in disguise, that has doomed Venice to be labeled “mysterious.” Maybe it’s the fog. Maybe it’s the wonders of low tide.
I object to this tendency for several reasons. One, because it is a cliche, and cliches annoy me. The image of the city as an enigmatic, unfathomable, a faintly (or overtly) sinister place, an amniotic sort of realm ruled by inscrutable forces illuminated by a faint but lurid aura of romanticism, began to germinate in the 1600s, when visitors began to be interested in the city less as a political or commercial power and more as a place of intrigue, decadence, and general dissipation.
Mystery, in fact, is a quality that was promoted by the city itself, whose patrician families and government (which were the same thing) knew that secrets had real power. Discretion and dissimulation were serious weapons of self-defense in a world composed of much larger and more dangerous nations, all of which wanted to hurt, or, if they were having a very good day, to kill you at some point or another. This much we can certainly appreciate.
“The first who wrapped the city in mystery were the Venetian rulers,” Espedita Grandesso, a Venetian writer and historian, told me once. “Because the Serenissima was a little bijou in the midst of iron barrels. So this state of things made the nobles and merchants keep everything secret, even the most foolish thing. They weren’t completely mistaken. All they needed was the rumor of something going wrong, and all the governments of Europe would be breathing down her neck.”
“All the secrets of the crafts had to be protected, like the secret of making scarlet dye,” costume designer Stefano Nicolao added. The same paranoia applied to the techniques of glass-making, and many other trades, such as the formula for the best teriaca in Europe. (Teriaca was the all-purpose medicament of choice for centuries, but the recipe has been lost. Would that be a mystery?) There were obvious commercial reasons — survival reasons — for relying, not on a hearty handshake and a call for another round of drinks, but merely the shimmer of a sideways glance, a tiny shrug. Did that little frown mean yes or no?
But by the Romantic era, the idea of Venice’s inscrutability had gotten completely out of hand. Once secrecy had become the way of life, aided by the custom of wearing masks up to half the year, it didn’t take long before the entire city came to be viewed as a fantastic decoction of intrigue, deception, and eventually — why not? — erotic adventure. But I still don’t see how all that adds up to “mysterious.”
Which leads me to my second objection to this cliche, which is that I don’t understand how a city which covers just three square miles, with only 59,000 inhabitants, and is visited by millions of people every year (though admittedly in very short bursts of time and attention), can possibly be presented as retaining even the tiniest shred of a secret.
Tokyo has 35,676,000 inhabitants and covers 5,200 square miles– you could make a very good case for there being a mass of secrets as big as the Sears Tower hidden in there somewhere. Probably a much better case than you could make for Venice.
Maybe the force governing these Venetian so-called secrets is the city’s beauty. But why should beauty have anything to do with secrecy? I’d be willing to bet money that there are as many, or more, secrets in Lincoln, Nebraska, as there are in Venice. But nobody indulges in reveries about the secrets of Shreveport, or contemplates the mysteries of Walla Walla. Why?
And another thing. If there were to be secrets here, how have they managed to stay secret all this time? Amazon.com lists 11,696 books under the keyword “Venice.” Secrets? Where?
My opinion on the subject can best be expressed by Sherlock Holmes’s astute comment to Dr. Watson: “You see, but you do not observe.”
Why insist on seeking something ephemeral and perhaps even indefinable? If you really want to discover Venice, don’t go looking for secrets; look at exactly what there is. Anything you can see in broad daylight anywhere in the city is going to be as complex, as brilliant, as astonishing as any rumpsprung old “secret” foisted off on you by yet another Venicemonger.
Yes, of course the city has an eccentric glamor, an insinuating fascination that can indeed sneak up on you and trap you. Venice is beautiful; to say that is to have said little more than that the sun rises in the east and water runs downhill. It is unforgettable, fatal, addictive, whatever you want. People become infatuated with it, or the idea of it. I offer myself as a case in point. But that doesn’t make it mysterious.
So let me make a heartfelt, and I’m sure completely inaudible, plea for some new word to describe Venice that will take the place of any term that is synonymous with secrecy, concealment, enigma, or anything more subtle than a bowl of pasta and beans, or a couple of fried clams. Please. Just try.
Update on cruising
I stated in a recent post that Venice was now the number one cruise port in the Mediterranean. A new study reveals that the blue ribbon goes to Civitavecchia, the port about 46 miles/one hour from Rome. Two million passengers went through the port in 2009, according to EBNT (Ente Bilaterale Nazionale di Turismo).
For the record, the Port of Venice reports that 1,420,980 cruise passengers came or went in 2009.
I realize that you can make yourself verge on crazy by tracking each little item and what it means, but I thought it would be wise to update the hierarchy, lest anyone think I insisted on pushing Venice to the front of whatever line there is, just because it’s, you know, the most beautiful city in the world (TMBCITW).
Racing through Murano
If you’ve ever been to Murano, one of the world’s great glass-making centers, you will know that it’s impossible to race through it. You will be exhausted, but not because you’ve been going so fast; au contraire, you will have been plodding along at the pace of those debilitated galley slaves in Ben-Hur, going in and out of so many shops you’ll think they’ve been breeding in dark corners when you’re not looking. The five islands that make up Murano, of which you will probably only visit two, cover barely one square mile, and the Yellow Pages list 61 shops. I think there must be more.
Anyway, you will not have been racing. Unless it’s the first Sunday in July, in which you can come to Murano to watch other people race, and believe me, they’re going to be more tired in less time than you and your whole family after an entire day.
The regata of Murano is really three regatas, each involving solo rowers, which calls not only for stamina but for skill. The races are for young men on pupparinos, women on pupparinos, and grown men on gondolas. It’s always hot, and there is always wind, and sometimes, like a few years ago, there can be sudden thunderstorms with pouring rain. But the race must go on.
The city of Venice organizes nine regatas a year, plus the Regata Storica. Each race is designed for a particular type of boat and number of rowers, and each is held in a different part of the lagoon, which means that the conditions and course present their own particular quirks. These changing venues also means that some are easier to watch from the shore than others, and the one at Murano is especially exciting not only because you can see both the start and the finish, but because there are good vantage-points along the fondamentas, and even a big cast-iron bridge from which to get a spectacular view of the finish.
Regatas (a Venetian word, by the way), have been an important feature of Venetian festivities since the Venetians crawled out of the primordial ooze; sometimes they were part of a religious celebration, or part of the myriad spectacles staged for the amusement of visiting potentates, but they were one-time events.
But in 1869, the regata at Murano was established as a regular annual event and not for any prince or pope but to entertain — yes — tourists. And whether or not tourists can look up for a few minutes from the heaps of glass necklaces and picture frames and flower vases, this race is arguably the most important occasion for a Venetian racer to show what he, or she, has really got. I can tell you that the man who wins the gondola race is universally regarded as having won something akin to Wimbledon, or maybe the Ironman Triathlon, or the Tour de France. Maybe all of them.
Here’s what it takes to win: Strength, stamina, skill, luck, and extreme and ruthless cunning. It also helps if you’re tall. It’s a physics thing; short rowers have a hard time keeping up with taller ones, though sometimes a short person has pulled it off, especially if he or she (I’m thinking of a she) is lavishly gifted with the aforementioned luck and cunning. Or just cunning.
My two most vivid memories of this race are from one of the earliest ones I ever attended, and the one from last Sunday. Both, oddly, involve a certain racer named Roberto Busetto.
Mr. Busetto is strong — he looks like Mr. Clean, and he has biceps that make you think of whole prosciuttos. He is also experienced, and very determined (I’m not sure that he’s made it up to “ruthless”), but if anything ever upsets him during the race — even if it may not have prevented him from finishing really well — he can be counted on to show up for his prize yelling about it. In fact, there will always be something that’s wrong, and he goes all Raging Bull at the judges, at some fellow racer, at some onlooker, at anyone or anything that might have created even the tinest problem for him. Or who looks like they don’t care. It’s never easy to understand, in the midst of his tirade, what actually went wrong. But you know he’s mad.
The first time I saw Busetto at full throttle, he had barely crossed the finish line when he started ranting. It had something to do with what he claimed was some sneaky, illegal thing that another racer, Franco Dei Rossi, had inflicted on him, thereby preventing him from finishing better.
But it wasn’t his tantrum that stunned me, though I didn’t know at that point that tantrums are his normal means of expression, the way some people can’t help starting every sentence with “Well” or “You know.” It was the fact that under this deluge of outrage, Dei Rossi was sobbing as he mounted the judges’ stand to be awarded his prize. A grown man, one of the greatest (in my view) racers of his generation, son of one of the greatest racers in history, was standing there weeping uncontrollably. It was so astonishing and distressing that I know I didn’t imagine it, and I’m not exaggerating, either. I’m glad I didn’t have a camera with me, I wouldn’t be able to bear looking at the pictures. It really left a mark on me.
So we come to last Sunday. It’s Busetto again. He has been racing for at least 20 years, maybe more, but he had only a very brief peak, and that was quite some while ago. In fact, I’d have to stop and do some research to determine when was the last time he won a pennant. I think the Beatles may still have been together. (Just kidding; it was in 2000.)
But this year, he finished third. Which means he won the green pennant, which means that after a ten-year drought he had managed to pull himself back into the ranks of the demi-gods. Pennants are awarded to the first four finishers, and they really matter to the racers, almost as much as the cash prize.
Finishing third is pretty great, but about two seconds after crossing the finish line, he collapsed. First he sort of let himself fall down backwards on the stern of the boat, which isn’t so strange except that it’s usually the younger men who want to show how completely wrung out they are. It’s like when they throw their oar in the water (rage, joy, some other intense emotion — looks very dramatic, till you realize how dumb it is).
But then my friend Anzhelika said, “He’s too white.” Then I noticed that his boat had drifted slaunchwise across the canal, blocking the arrival of the last gondolas. Then there was some commotion, then the sound of the water ambulance arriving at full speed.
Much pouring of cool water on his head, much checking of his blood pressure. He tore himself away long enough to come pick up his pennant, annoyed (of course), though not yelling, because everybody was fussing over him. He likes attention, but nobody with arms like prosciuttos wants it to be because he fell apart.
But some things in life are bigger than prosciuttos, and rowing under the searing sun for 40 minutes at full blast if you’re not in astronaut-type physical condition is asking for it. “It” being an ambulance and a blood-pressure cuff, and lots of people suddenly looking at you like you’re some kind of invalid.
You know it’s serious when Roberto Busetto isn’t yelling.
