I’ll never know what happened, but my first reaction was to feel sad for whoever dismembered the rose and scattered its bits to the wind, to the gravel, to the pigeons. To feel sad for the reason why it happened. To feel sad for how they’re feeling now. To feel sad for the rose, too, while I’m at it.
But because I really, really hate feeling sad, especially that early in the morning, when the sun is shining, etc., I let my brain wander around seeking other possible scenarios to account for what had happened that might make me feel better.
Maybe this is an original way for two people to pledge undying, eternal, infinite love. Buy a rose and decapitate it.
Maybe she said, “If I have to choose between having a rose and having you, this is how much I need the rose,” and destroyed it and flung it away. Avaunt!
Or maybe he pulled off the petals one by one and let each float down on her head, saying “I love you” in a different language as each one touched her hair.
Or maybe she hit him with the rose till it fell apart. Maybe they laughed. Maybe they didn’t.
Maybe he said, “If you ever die, I will rip away every remnant of your beauty and sacrifice it to the sun.” (He’d have to have been moderately drunk if he got that far.) (However, I am not.)
I am not going to say that the petals were the color of blood, because that’s just too obvious and trite. But they came darn close.
I’ll tell you what: I’m going to stop all this, and I’m going to stop imagining writing a poem, or a short story, or a one-act play, or anything else.
I’ll leave the subject — and the carcass of the hapless scion of the family Rosaceae — with two thoughts, either one of which makes me feel strangely better.
One — maybe it’s just some work of art from the Biennale, a fragment of improvised performance art.
Two — this observation from an unidentified person:
People say hate is a strong word; well so is love, but people throw it around like it’s nothing.
Or maybe there’s just something about this part of the neighborhood that impels people to strew bits of red vegetable matter.
The sun is shining but the sky is dark. I know it happens everywhere but here it has a sort of metaphoric vibe.
People sometimes ask me — or ask themselves, standing next to me — why the government of Venice doesn’t do one thing or the other to resolve the city’s problems, which are right out there for everybody to see. It seems impossible that nobody has come up with any ideas for what to do to make it cleaner, safer, more efficient (well, that might be a reach) — or just generally spiffed up and functioning. How can it be that no long-term solution is found for something — anything?
If we were to take the proverbial legal tablet and write the proverbial two comparative lists, one would be titled “Problems” (it would be a very long list), and the other “Solutions” (which would also be long). But there are almost no points at which they recognize each other and embrace, like twins separated at birth.
But guess what I just found out? People were raising red flags, launching the lifeboats, pulling out handfuls of hair in 1970 about the very same problems everyone complains about today. That’s 43 years of standing in one place. If I were a city, I’d be tired by now.
This would be a characteristic glimpse of Venice — not so much due to the water, but the history of the house on the right. The windows have changed several times — being opened, being bricked up, being put wherever there’s a free spot. Lots of changes, none of which essentially changes anything. Yes, I’m definitely on a symbolism streak today. Bonus: a glimpse of the future, which isn’t pretty: The missing block of stone beneath the lowest window, which has left the stone above it just hanging in empty space, waiting to fall down. You can see it, you can understand it, you can even know what to do about it. Except that you don’t.
As I have long suspected, it’s not ideas that are missing here. (I mean, constructive, forward-looking, beneficial-to-everybody ideas). It’s execution.
Tides of ideas flow through Venice from all sides, but like the lagoon tide, they go out again. Most of them. To return again. Most of them. Some of them begin to be realized, then they stop. Then they start again. You get the idea. (Sorry.)
Here are some of the most telling bits from a big article in the Gazzettino last Sunday, written by Pier Alvise Zorzi. It might be useful to know that the Zorzi family is documented to have been in Venice since 964 A.D. That doesn’t mean he knows more than anyone else, I’m just saying he’s not the latest person to see the fireworks of the Redentore and decide to stay here forever.
Mr. Zorzi reports that back in April, 1970, veteran journalist Indro Montanelli dedicated virtually the entire month to articles about Venice and its problems — its particularity, its fragility, the housing depression, the political bungling, and so on.
“THE ILLS OF VENICE? THE SAME WERE REPORTED BY INDRO 43 YEARS AGO. From depopulation to the risk of the touristic monoculture, from the sublagunare project to the problems of housing.”
“I have in hand a page from the Corriere della Sera (April 23, 1970) with the headline: ‘The Youth Front for Venice,’ with the subtitle “On the lagoon one breathes the air of the Titanic — the discouragement which by now pervades the Venetians is the main danger to face – to break this passivity a movement of young people has arisen without any political label ready to support at the next elections anybody who defends Venice.”
Under some emblematic photographs are these succinct quotes from 1970, which read like telegraph messages from the front lines. It’s deja vu again, and again, and again.
“Tourism: The city can’t live only on hotels and restaurants.”
“Housing: Too many uninhabited palaces and the cost of rent is through the roof (as they say here, “to the stars”).”
“Dignity: Enough of sterile complaints: each person needs to get involved.”
He continues: “A young person who was interviewed complained of the progressive abandonment of the city…the problem of housing, which is not only decrepit but at much higher rents than on the mainland…And the culminating point, ‘We don’t intend to raise tourism to the level of a monoculture. A city like Venice can’t live only on hotels, trattorias, tips. It will become degraded.'”
And the solutions these young people suggest are also, by now, hoary and draped with cobwebs: More artisans, for example, or linking highly specialized institutions to the world of production and cultural foundations in Europe and America.
The Front eventually fell apart, but the old problems are still here, and have been joined by some new ones: “The ‘hole’ of the Lido (endless construction projects that are badly conceived, worse realized, mercilessly expensive); the ghost of corruption on the MOSE project (more about this in another post), the mega-billboards which continue in spite of new ministerial regulations.”
But wait — I see repairs going on! A few years ago the bridge over the rio dei Mendicanti was in clear and imminent danger (imminent being the only kind of danger that gets attention) because motondoso was, as you see, breaking the link between the steps and the balustrade. This is not an unusual sight — you can find similar large fissures between fondamente and the walls of houses as the walkway begins to break off and slide toward the water. But it is nice to see it being fixed. Until you’ve been here long enough to realize that without fixing the cause, the same problem is inevitably going to come back again, and again, and again, and again. Is that enough “again”s to make my point?
Zorzi acknowledges a few positive signs lately, small and tentative though they may be. But the essential character of the situation is not only unchanged, but maybe even unchangeable. “The problem,” he says, and so do lots of people here, “is that everyone who is able to make the decisions is so tied up in the webs of common interests, either political or economic (but aren’t they the same?) that they move only with extreme, sticky slowness.
“The risk? That 40 years from now we’ll still be right there, at the same spot. I don’t want my grandchildren still to be reading, for example, about the Calatrava bridge, that economic abyss … or the suspected speculation on the renovation of the Manin barracks. Or the hospital. Or the eternal MOSE. Or all the usual things which the national newspapers don’t bother with anymore because everybody’s fed up with Venice’s constant whining.
“I want Venice to have the dignity to save herself on her own, thanks to the citizens which consider her not as something to exploit, but something to invest in. I want the Venetians to denounce the little local mafias, instead of trying to join them in order to gain something for themselves. I want the multinationals who buy the palaces to invest in the city and not merely in their own image. I want that each person, even in their own little way, should do something to safeguard our special character. If I were to live for a hundred years, I’d like to read something new about Venice.”
You know what’s too bad about this cri de coeur? I’ve heard it before.
Which degradation is more disturbing? The kind shown here? (Anyone who considers the condition of this once-beautiful wrought iron to be charming can skip to the next question)…….Or this? Mass tourism creates blowing trash and cattle-car transport and other unattractive things which could be considered degradation. But you don’t need a mass of tourists to feel depressed. You can manage with just two, if they’re like this pair, relaxing in front of the church of San Zaccaria.So I look for things that nobody can spoil. Like the sky.Or real human contact, of which there is still a heartening amount.
As you see. People lurking in crannies as the avalanche of uncontrolled tourism and uncontrolled everything surges over the city yet another day.I didn’t get close enough to listen in, but these Venetians give several signs that they’re talking about something that’s either gone wrong, is going wrong, or will be going wrong. (Perhaps it’s about work, or the mother-in-law, or the car. But eventually it will almost certainly be about Venice.) If I had ten cents for every time I’ve heard a Venetian say “Poor Venice,” I’d be living in Bora Bora by now. The elderly gentleman, on the other hand, is saving his energy by merely reading about the day’s problems in the newspaper.This is a view of what I think we need. I don’t mean the doge (especially not this one, Francesco Foscari, who had enough calamities of his own). I mean the lion. I want this lion to come back and take the situation in hand, in tooth, in claw. He looks like all he needs is a signal. First thing he’ll do is throw the book at everybody.
I appreciate that Venice (well, San Giorgio, in this case) is seductive and irresistible and beautiful and everything. But it wouldn’t have been less beautiful the next day. The city has been here for 1,500 years — presumably it can wait for a family to have dinner and sleep.
After I began to think about it more clearly (that is to say, after I thought about it in the mountains, where we just went for four days, breathing air that was cool and dry enough to resuscitate my mental processes), I realized that I made a small miscalculation in the payday for the police.
I’m referring to the extra paydays they gave themselves by forging permits and whatever else they were doing to help eager immigrants make it through the bureaucracy.
Yes, each of the accused maintainers of public order did indeed receive 300 euros for finagling the permit, which seemed to my super-saturated brain to be pitifully small.
But now I realize what sharp readers have long since understood: It was 300 euros multiplied by God knows how many times they orbited the cash register each day. Each week. Each month.
Before long, it won’t be only God who knows what the total came to. I presume a phalanx of lawyers and judges is already pounding its calculators.
Not me. I don’t care anymore. I’m on to other things. I’m more interested now in the German couple who drove their camper 1,026 km/637 miles from Dresden to Cavallino-Treporti the other day. Even though the trip probably took them ten hours, and most likely more, when they got there the first thing they wanted to do was to get on the motonave and go to Venice. How romantic, how beautiful. And how inconvenient that their ten-year-old daughter dug in her heels at yet another trek before the day could finally be over.
Nothing daunted, her parents locked her inside the camper. Then they went off on their own, feeling fine about her being fine, except she wasn’t.
She got out of the camper, couldn’t get back in, became distraught, and was collected by a sympathetic passerby who took her to everyone’s favorite caretakers, the Carabinieri. Who were waiting for her parents at midnight when they got off the boat from Venice. To present them with the formal accusation of abandonment of a minor.
Mann kann nicht alles unter einen Hut bringen, as they say in the Vaterland. You can’t put everything under one hat. Neither can you have everything you want, including a child-free jaunt to Venice whenever you feel like it, no matter where you might be inclined to put it.
In honor of the brief but glorious interlude of the blossoming of the lime trees (or linden, or tilia, or whatever you call them) — no visible blossoms, and in fact, no visible trees, but only soft, luxurious waves of their delicate perfume from somewhere nearby — I offer a view of the recent spring, as told by flowers. Summer will be here in two days, and many of the flowers are already moving on. But each one of them was part of a spring which was chilly, late, and cranky, and often very lovely.
The pittosporum along the fondamenta by the Biennale is one of the first flowers to appear each year. It hangs on the longest, aging gracefully, concentrating its perfume to an almost nauseating degree.Roses in the Giardini, which seem to have opened all at once.More roses.And yet more roses. These seem to tend more toward the dog rose, which I like.No war of the roses here; the red counterpart was planted virtually in the lap of the white roses.Then suddenly there are poppies everywhere.With tamarisk blooming to keep them company.They make such a lovely couple.There are homespun patches of garden around the neighborhood also. This is a sage plant in the process not only of flowering, but taking over the world.A modest lemon tree.Grapes in their earliest stage. Not a flower, of course, but I’ll take signs of life in any form that’s going.Oleanders aren’t among my top ten, but this edition is an exception. It’s partly the fact that it has left shrubdom behind to become a tree, and partly that the tree has such a beautiful shape.Though the blooms aren’t bad, I must admit.The magnolias are coming out all over. Lovely as the flower may be, I have recently become more enchanted by the buds and the leaves, if anyone cares to know.The famous violet artichoke of Sant’ Erasmo is a first-rate flower.And back to roses again, which have found their niche in a closed-off doorway.
