I waited to tell you the bad news about Giulio Andreotti’s demise because I didn’t want my blog to turn into the obituary column. He entered the better life on May 6, and although he was 94, which means it was far beyond inevitable, I’m sorry he’s gone.
His CV tells you that he was important, among other reasons, because he was: Prime Minister (7 times), Minister of Defense (8 times), Minister of Foreign Affairs (5 times), Minister of Finance, Minister of the Budget, Minister of Industry (two times each), and Minister of the Treasury and Minister of the Interior one time each.
No need to ask what he did in his spare time — he couldn’t have had any. But if he’d ever written a book about his career, hardly anybody would have been left standing.
You need to know the above to have the rudiments of appreciation of what a master he was of the scintillating quip. First, he was Roman, and that gave him a huge headstart in the witticism department. While every region, town, hamlet must have its own type of humor, the Roman type is famously quick and piercingly irreverent.
Second, being a career politician meant that he had endless occasions for practicing his exceptional talent for quippery. Essentially he was Minister of Himself.
So it’s in that spirit that I offer you this glimpse of one of the pillars of 20th-century Italian politics. People who know more about it, him, or them, please don’t enlighten me. I want you to see his best side here. By which I don’t mean his turned back.
One of the many pages devoted to him on May 7, 2013.
From top to bottom, more or less, are the following observations:
Power wears out the people who don’t have it.
The wickedness of good people is extremely dangerous.
I know that I’m just of average height, but I don’t see any giants around me.
In politics there are more Draculas than there are blood donors.
It’s not enough to be right, you’ve got to have somebody who recognizes it.
Apart from the Punic Wars, they attribute everything to me.
Crazy people can be divided into two groups: Those who believe they’re Napoleon, and those who believe they can reorganize the state railway.
Humility is an amazing virtue, but not when it you use it in declaring your income.
You should always tell the truth, but except in the courtroom don’t ever tell the whole truth. It’s inconvenient and often causes pain.
I love Germany so much that I preferred two of them.
Being men of the middle class, the middle road is, for us, the most congenial.
I’m posthumous to myself. (This is the literal translation, but even Lino can’t make me understand what he meant.)
Once upon a time there was a lamp. Then there was a naked boy with a frog. Now there’s a copy of the lamp. I guess all we need to wait for now is a copy of the boy with the frog.
May 24, 2013. Even from afar, the Punta della Dogana is beautiful again.
The important thing is that there is a lamp, and it’s back where it belongs. I’m not sure where the boy with the frog belongs, but it’s probably not at Angkor Wat or the Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak. I doubt it (he? them?) would fit in well at Petra, or the Stone Circles of Senegambia, or the Medina of Fez. Just reminding some people that Venice and its lagoon are also UNESCO World Heritage Sites. There is undoubtedly a place where the boy and his amphibian would belong, but it’s not at the Taj Mahal, or Chartres Cathedral, or here.
I must go down to the blog again, to the lonely blog and the sky…..
More time has passed than I intended between my last post and this, though as usual many of the reasons had to do with putting down slave revolts in the technological departments of my life. (Apologies to anyone offended by the word “slave.”) My computer seized up. The espresso machine has had a nervous breakdown. Transferring my cell phone number from one company to another was an adventure within an adventure. My cloud backup service has gone into a semi-permanent stall. My photos stopped uploading to Flickr. We’re still waiting for the boiler-repair company to come repair the repair of April 16. The kitchen clock died.
But all this is no more preposterous or tiresome than what’s been going on all around the most-beautiful-booby-hatch in the world. The past two weeks have seen the return of many well-worn themes. If they were music, they would be familiar tunes — perhaps transposed into another key, or performed by different instruments, or converted from pieces usually played on a lone kazoo into swelling symphonic creations. But the same tunes, nevertheless. They practically qualify as folk songs.
The ACTV is always prime territory for the absurd.
An annoying number of the turnstiles keep breaking at the docks on the Lido, causing commuters to miss their boats to work. Sebastiano Costalonga, a city councilor who has made squaring away the ACTV part of his mission on earth, has pointed out that there are seven turnstiles at a typical London Underground stop, through which millions of people pass each day, while on the Lido there are 48 turnstiles, through which, on a really big day, perhaps 20,000 people will pass.
The ferryboats connecting the Lido to the rest of the world continue to fall apart and be taken out of service for repairs (one boat has been in the shop for nearly a year. Are they plating it with rhodium?).
The personnel of the ticket booths went on strike for two days, April 30 and May 1, when storm surges of tourists were naturally expected to overwhelm the city, which meant that tickets were sold only by the individual on each vaporetto who ties up the boat at each stop. You can imagine how many he/she managed to sell. Or even tried to sell.
The company is 17 million euros in the red, but the ACTV drivers are the highest-paid in the entire Veneto region. The ACTV is like the Energizer Bunny — it just keeps going.
On April 25, National Liberation Day, the city places laurel wreaths at important civic monuments. Here the wreath got as far as the plaque recalling the “Seven Martyrs,” but whoever was wrangling the wreath didn’t realize it was supposed to be right-side up.
Then there are the Illegal Vendors: Whatever they’re selling, they’re everywhere, and there are more of them every day.
First (and still) were the West Africans, who sell counterfeit designer handbags from bedsheets spread on the pavement. While this squad continues to proliferate, it has been joined by Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan vendors of gimcracks such as fluorescent darts which gleam when flung skyward and balls of gelatinous rubber which flatten when hurled to the ground, then re-form themselves before your eyes.
A sub-division of these ethnic entities has taken over the wandering sale of long-stemmed red roses, which used to be offered mainly from table to table in restaurants, but which are now available all day long in the Piazza San Marco, and environs. Illegal corn for the pigeons: After years of struggle, the city finally convinced the vendors with their little trolleys in the Piazza to switch from grain to gewgaws — this being the only effective way to limit, or even reduce, the plague of feathered rats which had passed the 100,000 mark and was still growing. So now corn is being sold surreptitiously by the handful from the pockets of the red-rose vendors. Still, on April 25, a blitz by the police in the Piazza San Marco netted plenty of swag abandoned by the fleeing vendors, leading off with 1,408 roses. The day before that, the police got hold of 22 kilos (48 pounds) of illegal corn.
But these are temporary events. Stashes of illegal pigeon-corn have been found hidden in the garbage around San Marco. Intermittent reports of these discoveries and confiscations, whether of goods or of people, imply progress, but they would be the intermittent reports of emptying the ocean with a teaspoon. Uncollected fines have reached some three million euros; one illegal rose seller was reported to have laughed and shown some employees of a shop near Rialto his collection of tickets — five so far, one of them for 5,000 euros. “Stupid police,” he said, “I don’t have anything and I’m not paying anything.”
The complaints of exasperated merchants and citizens have finally caused the city to increase surveillance by putting officers on patrol, from police in plainclothes to carabinieri in full battle gear. But only on the weekend! Still, there was plenty to do: Twenty-eight illegal vendors spread across the Bridge of the Scalzi were nabbed with their bags and sunglasses and camera mini-tripods! (I know from personal examination that the bridge is 40 steps on each side, so that comes to one vendor every 3 steps. But somehow it must be hard to see, because citizen outcry was needed in order to focus the city fathers’ eyes on it.)
Sometimes there are violent altercations between vendors, based on subtleties of territory and rights thereto — though the concept of someone claiming the right to something illegal is kind of special. Many are often without papers, so they’re already in tricky territory where the concept of rights is concerned. One recent nabbee, from Senegal, was discovered to already have been sentenced to five months in prison, by the court of Florence.
The city council dusted off a year-old proposal to issue residence permits (permesso di soggiorno) with points, like a driver’s license. It didn’t pass, for various reasons, some of which verged on silly: “What are supposed to do,” asked one councilor — “expel the women caretakers because they get a fine for illegal parking?” But another summed up what everybody has long since recognized: “Even the police can’t manage to do much if there isn’t collaboration from the local politicians. The message which has been sent out is that here there isn’t the kind of determination there might be in other cities because of a misunderstood sense of solidarity.” (Translation: We feel sorry for the poor foreigners.)
Speaking of illegal vendors, the mendicants from Rome who dress up as Roman centurions and pose for pictures near the Colosseum attempted to set themselves up here. Some of you might wonder at the congruence of fake Roman soldiers with fake swords and breastplates in Venice, but the tourist-guide association didn’t need to wonder. It managed to drive them decisively out of the city in a matter of a few days. Instead of police and carabinieri, why don’t we just pay the tourist-guide association something extra to clear out the illegal vendors of everything? Or better yet, send them roses?
As Roberto Gervaso noted in his satirical column in the Gazzettino not long ago, “Our generals manage to lose even the wars they’re not fighting.”
The only antidote I know to all this is to go places and do things which only give pleasure. And there are plenty of them, in spite of all the weirdity. All you have to do is pull the plug on that part of your brain that concerns other human beings. Here are some views of what we’ve done or seen that have made the past few days more than usually pleasant.
Lino isn’t looking for clams, he’s looking for scallops (canestrelli, or Chlamys opercularis), and it was a great morning to do it.And he did surprisingly well. These little critters reached their apotheosis that evening, fried.My activity of choice is often to sit in the boat and look over the side. It’s pretty busy down there, what with crabs and snails and so on. These two were moving right along.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen this creature in the fish market. The label here calls it “pesce sciabola,” or saberfish, but I see that it is known in English as scabbardfish (Lepidopus caudatus). It was brilliantly silver and shiny, just the kind of saber I’d rather not confront.
And despite all the rain in March, the wisteria has come out right on time. Along with the laundry, and the trash.Lilac is here so briefly that I took a mass of pictures. Bonus: Lilac-shadow.
Bessie Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson, 1936, a year before she became the Duchess of Windsor.
This is too good to keep to myself.
A reader in New York occasionally sends me some reminiscences, observations, and corrections, when necessary. We’ve long since abandoned limiting ourselves to the subject of Venice; his life, by now in its eighth decade, is far too interesting to be crammed into the “V” cubbyhole alone.
He recently wrote me this, apropos of nothing whatever:
A letter came from a grand niece of my uncle (by marriage) Morris and was followed by a long call from CA in which I learned that he had won a couple of years at the Ecole des Beaux Arts after leaving the U of PA. He had never mentioned it. He was an architect for the chief of engineers and built hospitals all over the world during WWII, member of the Cosmos Club, the equivalent of the Century in NY and one of the founders of the Arts Club of Washington. My other architect uncle went to E des BA too and wore the little red ribbon (I presume he’s referring to the Legion of Honor) for having instituted a memorial for one of his teachers. The first was a real gentleman. The other once used the first’s name to use the Cosmos and had great airs. I call him my “let them eat cake” uncle.
My uncle came from Lutherville MD and one time was talking to an old colored family retainer who asked, “Mr. Morris, is it true that Miss Wally is going to marry the King of England?”
“It looks that way.”
“Is it true that he has to give up the throne to do it?”
“Yes, Jim, that seems to be so.”
There was a long pause, and Jim said, “I wouldn’t.”
