Too many corners? This street will take you somewhere. It might be the “where” you want to be, or maybe not.
I had an interesting dream last night, set in Venice; nothing particular happened but I did awaken with this thought: It’s not the canals that make Venice so particular (special, different, beautiful, strange, etc.), it’s the corners.
Why is that? Because there are so incredibly many of them, and when you turn one, or two, or more, you either move ahead or you somehow find yourself pretty much back where you started.
That’s my new metaphor for Venice. As far as I can tell, after the enormous difficulties and turmoil caused by two years of Covid, somehow it seems that we’re back where we started. You might think that could be a good thing (“Back to normal!”) except that it’s not (“Back to normal!”). Things keep happening, but almost nothing really changes. Names change occasionally, but the headlines seem to be set on “replay.”
There are now fewer than 50,000 Venetians living in the historic center of Venice. (In 2021, there were 50,434). This is a threshold many people dreaded crossing, but it has been crossed nonetheless. I have no idea what this means in real life, because supermarkets continue to open. Who are their customers?
This place was a furniture and upholstery shop when we moved here. Then it became a bar/cafe/slot machine parlor. Then the “acqua granda” decimated it in 2019 and it has remained this way till now.Then, just a week or so ago, suddenly there was activity.It’s going to be a very large supermarket dedicated to shampoo, detergent, cosmetics, also potato chips and beer. Just what we few who live here were needing? We already have two supermarkets and a shampoo/detergent shop. Stand by for the struggle for survival of the smaller, family-run detergent emporium and this megalodon.This store is already separating itself from the family-run shop several doors down: It will be open continually (no mid-day closing for lunch or a nap or anything like that), and it will be open on Sunday, when the family is at home taking a break like normal people. I am not happy.Here’s a wonderful sight, though: Imagine my delight at seeing a truly useful shop open up. A barber named Mohammed took over the space of the defunct laundromat, victim of the acqua granda. The space sat empty for two years, then suddenly the classic rotating barber-pole appeared. I really hope Mohammed makes it. There must be at least one tourist who’ll need a haircut between spritzes.
When the mayor uses the term “Venice,” he is referring to the general metropolitan entity, the preponderance of which is on the mainland. Everybody knows he really only cares about the mainland: “The future of Venice,” he said openly, “is Mestre.” Take that, Venice-lovers! The future of Milwaukee may well be Sheboygan, but to someone who thinks of the Piazza San Marco when he/she hears “Venice,” Mestre is a bit much. Still, this is how it’s going. Eight of the ten city councilors are from the mainland. The ninth is in Venice itself, the tenth lives on the Lido. And of course the mayor too is from the mainland, where he has business interests. So voices speaking up for the dwindling historic center are faint and few.
Meanwhile, daily life is made up of stores closing, stores opening. Unpredictable transit strikes and all-too-predictable wailing by ACTV, we have no money we have no money. Tourists: We want them, but they’re making us crazy. The sudden drought of Russian tourists has torn a new hole in the city’s financial fabric.
Cruises: Big ships are banished from the Bacino of San Marco. The cruise ships will enter the lagoon at Malamocco, toiling like container ships up to the raggedy docks in the commercial port zone of Marghera.
The MSC “Sinfonia” opened the season by docking at Marghera on April 9, the first of the 200 cruises scheduled for this year. Sound good? Not when you compare it to the 565 cruises that stopped (or started) in Venice in 2019. But those days are gone.
MOSE: There will never be anything new to say about this. Work stopped, problems found, money gone, problems found, money arrives, work starts again, problems found, date of completion always on the horizon.
The thing is that headlines blurt out news that any Venetian already knew years ago. Example: Barnacles. Lino mentioned the inevitability of barnacle encrustation to me back in 1994. It would be impossible to astonish anybody who has kept a boat in the water here. This is as much a fact as that water is wet.
Still, somebody finally noticed the problem. In 2018, an article announced the discovery by an underwater drone that the MOSE barriers were rusting and encrusted with barnacles. Time passes, nothing is done. In 2022, another headline: Barnacles!! Or to be even more precise: Mussels.
The Guardia di Finanza disseminated a brief video showing this little voyage of discovery a few days ago. I can’t estimate how many tons of mollusks have attached themselves to the gates, but I can tell you that their weight is going to have a very serious effect on the gates’ functioning.
Turns out that the gates that have been lying in their assigned position underwater awaiting the call to block the tide have not been receiving the required and agreed-upon maintenance. The money for maintenance was allotted some time back, but it seems to have not been spent on maintenance. If the crud was predictable, so was the fate of the maintenance money.
Years ago, the cost of annual maintenance was forecast to be some 15 million euros. Then estimates of maintenance costs rose to 80 million euros, and now they’re projected to be 200 million euros per year. Where do these numbers come from? Are they breeding in dark corners, like wire hangers? In any case, vast amounts of money can’t ever sit still long enough to be spent on what they’re supposed to be spent on. When you actually need the money, somehow it’s just not there anymore.
There’s no need to read headlines, this has been going on for generations now. The big hold-back-the-tide project began in 1973, when the Special Law for Venice allotted money for a competition for designs (held in 1975). When the first stone was laid in 2003, the end was promised for 2010. We were all so young, so innocent… Then the 2014 deadline came and went, then the middle of 2018, then the beginning of 2019. The “acqua granda” of November 2019 broke several financial logjams, and work picked up with the promise of concluding in 2021. Sorry, I meant 2023. Endless years pass of “We’ll get there! Give us more money!” Lack of funds closed the works for the entire year of 2021. Rome sends millions, then more millions. And yet, somehow there is never enough.
Tourism: They’re baaaaack. Intermittently, and more often on weekends, still more often just during the day. There were a few Carnival crush-fests in the San Marco area, but nothing noteworthy. I suppose it just wouldn’t be Venice without 100,000 or more visitors in a day. And just now, on the cusp of the Easter weekend, we are back under siege again.
This is supposed to be good (even as we see the interminable lines at the vaporetto stops for boats to Murano and Burano). Venice has got to get back in the game, seeing as it’s the only game there is.
Venice isn’t the only Italian city to take a major hit from the pandemic, but I am not seeking comparisons. There were 8,800,000 visits in 2019; 2,500,000 in 2020, and a little more than 3,200,000 in 2021. Between May and August of 2021 (peak summer season) the arrivals were 54 percent fewer than in 2019.
Last January I glimpsed that a return to normal tourist business was imminent when I passed the dry cleaning shop and saw piles of hotel-room drapes.Now vaporettos are back to being jammed with people and luggage. True, this is a holiday weekend, but the crush has become more noticeable over the past two months.Fancy bags from fancy stores show that some of the tourists with money are returning. Too bad the Russians are gone; they’d been increasing over the years to be among the top spenders in the tourist cavalcade (fourth after Japanese, Chinese, and Canadians), spending an average of 145 euros per person per day in 2018. And they loved the many-starred hotels; almost 40 per cent of Russians stayed in the fancy hostelries.Italian tourists are forecast to increase by 35 percent over last year, and foreign tourists will be up 43 percent. If they all went to Dior, how great would that be.Maybe these bottles were prepared for the now-missing Russians? Stunned by a wine that costs 900 euros ($972), I discover that Solaia is produced in the Chianti Classico area and is considered “among the most influential wines in the history of Italian viticulture.” The other two bottles suddenly seem so much more approachable. Yet if there is one thing — or three — that say “tourist,” it has to be these. Have them delivered to my yacht.And speaking of bottles, there are these little containers of unknown substances. Of course there ought to be something on sale for everybody, but the city is promising to clamp down on the shops selling the cheap tchotchkes aimed at the average yobbo. I doubt that this item will make it onto their radar, though. They’re on the lookout for cheap masks and little bobbing battery-run gondolas for your bookshelf.Gondoliers are back at work.So are taxi drivers.Suddenly the now-reopening businesses and hotels are scrambling to find staff. The Bar Torino in Campo San Luca is looking for a woman or man to work the bar — experience required.Waiters!! “We are seeking personnel for the (dining) room. Send your CV via email….or leave it inside! Age between 20 and 30 years old.” Evidently age requirements aren’t forbidden by law; if they were, I don’t suppose the proprietor would be so upfront about how much he prefers people in their 20s.“Lacking chambermaids, war breaks out between hotels.” I say “chambermaid,” though maybe there are men who also clean and set up hotel rooms. But 70 percent of workers associated with tourism are women.Unloading bags of flour at the bread bakery is another sign of the touristic return. People buy bread, sure, but restaurants and bars buy more.
Last year sometime there was a brief quiver of excitement over the resurrected idea of installing turnstiles to control the flow of tourists entering the city at certain points. That idea has been mothballed. I think we don’t want to slow them down. The eternal subject of the selling a ticket to enter Venice has also been put aside. But these ideas will be back. They’re like the swallows going to Capistrano.
One huge drawback to the renting of apartments to tourists is their garbage. Many owners leave instructions about when to leave it out for collection (on our street, the trashmen come by between 8:10 and 8:25 AM). But if for some reason you put it out much earlier, even the night before, this is what greets the dawn. Seagulls can smell your pizza box and coffee grounds and they will rip the plastic bag to shreds.Pigeons are also fans but they don’t get a chance till the seagulls have finished.There are two tourist-rental apartments on our tiny stretch of street. I understand that if you have a flight that leaves at 6:30 AM, you’re going to put it out when you go. Then again, there are people who put it out at 9:00 because they want to sleep late. The trashmen are not amused but they can’t leave it there.
Biennale: Yes, it is opening this year — April 23 to November 27 — and the vibrations are palpable. The small park on the Riva dei Sette Martiri tends to host more light-hearted works. I’ll just call them “works,” because I can’t bring myself to say “art.” I honestly don’t know what they are.
No, THIS is art.
So here we are, caught in the endless cycle of everything. Maybe there will be something new around the next corner (or ten), but I’m not counting on it.
My vision of a perfect world: Nothing fancy, everybody getting along, nobody trying to get anywhere.
A few readers have written to me from time to time telling me that they are not seeing the photographs in whichever post had just come out.
This is distressing, of course; I spend a lot of time working on the text, but just as much time on the images. I never thought I’d reach the point where I’d even hint that without pictures my writing is meaningless, but here we are.
I thought the problem might be caused by the reader perhaps reading the post as an email, without clicking on the post’s title and being mysteriously transported to the realm of the real blog (on what I refer to as my glamor site). But that may not be the reason at all.
I asked my blog tech wizard, and he wrote a very simple reply: “It could be that the email service provider they are using does not allow large images to be received. Some email service providers have odd restrictions.”
If I were to optimize the photograph, the problem might very well be solved. But this is a process that requires several steps and considering how many images I sometimes include, I honestly can’t see myself optimizing them all to resolve a problem affecting so few people.
So I apologize to anyone who can’t see the pictures. If there’s something you can do at your end to resolve it, I’ll be grateful.
To anyone who has ever looked at a bit of crumbling Venice and said, or even thought, “They really ought to fix that,” this is your moment. But if you were to have considered coming here now to see Venice, let me warn you that you’ll be seeing square miles of scaffolding and tarpaulin.
I was fascinated by all this happening so suddenly (or at all), and believe me, at a certain point I stopped taking pictures because there’s no need to publish literally a thousand photos of scaffolding and tarpaulin. But why is it happening now? Like so many questions, the answer is lying at, or not far from, some point involving money because, apart from the cost of the work, there is a phenomenal daily cost merely for the scaffolding. As I understand it, the cost is imposed because the metal towers are occupying public space (think cafe tables inching out into the street), and said occupation comes at a price. Perhaps this is true in the whole world, but because we’re here, I risk invoking my one-size-fits-all explanation: ThisisVenicewheremoneyisking.
For confirmation, I went to Lino, as I always do, and he answered my question with two words: “Bonus casa.” (As I said: Money.) Here is how it works and why everything is happening now, translated by me from a well-informed website. “Extension till December 31, 2021 also for the deduction from personal income tax (Irpef) of 50 percent of the expenses sustained for interventions of building recovery, also known as ‘bonus casa’ or ‘bonus renovation.’ With a maximum limit of 96,000 euros for each unit of real estate.” Fun fact: There is an assortment of additional bonuses for a variety of housing improvements from improving energy efficiency to windows to installation of solar panels to street-facing facades to adding or maintaining “green areas.” There is much more, but you get the idea.
So I’m absolutely correct in supposing that everybody woke up with a start one morning yelling “OMG I’ve got to get started on redoing the entire building today!”
I’m not saying you should bring a hard hat to wear over your woolen watch cap. Just saying that work is booming. Nice, when you think about it. Only slightly less nice when they’re drilling, hammering, sawing, scraping, sanding and yelling next to your bedroom window. And the dust, of course. Now I know why I haven’t dusted the house since spring; I must have sensed that this was coming up. Life is still so far from perfection….
And then there are the beginnings and endings of the work, what you might call pre- and post-encumbrances. Here we go again.Gosh there wasn’t anything going on here. Let’s fix that.You need a place to store all your stuff, so temporary areas are usually set up near the work site.More supplies, on their way to work or to the storage area. In any case, these bags of Portland cement are also out in the street, along with everything else.Over there were bags of cement. Here there are bags of 00 flour, heading into the bakery. I can only hope the same company isn’t making both deliveries.I wonder if there is some supervisor losing his or her mind waiting for these, with no idea where they’ve been left. In any case, if you’re a man from Kosovo and know how to hold a hammer, or know somebody who knows how, your fortune awaits.
At dawn the city may seem to be standing still, but just as the tide is almost certainly in motion even if you can’t see it, so are the stores, shops, and other commercial entities. But while for some enterprises the tide may be rising, for others it may already have gone out. When money is to be made, Venice stops for no one.
The pandemic is slowly retreating here and normal life has taken a few big summer-weekend bounces that give the city the sensation that the old days have returned. On June 2, a national holiday, there were 50,000 tourists in the city (21,000 from the Veneto, 19,000 from other Regions, 10,000 foreigners, half of which were German). However, it’s becoming clear that the old days could have used a lot of improvement.
All those months during lockdown, etc., when so many people hoped that the city could somehow benefit from the forced suspension of so many activities in order to reassess and resolve the problems of the mass tourism monoculture, was time blown away like so many soap bubbles. We’re pretty much right back to where we were in February, 2019.
For example, outdoor tables and chairs were permitted to occupy more space than strictly allowed during the Old Regime in order to accommodate the necessary social distancing; now they might just stay that way, filling up streets and campos, because now we’re used to it (though the owners won’t feel like paying an adjusted tax for occupying more public space). The aforementioned bars and restaurants and other touristic enterprises have been discovering, to their surprise, that manpower is missing. Bluntly, one out of five former employees isn’t coming back. A year and a half has passed, and waiters and chambermaids and many other toilers in the touristic fields have found other jobs. So let’s nab all the foreign workers we can for temporary (low-paid) summer work, even though they haven’t been vaccinated.
As for daily life, naturally I’m glad that people are working again, but this means we’re picking back up with motondoso and sometimes overcrowded vaporettos and cloddish tourists and pickpockets and seagulls ripping the food out of people’s hands in the Piazza San Marco and so forth, with more of the same coming up, no doubt, as restrictions continue to ease. The great forerunner is the Biennale of Architecture; it opened on May 22 and will run until November 21, B.T.U. (Barring The Unforeseen, not British thermal units.) The unforeseen has become a major player now in any undertaking, psychologically if not logistically.
So now that Venice Inc. is trying to get back underway, I paraphrase the famous remark of American President Calvin Coolidge and say that obviously the business of Venice is business. Or, as I put it, thisisvenicewheremoneyisking. And now that we can talk about business in the present tense again, I see the economic landscape, as illustrated by the shops, as divided into two basic categories. And both show the ways in which the Venetian economy has changed over the past two generations or so.
Category 1: Shops that have changed over the years. Category 2: Shops that have closed forever.
Category 1: Walking around the city, I can add my own version of what I call the Venetian litany: “I remember when that was…..”. When Lino would walk along Calle Larga San Barnaba and tell me, door by door, who used to be there, the coal seller or the fish fryer, it seemed exotic, as if change was so long ago. But now I too have seen it as it is happening.
It used to be, some 25 years ago, that when useful shops succumbed they were most often replaced by ones selling “Murano glass” or Carnival masks. Lately, though, when you see yet another useful shop disappear you can assume it will be replaced — well, certainly by supermarkets, they’re everywhere now — by bars/cafes/restaurants, or by hotels. Evidently people come to Venice to eat and sleep, as if it were a convalescent hospital.
Examples are everywhere. The best nursing home in the city is being converted to a hotel (and the worst nursing home appears to be on the same trajectory).
This was the “Ca’ di Dio” nursing home, not only a beautiful facility but a fantastic location on the Riva degli Schiavoni. Too bad those are the very aspects that exert a fatal fascination on hotel developers. It’s been several long and laggy years since the old people were evicted, and the restoration work has only recently picked up again with some seriousness. So yes, another hotel is on the way. There’s always room for one more.
When the skeletons of the two former gas holders near San Francesco de la Vigna were up for renovation not too long ago, scores of families formed a committee to implore the city to convert them to an urgently needed multi-purpose sports center for the students of the nearby high schools. For a while it seemed as if the city had yet to decide, and then the surprise. Renovation has continued, but the citizens are out of luck because this treasure of industrial archaeology is going to be a hotel. Those are only two examples of how a facility useful to Venetians is removed to make room for something that makes money.
In 1969 it seemed perfectly fine that two gas holders had been built next to a 16th-century church designed by Jacopo Sansovino with a facade by Andrea Palladio. I can imagine that the Franciscan monks in their cloisters added the gas works to their daily prayers. (bonificagasometri.com)Work began in January to stabilize the site. Much concrete was seen passing from barges to land.Here is the architect’s rendering of the glorious new incarnation of the old structures. The kids will just have to keep on making do with whatever sports areas have been cobbled together for them around the city because we absolutely need another hotel. I make the futile observation that there are laws that prohibit any construction or alteration that is not in tune with its surroundings. To be fair, these weren’t in tune with their surroundings 50 years ago, either. (Il Gazzettino)
So much for hotels. Let there be restaurants!
This used to be a great family shoe store on via Garibaldi.
I don’t want to bore you to oblivion, but here’s a quick review of the transformation of via Garibaldi, still proudly promoted (not by us) as one of the few places where you can still find real Venetians. Yet many shops that were used every day by the aforementioned Venetians have gradually been removed, one by one. The excellent clothing store has undergone really ambitious renovation to become a restaurant (work appears to be stalled, but there are cartons of wine on the floor); the small deli/supermarket where Claudio reigned behind the case of cheese and butter is now a restaurant; a pork butcher shop dedicated to salame and other such products is a restaurant; the furniture and upholstery store became a bar and gaming salon (closed since the acqua alta of November 11, 2019); the fresh pasta and exotic ingredients shop is now Nevodi Pizzalab for takeaway pizza; a fruit and vegetable stand is now a restaurant.
On the non-comestible side, other stores have also been through various reincarnations that moved successively farther away from ordinary life. The bank became a hardware store (could have been useful except that somehow whatever you needed on Friday was expected to be delivered next Wednesday. This went on for at least two years until it folded) and now it’s a real estate agency. We miss the bank.
The name “Salumeria” (salame and similar pork products) is so wonderfully generic, like shops that still have “Latteria” (milk) carved on their lintels from long ago. Now it’s a bar/cafe’.Another salumeria just down the street from the one above is currently selling cheap clothing. The meat display case is still inside, loaded now with T-shirts and sweaters and shoes. At least these are everyday items, nothing fancy or touristic.This was a scene that stabbed my heart with an icicle. In late December 2019 the dry-goods store had to move out because the landlord raised the rent. This is the classic scenario. Stores keep closing, not because they have no customers, but because the landlord wakes up and thinks he or she would like to have more money. Up goes the rent, out go the tenants, and eight out of ten times (seems like) what comes in is a restaurant or bar. It’s obvious that you can’t sell enough pajamas and tablecloths to make thousands of euros a month more for rent.The shop went back quite a way and contained so many things you need if you lead a normal life: Pajamas. underwear, ribbon, zippers, socks, dishtowels, ordinary towels, sheets, bandanas… Naturally I expected to see a restaurant or bar take its place, because God knows we need more of those. But a year and a half later the shop is still closed, so whatever master plan the owner had devised that required throwing out the socks and underwear isn’t going quite as he or she expected, and meanwhile that’s a year and a half of rent that he/she didn’t receive. Sometimes you just roll snake eyes.Another stab was delivered to my heart when I discovered that the little deli by the church of San Martino had closed in October. In Venetian, the person owning this sort of all-purpose little grocery (prosciutto, cheese, bread, wine, oil, etc.) is called a “biavarol” (bee-yah-vah-ROL). The name comes from “biade” (bee-YAH-deh), meaning fodder. Centuries ago that was where you bought your horse feed because yes, there were horses in Venice; then the products increased to grain and seeds, and gradually other provisions. Like many such small shops, it was often run by a family — in this case, since 1985, although the shop itself was already active in 1907. But as is also often the case, the children took other paths, the parents retired, and so here we are. There was a biavarol, Lino recalls, at the Ponte Trevisan by San Trovaso, and the word “BIADE” was visible above the door until not many years ago. Then, when the biavarol retired, the new owners sold trendy clothes and the word “biade” disappeared. “That’s really a shame,” Lino says. “It was a wonderful relic.”“Seeking a biavarol to continue a century-long story.” As this article recounts, everybody in the neighborhood frequented the shop — there isn’t anything like it nearby — but after 35 years at work Elisabetta and Francesco wanted to retire and spend time with the grandchildren. They’re ready to rent it, though, to anyone who will pick up where they left off. No trendy clothes, thanks.
Actually, there are plenty of places that change that don’t turn into restaurants.
This used to be a huge store selling glass. Now it’s a huge store selling pet supplies. Supply follows demand, as Adam Smith probably said. This is one case where the dog- and cat-mad locals got the benefit of a change, as nobody here needs “Murano glass.”Butcher shops just can’t seem to keep going. The kids want to do something else in life and anyway, with the population shrinking by the month, jewelry clearly has a better chance at survival than pork chops. I’m glad the new people left that marvelous relief carving of the beef.Further along the street near the Rialto Market is yet another defunct butcher shop. Fun fact: Venice was the home of one of Europe’s largest slaughterhouses in the mid-1800’s, just after Padova, Vienna and Rome. If you think the streets are unpleasant when jammed with people, try to imagine the calle de la Beccaria near San Giobbe when it was time to drive the cows, horses, sheep, and pigs to their doom. In the summer. Not made up.I don’t know what this shop originally sold, but at least it’s not a restaurant. As you see, some bright sparks have made it into a social-message emporium. Half-hidden by the condensation is a large tote bag proclaiming that “Plants are better than people.” This is original, if a bit antisocial, but I assume they’re thinking of popcorn and peonies and not kudzu, Venus flytraps, killer algae, purple loosestrife, water hyacinth, castor beans, deadly nightshade, wolfsbane, poison hemlock, rosary pea, or your neighborhood oleander tree.
Apartments for rent: Of course this is a business too, and by now a very big one. The pandemic across Europe pretty much obliterated last year’s crop of tourists, but they are coming back. Collectively calumniated in the popular mind as “Airbnb,” apartments for tourists are offered by scores of other companies.
The continuing depopulation of Venice has left ever-more apartments empty, so of course they’ve become another commodity. Venice is far from unique in this, as we all know, but the sheer quantity has distorted (or is the result of the distortion) of Venetian life. Now that the apartments are being registered and regulated, virtually all of Venice’s some 3,000 streets (calle, calesela, ruga, salizada, ramo, etc.) has at least one door with an official tag indicating a touristic apartment within. We knew there were lots, but now that we can see them it’s a bit unnerving. Still, all those people who rail against Airbnb as the destroyer of Venetian life need to recognize that nobody has forced the apartment owner to do this, and otherwise the apartment would most likely sit empty, which isn’t a positive thing at all.
“Touristic location” and license number.
I could add a thousand more of these images, but you get the idea.
So much for Category 1, shops (and apartments) changing. Before I go to Category 2 (shops disappearing), here are some thoughts on the economics of bread.
Every morning at 6:30 a ponderous barge briskly backs up along the rio de Sant’Ana, with huge roaring, till it reaches an open space to park. One of the two men aboard jumps ashore, loads a few plastic boxes containing variously shaped bread onto his handtruck, and rolls it rapidly toward the Coop supermarket on via Garibaldi.
Exactly five minutes later he has returned with the empty boxes and the barge is roaring its way forward (there is no space to turn around) out of the canal.
This phenomenon interests me because the barge is enormous, yet by the time it gets to us it is carrying a load that would qualify as almost nothing. Seems like a heck of a boat to use for that small a cargo, but let’s say that this is the last stop, and that the run started at 4:00 AM with ten stops and eight tons of bread. That’s not exactly my point. It seems like a huge expenditure for a small return, but clearly the formula is working fine.
My point, however clumsily expressed, is that this is a proverbial coal-to-Newcastle situation. Within the area of about two city blocks, there are three full-time bakeries turning out bread every morning as the handtruck from who knows where rolls by. So in my primitive lizard brain, anybody who’s in favor of keeping local businesses alive ought to consider the possibility of the local bakeries supplying the supermarket, though I realize that’s slightly nuts because people could just go buy the bread straight from the baker.
So why do people buy bread at the Coop when they could buy it up the street at Crosara? Because it’s cheaper, of course. But it isn’t as good. So at the intersection of price, quality and convenience (bakeries close in the middle of the day), we see the bread on the truck at dawn a mere half hour before the first bakery opens.
Hence the eternal decision is ever-present on via Garibaldi: Save 5 cents per kilo on my daily bread even though it tastes like styrofoam, or spend the 5 cents more on something divine just out of the oven. Venice will be making money somehow in any case, because that’s the way it is.
Speaking of little shops, we come to Category 2, the most poignant witness to how Venice has changed: Shops that have closed forever. In your wanderings around the city you may have seen, but not observed, them. They are everywhere, mute witnesses to crafts and businesses and livelihoods and families that made Venice a place where life was vivid and intimate and dense.
Campo Ruga was bound together by shops; almost all the doors at street level led to some sort of business. A friend of mine who was born here could tell me, door by door, what used to be there. “The milk shop…the shoe repair…the fish seller…” Now they are apartments, or storerooms, or small offices, or nothing.This small corner shop at #128 brings new meaning to the word “closed.”
Adjacent streets were one shop after another, on both sides of the street, as you see.
One of the best hardware stores in the city, in my opinion. Gone.Campo Do Pozzi is a monument to the way almost every campo was when Lino was a boy. Literally every door and window around the campo belonged to a shop of some sort. This is the north side.Campo Do Pozzi looking east. Gaze at this and populate it with everybody who lived here and did the shopping here every day, throw 20 or 30 kids outside to play, and you might get a faint sense of how, as the saying goes, “Stavamo meglio quando stavamo peggio” (We were better off when we were worse off).South. This was a butcher shop. The street on the right, Calle del Forno, was obviously the location of a bakery.West side.
Whatever this shop was, it closed before the last Ice Age.
Take your pick, you’ve got a whole street of defunct shops. These are long since deceased, but the lockdown of March-June 2020 and the few tourists who came during the summer forced many businesses to close.“Do you have a shop?? You have to die!!” So begins this cri de coeur from one merchant, reminding us of the crushing expenses even your little enterprise has to face. “Income: 500 euros per day, 120,000 euros per year. Annual expenses: IVA on sales (value-added tax, since 1968) 20,000; buying stock 60,000; rent 12,000; INPS-INAIL (Social Security) 4,000; accountant 1,500; electricity 2,000; store sign and cash register 2,000; trash collection 1,200; telephone 500; IRAP Regional impost for productive activity and local taxes 2,000; 5% perishability of merchandise 3,000. Total expenses 108,200. Gross income 11,800. IRPEF income tax 4,000. Annual net profit 7,800. Work 12 hours per day for six days of the week to earn, if things go well, 650 euros a month. And you hope you don’t get sick.”
So whenever you see a dead store, remember that it, and all the others, kept Venice alive until basically yesterday. Lino says it repeatedly: “Every time you go over a bridge you’re going from one island to another, and every island had everything it needed, right there.”This dry-goods store near Sant’ Aponal was the only place in Venice where I could find the socks that Lino likes. It was obviously a neighborhood fixture, but it couldn’t last forever. I don’t know which factors determined their decision (rent? grandchildren?). At least the owners left a farewell note that might have applied just as well to every closed shop in Venice, if the owners had the heart to write anything. I translate: “The shop’s voyage has now reached its end. Here, at the end of the line, we want first of all to thank our clients who believed in us, who appreciated the work and the products, who have chosen at the shop items for special days of their lives, but also for the daily routine which has offered us friendships, esteem, gave us smiles and satisfaction, company, laughs, the grapevine, gossip, coffee, words of comfort and compliments. Have a good life and smiles and joy always to all of you! Angela, Raffaella, and Flavia.”
