We’re sitting here  holding a  sort of tense little domestic vigil awaiting the end of the world, which is predicted to reach Venice some time tonight.  

Briefly, a huge weather system is moving across Italy and will be bringing high winds, torrential rain, and acqua alta, or high water, sometime tonight.   I say “sometime” because Things Might Change (at least slightly — maybe the wind won’t settle into the southeast after all, for example) but we’re going to be getting wet.   Just how wet is the question that is keeping the lights burning in our little hovel.

The tide is going to turn and begin to rise about 3:00 AM.   Which means we can expect to hear the municipal high-water warning  sirens begin to wail not very long after that.  

The tide forecast is: Maximum at 9:30 PM tonight  at 75 cm [29 inches above mean sea level] ; minimum at 2:25 AM at 45 cm [17 inches]; maximum at 8:35 AM at 130 cm [51 inches]; minimum at 3:40  PM at 20 cm [7 inches].    

My only hope and prayer at this point is that the tide will only reach the three-tone level, because that means we’re still dry.   We discovered last December 1 that when we hear four tones, we’re basically doomed.  

We had water in our very own domicile; what was unnerving wasn’t so much its height (I guess it never exceeded an inch on the floor) as its inexorability.   I can’t recall a sensation to compare it to: The realization that you can’t do one single thing to stop it.   I suppose going into labor might be something similar.

I can tell you that the garbagemen are working an extra shift right now, setting up the temporary walkways in the parts of the city which will certainly be submerged to some extent, especially around the Piazza San Marco, the lowest point in the city.

There is also absolutely no doubt  that Paolo Canestrelli and his band of hardy forecasters are working the lobster shift at the Tide Center, refining their predictions probably minute by minute.   What they really, really hate is to turn out to have gotten the numbers wrong.   People may snicker at them when the tide doesn’t rise as high as they thought it would, but people rage and snarl and shriek when they estimated too low.   Not a job I’d be at all interested in having.

For the record, a normal tide (measured in height above mean sea level) is between -50 cm and +79 cm   [minus 19 – plus 31 inches.]     One siren tone.

Code Yellow (“sustained tide”) is between +80 and +109 cm   [31 – 42 inches.]   Two tones.

Code Orange (“very sustained tide”) is between 110 cm and  139 cm   [43 – 54 inches.]   Three tones.

Code Red (“exceptional high tide”) is over 140 cm  [55 inches.]

In case anyone has heard about the MOSE floodgate project (perhaps to be operational in 2012), intended to block high tide from reaching the city,  I want to point out that it is intended to be used only in the case of Code Red.   Which means that for 3/4 of the high-tide events, we’re still going to be pulling on our wellies.  

Another point: The numbers don’t really tell you much because Venice is not uniformly level.   So a number in one place isn’t going to signify the same experience in another — sometimes even just 50 yards down the street.

More tomorrow, at some point.   Going back to doing laps around the rosary.

This is just one of my random musings; they usually come when I’m doing hard labor, of which there is plenty every day.

It’s the old idea of imagining what certain historical personages would do or say if they found themselves thrown together at, say, some cocktail party in a trendy loft in the meatpacking district.    The kind of gathering where you realize you know absolutely no one but the host, who has long since disappeared in the scrum.

So I was washing the dishes when suddenly Copernicus came into my mind.   He seemed lonely.   I cast around for somebody  who  could keep him company till at least the next tray of canapes came past, and I thought, Baby June.   Already this party is looking up.

So I needed more.    George Burns is staring out the  window — odd, I know, even I have trouble picturing him standing still — so I sent him Marie Curie.   There.   He’ll make her smile, which I think she probably hasn’t done since she fainted from hunger in her freezing little garret as a student in Paris.   And she’ll give  him  a leg up on something really important about the subatomic  world, which you have to admit is a subject that has always been lacking in his shows.  

So we  throw out a batch of models and a few publicists and screenwriters and street artists to make space for some more happy couples.   I think Nikola Tesla and Edith Wharton would be smokin’.     I know he would be pretty far out along the edge of the envelope for her, the edge of the flap that cuts your tongue,  but I believe that she could talk with anybody.   That’s what real sophistication and real manners means and real intelligence means.   I have no doubt that by the end of the evening he’d be thinking how smart she was and a little less about his own scintillating brain.

Then I got to imagining Enrico Dandolo and Mary Anderson (you know, the woman who invented the windshield wiper).   He was one of the most pragmatic people ever born, and I think   he’d have liked her.   Or at least understood her.   I’m serious.   Because I don’t think many people understood him, either.  

Joan of Arc and George Clooney.

Ernest Hemingway and Marian Anderson.

Captain James Cook and Wilma Rudolph.  

Margaret Sanger and Hereward the Wake.

Vitale Bramani and St. Hilda of Whitby.

None of these really working for you?   Okay, how about this:

Martha Stewart and Stalin.    

Back to work.

When you walk out of the train station in Venice, the Grand Canal is the first thing you see.   Or ought to see.   I remember that day 25 years ago; it was a bolt from the blue from which I have never recovered.  

But the Grand Canal hasn’t been the first   thing you see for quite a while now.   Your eye goes straight to the imposing baroque church on the other side of the water, and you’ll be staring at it not because it’s a church, or baroque, or  imposing.   It will be because of the imposing not-even-close-to-baroque billboard covering the facade.   I won’t describe it, I’ll just show it to you:

The idea of offering a sponsor a public space to promote its product in exchange for the money needed for restoration of art and architecture has become the greatest thing to hit Venice since the invention of the coffeehouse.   And it is absolutely true that the billboard preceding this one was much worse, as the lady promoting a line of handbags was even less clad.   This is the kind of hair-splitting you find yourself indulging in here, but  “It could always be worse” doesn’t get it done in a city that is an entire work of art.

Since the city never has any money to do anything it doesn’t feel like doing  (though there are weekly miracles in which funds appear for all sorts of unexpectedly necessary things, like installing turnstiles on the vaporetto docks), for some time now it has been offering vast spaces for private cash on monuments.    I am not the only person who finds this ad objectionable (nor am I the only person who is wondering why this church has been condemned to Restoration Purgatory; it’s been under scaffolding since the first time I saw it, in 1985).   Plenty of people have objected.  

I also find it objectionable that half of the Doge’s Palace is covered with publicity for Chopard (it started last September, with ads for Lancia),  and most of the Marciana Library is concealed by silliness by Swatch.  By the way, there is a national law which requires that the scaffolding covering  a public monument  under restoration must show a perfect replica of the concealed facade.    A mere detail, obviously.   But I’m getting ahead of myself.

And  I mustn’t let myself stop now to talk about how the  city had stamped all the waivers needed to allow a Maltese business to put five mothers-of-all-Jumbotrons in the Piazza San Marco, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in exchange for millions of euros to restore the buildings they would be defacing.    This plan  seems to have been halted, at least for now.   One can never be sure if these shenanigans are really dead, or just in hibernation.

Don’t imagine that there are no rules for the safeguarding of Venice’s monuments.   There are metric tons of them.   But here is how the Doge’s Palace became, overnight, the most beautiful billboard in the world:  

The palace needed restoration; among other things, bits of marble were falling off it and barely missing passing tourists.   The work would cost 2 million euros, which the city doesn’t have.   So the Dottor Group,  a massive company specializing in architectural and historic restoration, got the job and put up the money, and so they get to rent  out the billboard space of the gods.   Then they installed the scaffolding (of course there are also laws limiting the square-footage allowed for publicity on public monuments, which these exceed) by driving iron hooks  between the 500-year-old blocks of Istrian stone, hooks which will be there for at least three years.

Suddenly the legs-on-the-church don’t look quite so bad?   That’s how you begin to lose your bearings here.   But never mind your taste in legs, or churches.   There are so many other  facets to the plight of San Simeon Piccolo that I can’t organize them for you; I’ll just give them as they come to me.  

• Nobody knows how much money is needed for the restoration
• Nobody can say how much money has been found so far for the restoration
• Nobody knows how many hours a day that SACAIM, the restoration company, is working at the site,  or whether the contract is being honored
• SACAIM won’t make any statement on whether or not the work has been stopped because it hasn’t been paid all the money it’s due  
• Nobody knows what criteria are involved in deciding what  is considered acceptable publicity
• The Curia (the church administration) has stated many times that seeking pelf through publicity is “squalid” (there goes most of Western civilization).   But this point is especially tricky because church buildings  aren’t technically the responsibility of the Church in Italy anymore, but are wards of the state and depend on federal money which is allocated by an assortment of Superintendencies (for architecture, archaeology, “cultural goods,” and so on).
• The Municipal Police (as with the Superintendencies, there is a variety of forces of public order, with varying responsibilities) says that it has done its job as far as paperwork is concerned,  the array of  official  permissions required for work on public buildings, or on public spaces.   So technically it has no authority to remove the poster.

The Superintendency of Architectonic Treasures has already stated (as with the handbag-lady poster)  that the publicity has to come down.   The Curia is against it, but the Superintendency says that the Curia has the power of reviewing all publicity before it goes up.   But wait — in the controversy of the Jumbotrons, the Superintendent herself, Renata Codello, stated that every piece of publicity put up during restoration work is regularly approved or rejected by the Superintendency.   So who gave the permission for this poster to be put up in the first place?   Nobody knows.

So here we are:   Nobody decided to put it up, and now nobody can decide whether or how to get it down.   But this sudden flurry of discussion is making the Superintendent a little  testy.

Yesterday Monsignor Antonio Meneguolo pushed his advantage a little too far by stating that this whole thing is “monstrous and immoral.”   Superintendent Codello shot back that even though  she never gave permission for this poster (that ought to be an embarrassing thing for a superintendent to admit, but let’s keep going), the Curia hasn’t got much to be proud of either.   “We’re all for publicity,” she  told the Gazzettino, “it’s the only way which allows us to be able to restore buildings.   If the Curia were to put up some money, we’d take the publicity down.”  

Furthermore,  “It’s not as if we could have just left the church to fall to pieces,  abandoned by the Curia.   The patriarchate has never put up a single euro.”   So there.

But what about how hideous it is?   She’s ready: “The churches of the city are full of examples of really bad  interventions.”   Presumably not approved by the superintendent.   Though one doesn’t know why.

This bickering only shows that here in the Cradle of the Renaissance people still  defend themselves  by saying  “Yes, I did it, but he did worse.”   Which comes right after you say  “Well he started it.”

Let’s imagine that I understand most of what has been going on.   What I really don’t understand is why this horrible thing has become an issue right now.   It was out there for months and months and nobody said anything.   Now, all of a sudden, it’s a huge problem.  

In fact, the only thing that both the Superintendent and the Monsignor agree on is that they are  shocked, shocked  to find that there is a vulgar and immoral billboard on a church.

                                                     (I acknowledge the excellent reporting of Davide Scalzotto).

April 25 is the feast day of Venice’s patron saint, Mark.   (Not the official patron saint of tourists, though you might have thought so.   I haven’t been able to find one yet, though Gerasimos and Dymphna would be likely candidates, seeing that they’ve already  been assigned to watch over the mentally infirm. Travelers — as opposed to tourists — have the choice of Nicholas, Joseph, St. Anthony of Padua (he of the lost-objects fame) and/or the Archangel Raphael.   There is a definite difference between travelers and tourists, and it’s more often the latter who have need of divine aid.   Those are just my thoughts.)   Still, having one of the four Evangelists to watch over you ought to cover just about any eventuality, and clearly the early Venetians thought so too.  

        Venice was never without a patron saint, but for the first several centuries of its existence that task was assigned to a Greek soldier saint, Theodore of Amasea (“Todaro,” in Venetian).  

In that era Venice was still technically a colony of Byzantium, and a saint’s being Latin or Greek had as much political as religious significance.   By 828, though, Venice had begun to reach a level of importance, and independence, which convinced its rulers that they needed to upgrade their guardian.   A Latin saint now looked better than a Greek one, and why stop there?   They aimed for one of the four Evangelists, Saint Mark, whose body was known to repose in Alexandria, Egypt.

        And so they went and stole him.   Two intrepid sailors, known to history as “Buono” of Malamocco and “Rustico” from Torcello (unquestionably noms de guerre), spirited the body of the city’s erstwhile bishop out of the Muslim metropolis by hiding it on a  wagon covered in pig carcasses (and also cabbage leaves, which was the Venetian way of conserving meat, between alternating layers of lard and cabbage.    The Bible compares humans to grass, but Venetians are more realistic).

        This exploit highlights two of the most fundamental Venetian traits: shrewdness and audacity.   And in case “Good” and “Rustic” appear to have been improbably daring and clever, some scholars have made a good case for their having bribed the shrine’s guardian.   The point here, as in much of Venetian history, is that it worked.   For my money, the appropriate motto for the Old Ones wouldn’t be the legendary “Pax tibi, Marce, evangelista meus” [Peace to you, Mark, my evangelist]  which is inscribed on the book most of his symbolic winged lions are holding, but a straightforward “Get it done.”

        In the great days, Venice observed not one, but four celebrations of its saint:

1. January 31, the “translation” (well, theft) of his remains, which was popularly called San Marco dei mezeni, because the body had been concealed between (in mezzo) the aforementioned pork and cabbage;
2. April 25, his martyrdom.   This is the big day for us, and it is called the festa del bocolo, or feast of the long-stemmed rose;
3. June 25, the finding of his relics (fancy word for corpse), which had inexplicably gone missing during or after the great fire in the basilica in 976.     Legend has it that a priest was led to the site of the concealed body by a powerful scent of roses, so not only did the liturgy involve a priest sprinkling the altar with rosewater, the day itself was referred to as San Marco dell’acqua rosata, or Saint Mark of the rosewater.   Roses again.   I have to look into that.
4. October 8, the dedication of the basilica, which had been built specifically to honor and preserve his body.   Ordinary people called this simply San Marco de le zizoe, the Venetian word for  jujubes, a popular but transient little autumn fruit here which is like a date made of styrofoam.   I buy them at least once just so I can say the word: ZEE-zo-eh.   It makes me smile.   There is, in fact, more to say about them, but I’ll save that for another time.

All this wasn’t just because Mark deserved it.   Venice’s masters loved pomp not only for itself but because they knew how to exploit it.   They made a point of creating celebrations around an enormous number of events — saints’ days, deliverance from plagues (twice), military victories, even military defeats.   All that was necessary was that Venice had to have been the star.   It worked extremely well, because all of this festivizing kept civic pride bubbling away, ready for use at any moment.   You weren’t even to imagine that there could be anything better than being a Venetian, and ceremonial was a dependable way to keep that fact front and center in your average Venetian’s brain.

        Back to the body.   There is a body under the high altar, and it is labeled as being Mark’s.   Lino doesn’t believe it.   I don’t know if this counts as heresy, but being a good Venetian, he doesn’t care.   He makes a good case: For one thing, he says, it’s pretty suspicious that the body is never venerated, not even on April 25.   For another, he says that when Angelo Roncalli (patriarch of Venice from 1953-1958) became Pope John XXIII, he gave an important (unidentified) relic to the church in Alexandria.   Lino tells me this with that “What more do I need to say” look.

        What it all comes down to today is the long-stemmed red rose, the longer and redder the better.  

The custom is for a man to give one to the woman — or women — he loves.   Could be his wife, mother, sister, girlfriend, cousin.   No protocol on this, except for the wife or girlfriend, which are non-negotiable.   Anyway, as roses were costing at least five euros each this year, the typical man’s list has probably been cut back to the minimum.

        Lino is a traditionalist to the bone, or in this case, the rose.   He would go without lunch and possibly even without wine, if he had to, but he would never skip the rose.

        He even gives a rose to our club’s eight-oar gondola, or gondolone.   Of course she is named “San Marco.”