Venetian Curiosities

decoding the fresco

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Generations have made their fortunes, to one degree or another, promoting Venice as a city of mystery, secrets, enigmas.  What amazes me, though, is how many discoveries one can make by just looking around.  It’s not as if you have to go looking for secrets — there are plenty of extraordinary things sitting right out there in the open, in front of everybody, but that go unnoticed for ages.

I have walked with Venetians, on our way to do something, who have suddenly stopped, looked up at/around/behind/next to some normal thing (a bridge, a window, a door) at something strange or beautiful and said, “I never saw that before.”

So here is something I saw because I looked up.  Was it a secret?  Only from me until that afternoon.

And the date is the same when read upside down or downside up.  A new sort of palindrome?  A mystic code opening to another dimension?  Somebody’s PIN number?

This fresco isn’t far from San Marco at the intersection of the Rio Tera’ de le Colone and Calle dei Fabbri.  Here is a map to clarify.

The garish aqua-tinted circle marks the position of this now-no-longer surprise.

Looking up as I walked west along the columned walkway …

This is the view along the Rio Tera’ de le Colone, for anyone in charge of navigating.

I came upon this, as previously noted:

The passageway was temporarily blocked, as you see, but that’s not important.  Just look up.
The edited street sign is a relic of a brief but intense period when the populace revolted against the “Italianizing” of the local street names; they had always been in the Venetian language, but an official urban improver in the city administration thought Italian would be better. For a while nocturnal vigilantes took a hand in correcting this cultural vandalism, but don’t let this deviation from the name printed on your map disturb you.

Back to the fresco at hand.  My first theory was wrong, of course, but I wasn’t alone in supposing the dice in this design to be a mystic reminder of what may have been a gambling establishment back in 1691.  There were plenty of them, but people probably didn’t need signs to show them where to go, mainly because gambling was mostly illegal.

Rummaging through the internet I found that several people had also found it reasonable to suppose that gambling inspired this curious fresco.  But then I was even more surprised to discover a much simpler explanation.  No need to go any further back than the 1980s and a particularly whimsical artist named Dorino Cioffi  (born 1932 in Este, Veneto region), now living and working in Venice.

I could go find him and ask him about all this, and I’m not saying I won’t, but I wanted to get this little tale out into the ether.  Whatever his motivations might have been, and however he may have managed to get permission to paint on a public space (“No worries, it’ll be down by Wednesday”), he created this diverting little image.  Fooling people is so much fun.  Carnival comes to mind.

Starting at the top is a streetlight (feral, in Venetian, pronounced fehr-AHL), sitting atop a cooking pot (pignata, in Venetian), behind three dice (dai, in Venetian).  This is important to the story, so read on.

For reasons as yet, if ever, to be discovered, the artist devised this image to refer to the three bridges nearest to the location of the fresco.  I don’t know why that spot was chosen, though if you’ve decided you want to paint on an outdoor ceiling, your options are already limited.

The aqua circle is the fresco; the yellow circle to the right is the Ponte dei Ferali, and the red on the upper left is the Ponte de le Pignate.
The Ponte dei Dai connects to the Piazza San Marco, as you see.
The Ponte de le Pignate, walking toward the Rialto bridge.

Heading toward the Ponte dei Dai.
The Sotoportego dei Dai, with the bridge just coming up.
Having just crossed the bridge, I look toward the Piazza San Marco.  This bridge, like so much of Venice, has been patched and repaired to a Frankensteinian degree.  The long strip of lighter-colored material stretching along the right side is undoubtedly the scar left when it was necessary to open that part of the bridge to get at whatever pipe is installed beneath it.  Water pipes, cables, or any other tubes that may need repairing and replacing are reached by incisions made in the bridge as needed and then closed up with varying degrees of finesse.  I have seen bridges that are held together after numerous dissections by various materials from asphalt patches to leftover concrete.  In some cases the only things they haven’t used to put a bridge back together are safety pins, duct tape, chewing gum, and a few staples.
This is what bridges look like under the paving stones. Stripping this bridge to its very innards was a drastic move indeed — usually they just remove the bare minimum to resolve whatever little problem may have been bubbling under the surface.  I’m guessing it wasn’t the innards that were the problem, but the bridge itself.

The names of the bridges, like the streets, referred to something that was made, or sold, or both, on or near that bridge.  As far back as the 1200’s the feraleri, or makers of streetlights (ferali), had set up their shops on nearby streets, as well as on the bridge itself (do not ask me how that worked).  The same explanation applies to the pignate (cooking pots).

As for the dai (the original name was dadi, or dice), they were not so much produced as simply sold near their eponymous bridge.  This is amusing, considering that gambling with dice was forbidden.  You and your friends might call a place the “bridge of crack cocaine” if that’s what makes sense to you, but painting the name on an official street sign would be strange.  I think we can agree on that?

You may be awaiting more information on the pots and the dice, which I suppose there is, but the streetlights turn out to be far more interesting than the other two items put together.  (Do not recommend.)  As I leave the eccentric fresco behind, though, I can say that without it I almost certainly wouldn’t have given a thought to the lamps.

My next post will be shedding plenty of light on the subject.

This is the Ponte dei Ferali, looking east toward the church of San Zulian.
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Events, Venetian Curiosities

Starting over

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The triangular red notice-boards of the Biennale have returned to their ancestral homes in the neighborhood.  Here’s an important one, front and center in via Garibaldi.

If there’s one term (among many) that has become fashionable around here this year it’s ripresa — recovery.  (Not to be confused with “Recovery Plan,” which is exactly what Italians call the mega-component financial scheme that will somehow reassemble our dismembered economy.  Does saying it in English give it some occult power?  Wish I knew somebody I could ask.)  I would have suggested “comeback,” like for some devastated boxer staggering back into the ring, but whatever you want to call it, everybody’s trying to get back to normal.

Over the past two weeks or so, there have been tiny but unmistakeable signs of life such as gradual lessening of curfew, gradual increase of shops and restaurants opening, etc.  We still have to wear masks, though not everybody does, but the only thing missing from a cartoon version of life here right now is birds swooping around with little hearts floating upward.

So I’ve been enjoying the tiny signs — more every day — that belong to life as we used to know it.  And many of them are connected to the imminent reopening of the Biennale on May 22 (canceled last year, along with its millions of euros from the municipal budget).

Being that our neighborhood is the epicenter of Biennale activity, of course I’d be seeing things such as enormous crates on barges with cranes being unloaded in the exhibition zone, unknown people wearing unusual clothes just standing on bridges looking around, a person here or there with lots of video or camera equipment, or the ticket booth for the vaporettos about to start selling tickets again, ever more individuals dressed in black with a lanyard and plastic-sleeved document around his/her neck.  Press, I presume.  More water taxis.  Gondolas with people in them.  I saw a woman today walking around with a big paper map of the city.  Boy, that takes me back.

Let’s also notice the soundtrack:  The scrapey clatter of rolling suitcases outside the window, the constant low rumble of motors everywhere.  All you need is a barge with three cement mixers aboard trying to get somewhere against the tide and you’ll hear what I mean, but the noise from even smaller motors gets to be big, when there are enough of them.  This is one part of the Sound of Venice I did NOT miss during quarantine.  But here we are.

So generally speaking non-Venetians are returning to their Venice, and we are sliding back into ours, invisible again.  We are all side by side, but we are not in the same city.  I’ve commented elsewhere on these parallel tracks of life here that never meet, and so that’s a part of normal that is ineluctable.

Not only is the day after tomorrow Opening Day for the Biennale; the following Saturday will be the opening of the week-long Salone Nautico, or Boat Show, in the Arsenal.  So bring on the people.  I guess we’re ready.

I’ve really missed the yachts; I look them up online to see what they’re like inside. Monsters such as this are moored here, not for their voyagers (this babe costs 238,000 euros per week) but as the perfect venues for really important Opening Weekend parties. It — or perhaps Plan A? — will probably be back for the same reason at the end of August for the film festival.
This restaurant was created a year ago February in what was the only shoe store in via Garibaldi. As soon as lockdown hit, it closed up and has never opened since then until this week. Getting all spiffed up and ready for hungry art-lovers. I think basil plants instead of flowers is an outstanding idea. Also, they say green is the color of hope.
This Eastern European man is a staple at the entrance to the Giardini, playing the old favorites (including “My Way,” my oldest unfavorite, but also the tango music from “Scent of a Woman”) to a modest recorded accompaniment. He had disappeared for a year, because who was around to give him money? The fact that he’s back is a huge sign of better things on the way.
Shapeless whimsy is seeking fame and fortune — the Biennale’s back and boy, is Venice glad.
You start with a plinth of some sort and work up. No way of guessing what might be due to be put here, we’ll just have to wait and be surprised.
The meaning of this will be revealed in due course, though perhaps not by me. At the moment, it’s sitting there in its perfect shape, though its relevance to “How will we live together?” is not immediately evident.
I have no way of knowing whether bags of mulch are a work of art — it’s a little hard to know where to look in these areas or what to appreciate. So I’ll appreciate the mulch.

One entirely unexpected discovery, beyond the fields of the Biennale, was a collateral effect of the city’s revival: The opening of the church of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti to the public.  I have only ever seen this church open for funerals, not infrequently because it was built in 1634 as part of the city hospital.  (Hospitals and funerals are unfortunate companions.)  We came upon this on a random afternoon wander, and seized the chance to see the church without mourners and memorial wreaths.

The church of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti is inserted into the city hospital, and is usually shut up tight, as you see here. (Foto: Abxbay on Wikipedia).

Enter the church and this is what you discover is filling the space over the front door.  Meet Alvise Mocenigo (known in Italian as Luigi Leonardo Mocenigo), Admiral of the Venetian navy in the 25-year War of Candia during 1648-51 and 1653-4.
You already have grasped that he was a Capitano da Mar because of his very particular hat, and his baton of command. He defeated the perennial Turkish foe at Paros and Naxos, but his qualities as a commander and as a man were evidently so remarkable that when he died even the Turks bedecked their ships with tokens of mourning for their worthy adversary.
The Battle of Paros (1651).
The Battle of Naxos.  That rearing horse must have been the sculptor’s absolutely favorite part of the whole thing.  The obelisks bear medallions representing the four medals struck in Crete to commemorate Mocenigo’s victories (Civica, Rostrale, Murale, Graminea.  This will not be on the final exam.)

So modern art brings tourists, which leads to opening some spaces to lovers of old art.  I might like this new normal.

 

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Venetian Curiosities

Let’s lighten up

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The big picture (of the world, life, etc.) is still being painted in various gradations of grim — we are in various gradations of lockdown till May, just to give an example — but all it takes is a walk (or a vaporetto ride) and two open eyes to discover a whole world of strange out there.  Strange is refreshing, so have a look.

It all started a few weeks ago when I walked past this door. This arrangement makes no sense.

I could have stood there for an hour gazing at this but I wouldn’t have been any closer to understanding it. I realize that the flowers can’t be in front of the door, that’s obvious.  But when did the railing come on the scene, and more to the point, why is it opposite the door?  The door has always been on the right.  I see that the door opens outward, so it might have blocked the hand reaching for support.  Closest I can come is that Aunt Maria Rosa Addolorata died and it cost money to remove the railing, so the family left it, and so did the new tenants. Anyway, the railing and the plants seem to have decided that seeing as they’re in the majority, the door is going to have to adapt to them somehow. This stalemate appears permanent.
Rowing with a baguette?  This entrancing vision is promoting, in a quintessentially Venetian way, the take-out services of the Rizzo chain of bakery and gastronomic shops.  “Lunch at work?” the poster says.  “We can think about it!”  As in: Just leave it to us, we’ll be the ones to organize and plan and provide, all you have to do is eat and pay.  Not in that order.
Continuing on the theme of food, these fresh tuna steaks are gorgeous. The sign uses all the important key words, no need for whole paragraphs: “Tuna.  Red.  Alive.  Local.”  Skipping “red” — one can see that — I stop to stare at “vivo.”  Alive?  This is pushing me into deep philosophical waters.  Does this mean it’s so fresh it might as well be alive, an interesting concept if seen from the tuna’s point of view?  Or is it the red that’s alive, which seems like a pointless remark to make when you can already see that this is a red that could give Venetian scarlet some serious competition.  Vendors will often add “fished” to make clear that it was caught, and not farmed.  But live slices of dead tuna, or dead slices of once-alive tuna — nope.  We bought a piece and grilled it.  It didn’t taste alive.  Were we cheated?
This is primal polenta and I haven’t encountered anything that resembles its elemental perfection in any restaurant. This is home cooking straight from Lino’s childhood.  First, you make real (not instant) polenta in his mother’s deep copper pan, stirring for 40 minutes. The result is soft but solid (out in the world, it’s either one or the other). Butter from the Alps, grated parmesan cheese — technically, its lowland twin, grana padana. Take a forkful of polenta, dip it in the well of melting butter, dab it into the cheese, to which it sticks, and eat. This could be dinner, as far as I’m concerned. No disrespect to the cook, but this is a very tough act to follow.
This poster is a dauntless relic of the shop it decorates, now extremely closed. As an advertisement for truffles, it obviously bounces off “A diamond is forever,” the famous advertising slogan for De Beers diamonds created by genius copywriter Mary Frances Gerety in 1948 and still in use today.  She died in 1999, so she was spared this vision of creative sloth.  Besides, what does it mean?  Of course a truffle isn’t forever — you’re supposed to eat the dang thing.  No food is forever, unless you count frozen mammoth wedged into the permafrost.  They might as well have written “This is not a truffle” — homage to Rene’ Magritte: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”
Venice is just full of things that aren’t. First we have a truffle that wants to make sure you know it isn’t a diamond, and here we have the recycling set out on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday, obviously one of the days that paper is picked up.  So is the paper in a paper bag?  Of course not.  It’s in a plastic bag carefully labeled “Carta e cartone” (paper and carton), just so you know.  A trash collector told me that there are people (the same people?) who put plastic in paper bags.  Someday I’m going to ask somebody what they’re doing.
It’s 856 meters (2,808 feet) from the vaporetto stop at San Pietro di Castello to the far end of via Garibaldi, and in this stretch of city not only do many people pass, but they are often carrying bits of things they need to throw away.  There is not one trash can.  Not that I’m excusing whoever it was who decided his/her plastic cup had become a hindrance, though I have to say I feel that they deserve points for creativity and willingness to take risks to have disposed of it by jamming it into the space atop this bricola.  These pilings must be three meters (nine feet) high  and they’re too far from the bridge to make it likely that anybody could have leaned out to get rid of the pesky plastic.
Maybe it was a dare?
Similar problem outside the Crosara bakery on via Garibaldi.  Also a similar solution, the old just-jam-it-anywhere move.  Like the bricola, it’s fairly high up.  Somebody brought a ladder?  They think if it’s up high nobody will see it?  Because I can promise that the trash collector isn’t going to see it.
It’s a plastic drinking glass containing tea of some sort.  It appears that the brand is Estathe’.  Must check from time to time to see if swallows are nesting in it or something.
I see that the house-number painter did not consider the space at the center of the arch to be sufficient. I myself wouldn’t have drawn that conclusion, but I failed geometry. In any case, even if it was done decades or centuries apart, I admire the artistic sensibility that made the numbers lean toward each other. It could so easily have gone the other way.
I can’t explain the fascination of this little scene.  Of course I was curious to discover what she was perusing so very carefully; something about her clothes, or the battered condition of the tiny book, gave me a strange impression of an immigrant  arriving at Ellis Island 150 years ago. Naturally I tried to make out what was written as I passed by, but no. The pages have kept their secret for a long time, by the look of it; I hope she found whatever or whoever she was looking for.
On another day, another vaporetto, I discovered a brand of shoes I’d never heard of before: “Scarpa.” This is a very common Venetian last name (actually comes from Pellestrina). Kayak champion Daniele Scarpa won an Olympic gold medal. architect Carlo Scarpa is world-famous.  That’s all fine till you stick it on a shoe.  It means “shoe.”
I thought it was runny paint and was going to file this in the “You had one job” folder.  But it’s not paint; it’s soot from the coal fires of yesteryear that dribbled out with the condensation of humidity inside the chimney.  Lino recognized it immediately.  His father was a train driver for the state railway, back when the trains were still steam-powered, and one of his perks was an allowance of anthracite each month for their home.  But people used many different grades of coal or charcoal.
Everybody’s chimney looked like this, to one degree or another.
Street of the Chimneysweeps. (Sorry I didn’t have time to wait for the sun to move; the word is scoacamini.)  Lino remembers that they worked in pairs, and walked along the neighborhood streets carrying a ladder and calling out; if you needed them, you just nabbed them then.  None of this making appointments.  Many people walked around crying their wares; the gua, or knife-grinder, for example, or the old man who called out “Strasse, ossa o fero vecio da vender” (rags, bones or old iron to sell).  You’d bring out a newspaper full of bones you’d saved, or some old nails you’d scavenged, and so forth, and he’d weigh them and pay you.
I saved the best for last. I noticed this girl as we waited for the vaporetto. What struck me at first wasn’t her Anouk Aimee/Amal Clooney vibe but her legs. Was she tattooed? Scarred?  I got up to look closer. No, it’s some design on the tights themselves.  It’s … words?
Words indeed: It’s Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.  Written on her legs.  First-rate gams that don’t need sonnetry to make you look at them, but I have to say that anybody who walks around with Shakespeare on her stems has reached a level of panache I can only dream of.  For the record, she is a German university student who bought them somewhere here, and she shot my day into an entirely new orbit.
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Venetian Curiosities

Hidden well in plain sight

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And before I leave the subject of water in Venice……

If one is compelled to cross the Piazza San Marco — and from Easter till the first hard frost one crosses only under compulsion — one doesn’t expect to see anything beyond the daily disarray.  On a recent afternoon Lino and I (under compulsion) were crossing, and because the crowds were swarming momentarily in another part of the piazza, we discovered something new.  Old, of course, but new to us.

Lines on the stones.  Significant lines bearing a message to somebody somewhere in the future, if anybody were to notice.  Or care.  That would be me.

These two concentric circles don’t exactly leap out at you.
They’re not tremendously more obvious from this angle, either.
But whoever incised those lines left a clue. More than a clue, positive identification. I couldn’t fit the entire very helpful inscription into one frame and make it readable at the same time, so here’s the first panel. It says “POZZO INTERRATO NEL…” “Well filled with earth in…”
…”NEL SECOLO…”  “…in the century…”
“XVII,” or “17th.”  Note that here the “17th century” doesn’t mean the 1600s, but the 1700’s.

I haven’t succeeded in finding much more information than that, so kudos to Walter Fano on his blog L’altra Venezia for supplying at least the following bits (translated by me):  “In the ancient Piazza San Marco there were wellheads, but how many isn’t very clear.  In 1283 one was located at the entrance to the Mercerie (N.B., under the clock tower), while in 1494 the historian Marin Sanudo speaks of two wellheads.  In successive epochs, anyway, all the histories speak of only one well located at the bottom of the piazza, near the church of San Geminiano (a church which Napoleon wanted demolished at the beginning of the 1800’s, who caused the so-called “Ala Napoleonica” (Napoleonic Wing) to be built in its place which today closes the piazza at the side opposite the basilica).”

Paintings by Giovanni Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Antonio Vicentini, all working in the late 1600’s/early 1700’s do not reveal anything resembling a wellhead in the Piazza San Marco, and considering their mania for accuracy, I’m going to accept that it was already gone when they began sketching.  I had hopes of glimpsing a well in Gentile Bellini’s “Procession in Piazza San Marco” (1496), but he cleverly composed the scene to as to obscure the area in question.  I give up.

This is the Piazza San Marco in 1500, delineated by Jacopo de’ Barbari with his customary insane attention to detail in the “View of Venice.”  I don’t know what the numbers indicate, but I can’t say there’s a well there.
But there is this: An undated image of the uncovering of an earthed-in well in the Piazza San Marco, essentially where the concentric circles are now drawn.  Why it would have been closed — and why in the 17th century — will have to remain in the “I’ll get to the bottom of this someday” file.

 

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