How to blight a festa
As I’ve related probably all too well, summer is loaded with more festas than the average barge with paying festa-goers. I have a reason for making that comparison, because once again we are now on the verge of the festa del Redentore, the “Notte Famossissima,” inspiration of song and story, one of the great parties of the world (though in terms of sheer tonnage I wouldn’t compare it to, say, the Kumbh Mela, which technically isn’t a party. But still). In a word, it’s tonight.
What is inspiring lively conversation this year, however, is the drastic decision announced a mere two days ago by the Capitaneria di Porto, the branch of the navy which is responsible for certain tracts of the lagoon. The commanders have made it clear that this year they’re throwing the book at the festivizers, and are ready to fine and possibly confiscate the large barges known as “topomotori” which usually show up carrying ten times as many people as they’re allowed. Without any safety equipment of any kind.
Yes, illegally overloaded barges have become part of the tradition, because they are a wonderful size for carrying large tables groaning with food and drink surrounded by the aforementioned people, a few of them also groaning. These working boats are typically certified to carry “cose” (things) but not “persone” (people). I suppose a clever lawyer could try to make a case for the people qualifying as things, but I’ll stop here.
Technical note: Of course you’ve seen these barges plying the Venetian waters every day loaded with merchandise with people aboard to heft the cargo, but the legal limit is six.
These restrictions also apply to the big fishing boats that trundle up from Chioggia and Pellestrina — they hold more people (good!) but they are impossible to present as anything other than what they are. (“Certainly, sir, all these women and children are professional fishermen too…..”).
What is really upsetting people isn’t primarily that that oppressed minority known as Venetian families is going to be prevented from enjoying a Venetian (debatable, by now) event. The truly distressed people are the barge owners who are now accustomed to making money by renting their vessels for the evening. The intake (in small, unmarked bills) to the party’s organizer could be 100 euros per person, with a payload of up to 40 people. The barge owner could expect 300-400 euros just for letting his boat leave the dock.
Some nervous organizers have already canceled their parties. Others are saying, “We’re going to chance it. Out of thousands of boats, why should they pick me?” I like the way estimating odds works: Your chance of winning the lottery (in your own eyes) is from reasonable to even very high; your chance of being fined for carrying a clan, a tribe, an entire linguistic group, is almost nil. Such is the power of human desire.
What’s modestly upsetting me is that this drama was avoidable because, as the Capitaneria has pointed out, the owners of these barges could have avoided all this unpleasantness by coming to the office in time to apply for official permission to “occasionally” carry more people than usual. I didn’t know such an option existed because it doesn’t affect me, but it would seem that a person with a barge, especially one who was looking forward to a couple of hundred free euros, might have exerted himself to acquire a more extensive knowledge of the rules of the road. And that forestalling this awkwardness in a timely manner could have been done without even breaking a sweat. But I forgot. Drama is so much more entertaining than just doing things the easy way.
As an interesting additional factor in the evening’s excitement (and in this case, totally unavoidable by anybody) is the weather. They’re predicting wind, and also rain. Perhaps even thunder and lightning. Looking at the forecast, maybe people would have canceled anyway. Or maybe the organizers and owners would have calculated the odds in their favor, as per usual.
I can hear it now: “With all these thousands of boats, why should it rain on me?”
We weren’t planning on being in a boat anyway, but on watching from the shoreline, like two years ago. The only thing that could spoil my evening would be for the gelateria to run out of ice cream.
Patriarchal postscript
Zwingle’s Eighth Law states “The bigger your memorial, the less people remember who you were.” A wander around Westminster Abbey shines a blinding light on that truth. A black marble slab for Charles Dickens, a white marble meringue for James Cornewall.
In case anyone was wondering if there might be any memorials to the three patriarchs of Venice who became pope, the answer is yes. But you might not notice them, and if you did, you might not quite grasp who they were. Especially if the inscription is in Latin (grrr).
Trivia alert: Venetians refer to popes, especially the three that touched Venice, by their civilian last names, not their formal papal names. Also, the word for “pope” in Italian is papa (PAH-pah.) The nickname for your daddy is the same word, pronounced pah-PAH. If you mix them up, people will think the pope is your father.
Pope Pius X, “Papa Sarto,” was deeply moved on leaving Venice to go to Rome for the conclave of cardinals meeting to elect the successor to Pope Leo XIII. The throng which came to see him off at the station was exhibiting what we’d call intense separation anxiety. He reassured them by promising that he would return, whether alive or dead. Yes, he said those words. He was elected pope, and though he lived another 11 years, he never made it back. He died in 1914.
In 1959, Pope John XXIII (just coming up in our chronicle) — who knew of this unfulfilled promise — arranged for Sarto’s casket to be disinterred, organized a special train which left, in those days, from a station within the Vatican, and sent him back to Venice. The body lay in state in the basilica of San Marco for a month, then was returned by special train to the Vatican. Promise kept.
Footnote: Lino remembers the day the train arrived, not because he was present, but because all the employees of the Aeronavali, which maintained and repaired airplanes at Nicelli airport on the Lido, were taken in a bus to see where the new Marco Polo airport was going to be built on the mainland. The sacred and the profane just keep on running into each other.
Of the three papal memorials here, that of Saint Pius X is the most impressive by weight, but the least impressive by location: at the head of the Ponte della Liberta’ by Piazzale Roma, next to the Agip gas station. Lino says it’s because he’s there to guard the gate to the city. There may well be more to it than that, but I haven’t taken the time to root it out. That could be a project for my old age.
Pope John XXIII, Papa Roncalli, or “The Good Pope,” was known as a saint by anyone who ever met him, at least here in Venice. The beatification details that made it official were just extra.
Lino had two encounters with him. One was by surprise, crossing the patriarch’s path as he left the basilica of the Salute. Lino was strolling with his girlfriend, and Roncalli stopped to say hello. “Are you two engaged?” he asked in a friendly, if generic, way. “Yes, Your Eminence” — Lino repeats this in a tiny abashed voice. “Love each other,” he said, patting each of them on the cheek. Evidently his charisma marked this little event in a powerful way, because on paper it looks like nothing.
The second encounter was at the airport, where Lino worked as an airplane mechanic. Patriarch Roncalli came to celebrate mass there for the workers, and he was lacking an altarboy to assist him. Lino volunteered.
My favorite bit of Roncalli lore is the nickname the gondoliers gave him: “Nane Schedina,” or Jack the Lottery Ticket. When he chose the name John XXIII, to the wags at the Molo stazio the Roman numerals looked like the pattern of the numbers on a lottery ticket.
If you needed any further evidence of his qualities as a patriarch/pope/human being, the nickname says it all. Gondoliers bestow them spontaneously, and only when they really want to. In fact, if there is any category which comes equipped with a built-in automatic crap detector, as Hemingway put it, it would be the gondoliers. The fact that Roncalli would sometimes walk over to the Molo to say hello, and even sometimes take them up on their offer of going to get a glass of wine at the nearby bar, obviously had something to do with their feeling for him. He’d play cards with the staff in the evening, too. Not with the majordomo, with the cook and the cleaning ladies.
He’s the only patriarch of the three that has two memorials. That doesn’t earn him any bonus points, I merely mention it.
Pope John Paul I, “Papa Luciani,” was smaller and, it turns out, more frail than his two patriarchal predecessors. But Venetians loved him, and not just because he came from the mountains just up the road. In his mere 33 days on the throne of St. Peter he earned the sobriquet “The Smiling Pope.” Venetians already knew that.
So far, no bust of him has been made, or if so, placed anywhere a human can see it. But he is remains an extremely tough act to follow, as his successors have amply demonstrated.
The Patriarch clocks in
Venice doesn’t have a bishop — you may be fascinated to know — it has a patriarch. And as of last Sunday, it has a new one: Francesco Moraglia, who has now been launched to a higher sphere from modest but reverendable monsignor to patriarch and, very soon, to cardinal. Next stop? We don’t speak its name, but we know it’s there.
Three patriarchs of Venice in the 20th century were elected pope (Pius X, John XXIII, and John Paul I). Which means that one reason — perhaps the main reason — why it took six months to decide on the new occupant of the patriarch’s palace could be that the man needed to be considered papabile, as they say: “pope-able.”
As you can imagine, his welcome ceremony was a many-splendored thing, but the centerpiece — and the piece feasible only in Venice — was a corteo, or procession, of boats in the Grand Canal.
Corteos, if you do them right (as in: have lots of participants), are impressive when seen from the shore/bridge/parapet/balcony or wherever the viewer may be positioned. Certainly they’re impressive as seen from the vessel carrying the person being corteo’d.
Corteos, as seen from the boats involved, have a much different character. They are composed of friends — or people who know each other, anyway — and what may look like a stately progress is actually a continual jockeying for position in a limited space complicated by vaporettos, gusts of wind, and tidal forces. All of these factors conduce to moments of vivacious confusion which most of the rowers astern, responsible for steering, know how to navigate. I can promise you, however, that there will be at least one boat whose poppiere has a very uncertain grasp of the connection between the action of the oar and the reaction of the boat. Fancy way of saying: helplessly wandering hither and yon like a rudderless boat on the high seas. This person, whoever it may be, is always happiest right in front of us.
The Gazzettino reported that there were some 200 boats in the procession, and I can believe it. I think most of them, though, were there for the event in its Venetian, rather than spiritual, aspect. I’m not saying rowers are godless, I’m just saying that the mass of participants seemed to be divided into two groups: Bunches of people along the fondamentas with welcome banners who were singing hymns , and us in the boats who were living another sort of moment.
The routine usually goes like this: The boats gather in the Grand Canal at Piazzale Roma. We go to the command-post boat if we’re due any bonuses (T-shirts, bandannas, small bags of rations usually containing a sandwich, bottle of water or carton of fruit juice, a small pastry or piece of fruit.) You lounge around and keep track of your friends. At this point in my evolution here, there’s quite a list.
Small organizational point: Unlike most processions, which are in the morning, we were summoned to appear at 1:45 PM. This seemingly innocuous moment effectively wipes Sunday off your calendar, when you calculate the time needed to get to your boat, row it to Piazzale Roma, do the corteo, and row home. The fact that the timing effectively wiped your lunch hour off your calendar was also noticed. That’s why they gave us sandwiches. Not much to keep you going till dinnertime, but if you came, you’d already accepted this fact.
We get the signal to start, and we proceed down the canal to the bacino of San Marco, dodging taxis and vaporettos and gondoliers and each other’s oars. The principles of defensive driving all come into immediate play for the half-hour or so it usually takes to run this 3.7 km/2.3 mile route.
I’d never seen so many boats in a procession, not even when we put on the same event in 2002 for the recently-departed predecessor. The sun was shining, the breeze was generally docile, and we were going mostly with the tide.
The only drawback was the long wait for the patriarch to finish his invisible ceremonies ashore, board his boat, and get going. When the tide is pulling you along and large public conveyances keep jostling for space, you don’t really feel like hanging around, even for an Eminence. Rowers began to murmur and to comment.
But finally we were on our way. We managed to put on a burst of speed to get past the small boat slewing around in front of us. We waved to Lino’s sisters on the fondamenta. And when we passed under the Rialto Bridge and saw the straight stretch of Grand Canal covered with boats spread out before us, Lino actually got a little choked up. I can’t remember what he said, but I looked up and his eyes were wet. Just in case you think we get all blase and jaded about everything.
As the patriarch debarked at San Marco, the gathered boats gave the customary alzaremi, or raised-oar salute. It’s spectacular when done right, or even just sort of right. The annoying part for the executors of this feat isn’t the weight of the oar as you haul it upright (I discovered a trick) — it’s the way the water runs down the shaft and onto your hands. I have no picture of it because I was busy with my oar.
Then we row back to the club, across the bacino of San Marco, which will always be full of big heavy clashing waves. You may well also have the wind and tide against you, so by the time you get the boat ashore you’ve forgotten how much fun you had.
But enough about me. I can tell you that the new patriarch has already remarked that he believes one of our main priorities needs to be to make children happy. He put that in his short list of things we need to take more seriously, like create more jobs and be more just and fair in our dealings.
My inner Protestant (I.P.) finds this an amazingly dim recommendation. If making children happy is a goal, I can turn over and go back to sleep, because that must be the easiest thing on earth to do. Unload a dump truck full of sugar and fat and iEverything and then leave them alone. My I.P. — who is as devoted to children and their well-being as anyone, even him — would have preferred to hear something a little less fluffy. If happy children are what we want, I think our mission should be to make sure they’re educated, healthy, disciplined, kind, at least bilingual and don’t smoke. I suspect that happiness would be within their own grasp at that point, and wouldn’t have to be provided by a squad of round-the-clock muffinbrains.
Feel free to pass this observation along to him.
Christmas spirit
Venice at Christmas — it sounds as if the entire city ought to be refulgent with gleaming and sparkling, as if every fragment of its shattered splendor should come together and shine in an unearthly and glorious way.
Yes, it does seem that it ought to be that way.
Instead, scattered efforts at decoration all around the city make bright flickers, some bigger, some smaller, that don’t come together in any coherent way. Venice is littered with Nativity scenes, in paintings, in sculpture, not to mention other aspects of the Christmas story — the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Flight into Egypt, and even the Massacre of the Innocents –yet the general attitude toward Christmas is not excessively devout. It remains essentially a domestic holiday and I suppose that ought to translate, if depicted accurately today, into scenes of Mary in the kitchen wrestling with something heavy in the oven while Baby Jesus is busy trying to teach the cat how to swim, or of them looking desperately, not for a room at the inn, but for a place to park at the mall. Meaning no disrespect.
Little old people, as everywhere, are being wrangled into some extended-family configuration; and the children are, I think, essentially like children everywhere — eyes and spirits fixed, not on the Star, but on the imminent deluge of presents. And not brought by kings or wise men, but laid on by squadrons of adoring relatives, even in times like these.
Perhaps there are gala balls being held in palaces, but my sense is that anybody with a palace is probably already at Cortina.
Still, the framework remains the same, at least in our little hovel: Christmas Eve means risotto of go’ and roasted eel, the ripping open of the presents, midnight mass, the singing of “You Descend from Heaven,” and slicing the panettone at midnight and popping the prosecco.
Christmas Day means the big mass at San Marco, some fabulous meaty lunch, then either sleeping on the sofa or visiting relatives, then more eating, and more sleeping.
The day after Christmas — the feast of Santo Stefano — is another holiday. More gorging on food, this time with all of Lino’s family.
One quaint aspect of this holiday is that there are no newspapers for two days because the journalists and editors and printers don’t work on Christmas Eve and Christmas. This is an antiquated practice that is even more exotic than bearing in the boar’s-head and drinking wassail. Newspapers in the rest of the world come out as usual, but here, for some reason (and I do not believe it’s because the entire category wants to spend two whole days in church) the newspaper-producers just don’t work on Christmas.
To which I say: Who notices or cares? The broadcast journalists are working as usual, and the news continues to flow to us in an unbroken stream via the television and the Internet. But somehow print journalists feel themselves to be special, which, I presume, is fostered and sustained by the unions. And then they complain that readership is falling.
But this is normal.
What is going to be abnormal this year for the holidays is: Minimal garbage collection. Of any sort, whether recyclable (there’s a weekly schedule for the different types of material) or otherwise (clam shells, coffee grounds, orange peels, fishbones, half-eaten cupcakes, wine bottles, etc.). And this will last for two days: Christmas Day, and Santo Stefano.
Two days with no garbage collection — this is a startling innovation in the festal folkways, especially in a city which purports to be world-class, or somewhere near it, and during a period which could be described as garbage-intensive.
The Gazzettino conveys the explanation given by the garbage company, which is nothing more than an arm of the city government with a different name: The garbage collectors are all going to be too busy keeping the streets clean to have time also to collect the bags which are daily left outside the doors of houses and shops.
The very best part is that, given this fact, the garbage company respectfully requests the good citizens to refrain from putting their bags of refuse outside for two days. So the streets can be neat and tidy. And the interiors of the houses and stores can become kitchen middens.
This is only moderately annoying to us, but for families with children, it’s inconceivable. I can tell you right now, sitting here with my eyes closed, that the streets are going to be FULL of bags of garbage. Or maybe there will be a mass reversion to the Old Way, which involves a big splash.
To review: We are requested to not clutter the streets because the trash-teams are going to be busy keeping the streets clean. But if we’re not putting out trash, why do the streets need to be cleaned? It’s like the definition of chutzpah: First you kill your parents, then you plead for clemency from the court because you’re an orphan.
I tell you, sometimes life in the most beautiful in the world makes my head hurt.
But let us return to the reason for the season, as they say. Here is a small assortment of glimpses of Venice preparing for Christmas. But of course, the most beautiful scenes of all are arranged and decorated and illuminated where you’ll never see them: In each person’s heart. Compared to which glass angels and marzipan cake and all the strings of lights ever plugged in are as nothing.
