Seasonal migrations (is that redundant? Sorry) are an excellent way to keep track of the year’s divisions, especially here, where you need a keen eye to discern that there is anything more than one season anymore, which is Tourists.
But at this moment, if you’re paying attention (and if you know, and if you care) you can detect a few important signs of autumn. I don’t mean the drying, yellowing, falling leaves — anybody can notice them, and besides, the drought began drying them before their normal time to drop. So leaves are out.
Torbolino — the first draw-off of the new wine. That’s an excellent indicator, though again, this year it’s somewhat early due to the unusually early harvest (see: “drought,” above).
Ducks are also useful heralds of the season — I saw my first one paddling around two weeks ago, This always makes me happy, except that I had seen my first duck hunter even earlier: The ducks began hitting the water on September 3. So much for enjoying their winter haven.
Seppioline — sepoine (seh-poh-EE-neh) in Venetian — are baby seppie, or cuttlefish. If “baby” anything on your plate upsets you, skip this paragraph. We are now in the period of the fraima, which is the annual passage of the fish which have spent all summer fooling around in the lagoon moving out into the Adriatic (or beyond) for the winter. The cuttlefish spawned months ago, and their small offspring are now in the process of making their first trip out into the world where they will become big, grown-up cuttlefish. Unless they get snagged before they reach the exit, in which case they will be sold at an outrageous price (there I go, being redundant again), grilled and eaten. Short migration.
The ramps are used by thundering racers for a few hours, and by countless humbler folk dragging suitcases, shopping carts, or strollers laden with small heavy tired cranky children for six months. I would bet that the shleppers appreciate the ramps just as much as any Ethiopian champion. Probably more.
But the ramps are back. I saw my first one two days ago and it was like hearing a small, clear trumpet announcing autumn, winter, and early spring. The ramps are set up for the Venice Marathon (this year scheduled for October 23), and they stay up till the end of March. That’s practically half the year. Then they migrate back to hibernate in whatever warehouse keeps them till next October.
They’re only installed on the race route — logically — which conveniently passes the Piazza San Marco and other heavily traveled tourist routes. I bet the people up in Cannaregio and along the northern edge of the city really envy us. I know they don’t envy us the tourists, but we get the ramps.
One of scores of winged lions stationed around the Lido; this one is at the vaporetto stop, on meet-and-greet duty.
It would appear that there is always a film festival going on somewhere in the world — 308 at last count, but no doubt the list is growing. That’s practically one a day.
And each one awards a (usually) golden trophy, The most famous give out lions, bears, and palm fronds but let us not disparage the Golden Crow Pheasant, Golden Pyramid, Golden Conch, Golden Frogs, Golden Space Needle, and even (I am not making this up), the Golden Calf, from the Netherlands. Did they do that on purpose?
Special buses start in the morning to take people from the vaporetto to the movies. As part of the multi-purpose art extravaganza known as the Biennale, the film festival is correctly known as the 'Exhibition of Cinema," as if the movies were hung on a wall.
Until September 10, here we’re focusing on the lion, naturally. For a thousand years the winged lion of San Marco stood for power, wealth, and glory, and struck fear, admiration and envy in the hearts of countless thousands. For ten days in Venice, it stands for movie tickets, daily updates on assorted stars and tiny asteroids, a constant drip of complaints and criticism of what there is and what there isn’t, and parties where countless thousands stand around and talk about how they’re going to make some more money, which essentially brings us back to the aforementioned power, wealth, and glory. Or maybe they don’t care about the glory.
The Venice Film Festival — 68 years old and still going strong, I guess — was the first of its kind in the world.
Back in 1932, the Lido must have seemed the perfect place to hold this innovative little event, seeing that in those days the Lido (well, Venice, but let’s be kind) indeed evoked some form of glamour. It’s a little hard to imagine now, because there was basically just an airport, a church, a few luxury hotels, and miles of artichoke fields. The people who came were mostly rich and did rich-people things, like spend a lot of money to drink, eat, and look at each other.
Reporters going to work, checking the paper for news on what they did yesterday, or what they have to do today. These are staying in Venice because there's no more room on the Lido. The symbolic winged animal on their bags looks like a GummiLion.
Now the masses on the Lido have almost no (actually, no) glamour, the artichoke fields are gone, and at least one of the luxury hotels is closed for semi-permanent restoration (Hotel Des Bains).
But the winged lions are posted all around the main streets, the phalanxes of photographers are in maneuvers, and, as usual, the vaporettos and busses are so full they’re practically shrink-wrapped.
Opening Day was George Clooney Day; his new film, “The Ides of March,” launched the ten-day marathon, and received a standing ovation.
Yesterday it was Madonna’s turn, here to promote her new film “W.E.” As I understand it, her goal is to “rehabilitate” the image of Wallis Simpson, and best of British luck with that. The Guardian’s report observes: “It takes a twisted creative genius to produce a compellingly bad film….and that is why Madonna, try as she might, will never make one of the worst films ever made. She just hasn’t got the talent. ”
The lions stand on pedestals which are four-sided billboards for beer, restaurants, and assorted Lido businesses. Wouldn't it have made more sense for some producer to have bought a batch to advertise the name of his/her movie? As in: Lion plus My Movie = Award me the top prize. But what do I know.
She reserved rooms in five hotels, to throw reporters off the track. This is something I wish somebody would explain to me. You come here because you want to be seen and talked about, then you put on this pantomime of craving solitude? Isn’t that why they invented Bhutan? Anyway, she ended up staying in Venice, not even on the Lido. Take that, Hotel Excelsior.
Now she’s probably gone, and so, day by day, the reporters too will shimmer away, leaving only the few hard-core journalists who actually write about movies, as opposed to people and what they’re wearing. By the time the Golden Lion spreads his wings, he almost seems to be an afterthought.
Then the film world will turn its attention to whatever golden creatures are next being shoved into the starting gate. Or at least who’s there and what they’re wearing.
Yachts are excellent places to give parties, and every year a batch of them tie up along the Riva Sette Martiri for exactly that purpose. Expensive but sort of generic, not unlike the people who rent them.The launch belonging to one of those yachts. Lino says it reminds him of a funeral boat. It doesn't cry "Party! Party!" to me, either.
But where there are films (or yachts), there are likely to be girls. These were seriously waiting for something, or somebody.
When the sunlight looks like this, it's time for the party to start.
The dust has now settled on the festa of San Piero de Casteo and everyone is recovering (or not) from the toil, excitement, racket, and nearly suffocating odors of frying fish and charring ribs.
Fine as all this may be, it used to be, in many ways, even better. Lino Penzo, president of the Remiera Casteo (our very local rowing club), was born in the next campo over, an open space named Campo Ruga. And he remembers it the old way.
“There wasn’t anything here,” he said, looking at the stretch of grass in front of the church. The party was in Campo Ruga where, to hear him tell it, as many people lived as in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Families everywhere. Kids everywhere. Drama without any pause for station identification. “We used to put cushions on the windowsill,” Lino said, “and just watch what was going on outside. It was like the theatre, it never stopped.”
There was the day a certain man went across to the osteria to drink some wine. Evidently his wife expressed the opinion that he was doing this far too often, so he locked her in the house and went anyway. So she fixed up a bedsheet and let herself down through the window. I don’t know if she chased him around the campo brandishing a rolling pin, but I can imagine it.
And there was a woman whose nerves would give out whenever there was a fight in the family (evidently she preferred the “flight” option of the famous pair of possibilities), and she’d suddenly go into a swoon. Everybody knew this, so when anybody heard the sound of nearby strife the men in the cafe would put out a chair for her. They knew she’d be needing it to fall onto, sooner or later, so they got ready.
And there were shops everywhere. The series of doors we see today, many of them shut forever, belonged to a collection of every enterprise necessary for human life. Two (two!) bakeries, fruit and vegetable vendors, a butcher, a cheese and milk shop, a cobbler, probably also an undertaker, though he didn’t mention it. I don’t remember the rest, but they were all there. You didn’t have to go more than 20 steps from home to buy everything you needed. As in most Venetian neighborhoods, going to San Marco was unknown, mainly because it was pointless. This was the world.
This is Campo Ruga on a typical morning. True, there are usually people traversing it on their way to hither and to yon, but the lone trattoria is now the only reason to stop. We just have to imagine this with a few thousand people in it, night and day, like every other campo used to be.
As for the festa, it was celebrated in the campo, and involved mostly eating. Long tables were set up, where everyone sat and ate tons — “tons” — of bovoleti, and sarde in saor, and other traditional Venetian food.
Eventually one day somebody suggested moving over to the big empty grassy area in front of the church, and put up a little stand with some food. From there, the festa just got bigger and bigger, and ultimately never went back to Campo Ruga.
So now we have live music and big balloons and grilled animals and gondola rides, and a big mass with the patriarch, and even a cake competition. It’s like the county fair, without quilts.
I wish I could know what she was telling him. Whatever it was, he was paying attention. Obviously he hadn't yet been crazed by sugar, fat, and all the stuff the other kids had.Greta was creating with the concentration of an icon-painter. Evidently knowing her creation was going to be gone tomorrow had no importance whatever. She's obviously destined for greatness.
There was a lot of this going on. It was great.
One man was producing these tumuli of french fries, but it took four people to study the numbered bits of paper to figure out which desperate customer got the next boxful.
This lone woman stood over vats of boiling spaghetti like the Delphic oracle, and after five nights of this she could probably have made a few prophecies herself.The last ray of light in a dying universe will be the gleam of the cell phone of a teenage girl.
This useful sign may look completely at home here, except for one thing. Why isn't it in Italian? If they'd wanted to look really cool, they ought to have written it in Latvian. DARBINIEKIEM TIKAI. That certainly would have gotten people's attention..
I knew two days ago what the weather was going to be last night. I knew it without checking the barometer, or the online weather forecast, or the newspaper. In fact, I knew it a year ago.
All I have to do is check the calendar.
June 29 is the Feast of St. Peter, as you know. And as everyone else knows — at least around here — that means there will be thunder. Probably rain. Possibly even hail, but that’s not so common.
Someone unknown to me has undoubtedly long since figured out why this is. All I know is that St. Peter likes thunder. They tell frightened children he’s cleaning the wine barrels. As time goes on there probably won’t be any children left who know what a wine barrel looks like, but I suppose St. Peter could be cleaning barrels full of discounted, slightly damaged designer handbags.
What St. Peter also oversees is one of the best festivals in Venice. Maybe anywhere. The festa of San Piero de Casteo, held on the greensward in front of the eponymous church (for centuries the cathedral of Venice), is a great moment in the neighborhood year. It’s five evenings of fun, frolic, and food, and dogs and kids and free gondola rides and also loud music that goes on far into the night. (St. Peter cleaning the Bose amplifiers?)
The proceeds, the fruit of phenomenal labor by squadrons of scouts and parishioners, some of whom in other places might have been expected to be doing nothing more strenuous than changing channels, are donated to all sorts of charitable causes.
The first people come with some semblance of tranquility and control. It doesn't last long.
Last night, being Wednesday, and the first night, the crowd was reasonably small, which meant you could still see grass and bits of walkway. The big event was the performance of “I Rusteghi,” one of the many famous Venetian comedies by the extremely famous and important Carlo Goldoni (1707 – 1793). A live performance of a certified classic — and for free. You can’t get that every day.
We wandered over there last night to get in the mood for the next few days; we (or at least I) needed to start strengthening my mental muscles to confront Friday and Saturday night, the peak moments of this event.
One of life's great mysteries: That it's more interesting to look at the person sitting next to you on a screen than it is to just turn to look at him or her for real.
It’s not so much the blasting music, which we can hear from our little hovel 293 meters/962 feet away, because eventually the band packs up and goes home.
It’s the enthusiastic shouting of overexcited people walking home, all of them funneling down the street which is just outside our bedroom window. It’s like having 2,000 people yelling good-night for an hour standing right in front of the bed.
We shut the windows and turn the fan on “high.” The only other solution would be to go to the mountains every night.
Still, if for some reason this didn’t occur, I’d be sorry. It would be like not having thunder or lightning or hail. It would be wrong.
And yes, it did rain last night, but only some time after midnight so as not to spoil the party. St. Peter thinks of everything.
Torbolino — the first draw-off of the new wine. That’s an excellent indicator, though again, this year it’s somewhat early due to the unusually early harvest (see: “drought,” above).
