There ought to be a special Venetian handshake, or greeting, or food (what? no special food??) to mark this little anniversary.
But I did hear something that sounded like a mystic knock at the year’s door, loud enough to be heard but perhaps not enough to be noticed.
The knock that struck ever so faintly on the old cochlea was delivered at the Rialto market. (You see? Of course food belongs in the picture. I was only testing you.)
These are carletti, and their moment is so fleeting you might not even see them the day you go to the market. Lino forages for them along the lagoon shoreline, and if you don't get them at just the right moment, whatever their parent plant may be will develop them into something inedible. They aren't cultivated anywhere; these little bouquets were picked by somebody, leaf by leaf.Bruscandoli, or wild hops, stay in the market longer than the carletti. Both of these plants make an excellent risotto -- that appears to be their main mission in life.
Instead of an occult greeting, there is an assortment of poetry passed on by the ancients to acknowledge the moment. Once again, it comes from the fathomless store of balladry that Lino memorized as a lad. If his teachers had had any notion that his brain was going to retain all this material far, far into the distant decades — maybe even forever — they might have wondered if it would have been better to have him memorize something else. Like algorithms, or the names of the then-68 member countries of the UN, or all the books of the Bible.
But poetry seems to have turned out to work better, because how often in any day or occasion would it be necessary, or even appreciated, to burst out with all the books of the Bible? Poetry, however, is always the Right Thing to say.
In exactly the same place (and perhaps bucket) where you can buy calicanthus in December, peach blossoms appear for a brief period in early spring.
So this morning, like every March 21, was marked by a spontaneous recitation of the vernal poesy of Giovanni Pascoli and Angiolo Silvio Novaro. Read these to the mental music of blackbirds cantillating in the dawn, and the sound of the truck delivering the branches of peach blossoms from Sicily.
If I had time, I would research the reasons for selling peach blossoms, and not apple or apricot or almond or any other flowering tree. I myself would like to know the reasons, but for now I can only say that these are here because that’s what people do. “People” meaning the growers, sellers, and buyers. So don’t come asking for pear or loquat blossoms or any other frippery.
Valentino, by Giovanni Pascoli. Lino launches into it like greeting an old friend: “Oh! Valentino vestito di nuovo/come le brocche dei biancospini!/Solo, ai piedini provato dal rovo/porti la pelle de’ tuoi piedini…”
Biancospino, or common hawthorn, is one of the first heralds of spring.
Then there are lines he doesn’t remember so I’ll skip those, then the conclusion and the link to March: “… e venne/Marzo, e tu magro contadinello/restasti a mezzo…ma nudi i piedi, come un uccello:/come l’uccello venuto dal mare,/che tra il ciliegio salta, e non sa/ch’oltre il beccare, il cantare, l’amare/ci sia qualch’altra felicita’.”
Valentino is a poor country boy whose widowed mother survives by selling the eggs from their chickens. Winter is brutally hard and he has outgrown the shoes she made for him. The poet compares his bare feet to those of a bird. But then in March come the first signs of spring, and he concludes, “like a bird that came from the sea, that leaps in the cherry tree, and doesn’t know that other than to eat, to sing, to love, there could be any other happiness.”
The second of these classics is a little paean to the soft rain of March, which makes the plants begin to bloom.
Che dice la pioggerellina di marzo? by Angiolo Silvio Novaro:
Che dice la pioggerellina di marzo/che picchia argentina/Sui tegoli vecchi/Del tetto, sui bruscoli secchi/Dell’orto, sul fico e sul moro/Ornati di gemmule d’oro?”
“What says the misty rain of March/that strikes silvery/On the old tiles/Of the roof, on the dry motes/Of the garden, on the fig and on the mulberry/Adorned with buds of gold?”
He goes on to say that winter is past, tomorrow spring will come out, trimmed with buds and frills,with bright sun, fresh violets, the beating of birds’ wings, nests, cries, swallows, and the stars of almond, white… The entire team, in other words, plus cheerleaders.
All this sounds much better in Italian, but in any language these poems and their ilk amount to a deep sigh of relief. Sometimes it’s not so much that spring is here, but that winter is gone. Less winter, more spring. If that doesn’t call for a poem, you may have a soul made of styrofoam.
No offense.
"Quando la rosa mete spin/xe bon el go' e el passarin." When the rose begins to bud, the go' and the passarini are good. In other words, to everything there is a season, and March is the moment for these creatures.The passarini are looking good.
We went out rowing the other afternoon, which is always a good thing but not exactly news. Other people might have been unenthusiastic — and in fact, we didn’t see anybody else out — but we don’t wait for the weather to sing its little Lorelei song. That’s a waste of valuable time especially in March, what with Lorelei being so skittish. We just go.
A nondescript March afternoon, soon to become much more descript with the gathering of the oysters.
For a while, the most notable thing about the excursion was the faintly hazy, vague color scheme of the part of the lagoon where we like to go. Then the breeze began to get to me. It wasn’t so strong, but it was raw and insistent, which began to be annoying, like a crying baby in the apartment at the end of the hall. Part of the effect of the crying baby, as with the wind, is that there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it. Things I can’t do anything about really, really annoy me. Just so you know.
But the situation became much more interesting when we ran the boat onto the exposed mudbank — the tide was out — so Lino could go exploring. I would have gone too, but wasn’t wearing shoes that would have made even the slightest effort to resist the squishy, waterlogged terrain.
And what he found were oysters. I knew they were out there because he’s brought them home before. Lagoon oysters on the half-shell were our antipasto for Christmas Eve dinner a few years ago, and they are delectable, not too large, not too small, and faintly sweet. One source states that this breed is known for its “unique tannic seawater flavor…and [is] considered excellent for eating raw on the half shell.” As I said.
To be precise, these unsung lagoon creatures are known elsewhere as the highly prized Belon oyster, the stuff of high-wattage chefs and cultivated feeders. Here, nobody cares about them anymore. Even less than not caring, nobody seems to even know they exist. Here the restaurants are fixated on clams…clams…clams…clams, like a stuck culinary record.
These animals (Ostrea edulis) go by various names, from the clearly appropriate "mud oyster" to the much"European flat oyster" to the much more glamorous Belon oyster. Too bad about the lone canestrello, or "lid scallop," that was forced to come along. Lino would gladly have brought a batch of friends for him, if he'd found them.
Oysters were once as common in the market as clams. A particularly Venetian habit, more firmly rooted than kudzu, is to exclaim “Ostrega!” (OSS-tre-gah) which means “oyster” in Venetian. (Italian: ostrica). It’s an all-purpose term that would instantly reveal you to be Venetian anywhere in Italy; in fact, it carries amusing overtones of charming quaintness to anyone not from here. It is one of those clever next-to words (like “hello” instead of “hell”) that people employ to avoid using a really serious and socially inadmissible word — in this case, “ostia,” which is the Communion wafer. Ostrega is close enough to get your meaning across without offense.
“Ostrega” is a flexible word which, depending on your tone of voice, can express a variously emphatic reaction from astonishment to agreement, disbelief, displeasure, wonder, delight, and so on. “Ostregheta” (OSS-tre-GHE-ta, or “little oyster”) is a gentler variation. I have a Venetian friend who will sometimes say “OO-strega,” which I think is adorable. I keep meaning to ask him if he invented this.
On the building at the corner of Campo San Pantalon is a small stone tablet where fish used to be sold. One of several that remain from the Venetian Republic, it shows a list of the fish for sale and the legal minimum size.
Back to the oysters themselves. One of the clauses in the numberless regulations governing fishermen (which began to be documented in 1270), as stipulated in 1765, stated that “To only the fishermen who personally exercise the laborious toil of fishing, should remain the usual freedom to go to the neighborhoods selling fish at retail such as eels, flounder, mullet, sardines….cuttlefish, clams and oysters in the permitted times.”
Another plaque with fish and sizes is in Campo Santa Margherita, here pleasantly accompanied by three stands selling fish.
But now, as with so many things (such as papaline), they have fallen out of favor and I’m not sure anyone can say why. There seem to be fashions in fish. It can’t be because oysters are difficult to collect, because they’re generally easier than clams. Clams lurk beneath the sediments, but oysters — like canestrelli — are often found lying there on the muddy/sandy bottom, right out in the open, not even trying to hide. You can just pick them up, like Lino does, though back when they had commercial value men would take them by means of a cassa daostreghe, more simply known as an ostregher (oss-treh-GHEHR).
A bragozzo in the lagoon, with an ostregher attached to each mast. (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venezia.)
An ostregher was a sort of baggy net weighted with a strip of iron which was tied to the stern of your boat, and which you would drag along the bottom as you rowed or sailed. Something similar, called a “cassa da canestreli” or “scassa diavolo” was used to take canestrelli (Pecten opercularis), as Lino often did when he was a lad; he sometimes shows me where, along the edges of the Canale del Orfanello stretching from the Bacino of San Marco toward the island of San Servolo. Or in the Canale del Orfano, from San Servolo to the island of La Grazia. Lots of people did this, just for themselves. Even now, a few people might still joke, when the vehicle you’re in (say, the vaporetto) is slowing down for no apparent reason: “Are they dragging a cassa da canestreli?” I imagine that most youngsters have no idea what they’re talking about.
All the fish go by their Venetian names here; the ostrega is second from the bottom, with minimum length of 5 cm (1.9 inches).
Then the city outlawed this technique as damaging to the lagoon. You might say this was a good thing — it’s certainly fine as a concept, like peace on earth — except that it wasn’t damaging, and if it were, why was this method outlawed while illegal clamming continues, night and day, by people using a mechanized version of basically the same technique, leaving utterly barren, completely devastated tracts of lagoon behind?
Lino happily returned to the boat with a bag containing a batch of oysters and a lone canestrelo which he couldn’t resist.
All now frozen solid, awaiting their moment of glory in Lino’s next fish soup.
It turned out to have been, as the saying goes, an excellent day to die. For the oysters, I mean.
I left you with images of raw fish and a gnomic reference to the Christmas Forcola (not to be confused with the Great Pumpkin). I think you deserve to see how they came out.
This is what risotto made from go' looks like. Perhaps you can intuit from the look of it that the last step is to add butter. How could it not be great? If this dish was to be found on any Venetian table other than ours, though, I would be very happy to know it.And this is the grilled eel. True, it doesn't look dramatically different than when it was raw, but I think it tasted a whole lot better.The Christmas Forcola. For me, the only thing cooler than decorating it would be to row it in this state. But I know beyond any doubt that the mere suggestion would be thrown down the well of Discarded Americanate. In any case, I like to think that the forcola enjoys being used for something.One of the best Nativity scenes I've yet discovered, here in the church of San Biagio. It has many imaginative touches but two flaws which concern me. First flaw: We have all the fundamental components here except for one thing. Where's the manger? I tried to convince Lino that a hayrack could perhaps serve the same purpose, but he wasn't buying it. He was also not so keen on the fact that Mary is holding the Baby Jesus when he's supposed to be lying in the manger. But if there isn't one......Second flaw: Much as I love this domestic scene (two bonus points for the laundry hanging out to dry), I can't get past the fact that there is a pig. I don't insist on the manger, but I can't see any justification on this earth for there being a pig. I must speak to the priest.But while their imaginations were running wild, the designers came up with a very nice addition to the traditional cast of characters: Fishermen, with net and fish. In the upper left corner is a small waterfall, which adds a nice sound to the atmosphere. I'm not convinced that fishermen are likely to be out at night in the way the shepherds were, but I'll still go with it. After all, they've put in a pig. A couple of fish can't matter, especially when you remember their symbolic value.Returning from the perplexing sacred to the reassuringly profane, a batch of Santas have asked to wish you all a good night. I let them stay up just this once.
Here the holiday season breaks down roughly into three categories: Food, Religion, and Santa. (I include “presents” under “Santa,” unless you’re giving somebody gold, frankincense, and/or myrrh.) I can’t think of any component which wouldn’t fit in at least one of those columns.
Santas are everywhere, especially for sale.
My impression is that the adults respond to the first, children to the third, and somewhere in there religion jostles to find a place, as if it were stuck inside a vaporetto churning toward December 25 and can’t manage to get off at the right stop because everybody is blocking the aisle with their strollers, shopping carts, enormous bags, and equally enormous selves. Yes, it’s a project here, as in many places, to feel that Christmas is anything other than a big blobby holiday everybody loves or hates for their own reasons.
This is not to say that people don’t acknowledge any religious aspect of the day — they do. By the admission of many, it’s one of the few times a year that they pass through the church doors. And virtually every church boasts its own Nativity scene, many of which are appealingly homemade. I don’t know if the big mega-shopping centers on the mainland display the Nativity in any form other than in a box with a price tag — I have never gone over there before the holidays and I don’t feel like risking what remains of my equilibrium by trying it.
But if I’ve never gone, why do I assume it’s bedlam? Two words which apply to life on the mainland: Kids and cars.
Here is our order of march for the festive three days (yes, we get a bonus, thanks to St. Stephen).
Buy groceries/send cards/clean and decorate hovel. Seeing that we have no space for anything larger than a paper clip, we skip the tree. I drape some festoons around the heavy forcola made for rowing in the stern of a balotina. I call it the Christmas Forcola and I really like it. And after all, it was a tree once.
The first year I did this, Lino regarded it as a possibly ominous sign of an incurable urge Americans are known to have to come up with impulsive, unorthodox, possibly unnecessary, vaguely embarrassing stunts. These are generically called americanate (ah-mer-i-cahn-AH-teh). Americanate of any sort fly in the face of The Way We’ve Always Done It and are sure to draw more ridicule than appreciation. Even if you commit one of these acts in the privacy of your own home, your Italian consort will still feel that the Natural Order of Things has been disagreeably disturbed. I learned early on that they’re not worth it. But the Christmas Forcola stays.
Christmas Eve: Big dinner. It is always based on fish, and more precisely, in the manner of Venetian families since the Bronze Age, the menu is this:
Antipasto — anything you like and can afford, which in our case rules out baccala’ in most forms but does allow space for smoked herring, anchovies, and some Ukrainian caviar we were given.
These are the lagoon gobies known as go'. They are approaching their moment of glory, if they but knew it.
First course: Risotto of go‘. You may remember we scored a small trap for snaring these lagoon fish, but we’ve also fished for them by looking for their lairs and then inserting an arm (Lino’s arm, I’ll admit) down into it till the fish is grasped. For years the go’ was one of the many humble and abundant fish on which families relied, and was consequently very cheap. In that era, sea bass and bream were elite creatures which cost three times what you’d pay for go’. Now the situation is reversed: Thanks to fish farms, bass and bream are sold at fire-sale prices (7 euros a kilo, or $5 per pound), and go’ now costs 18 euros a kilo ($12 a pound). Lino can’t get over it.
Anyway, risotto of go’ is a profoundly Venetian dish, so profound that you hardly ever find it on restaurant menus. The memory of this comestible has almost disappeared under the onslaught of Norwegian salmon and French turbot.
Second course: Roasted eel. You could also simmer your pieces of eel in tomato sauce, but throwing chunks of this creature on the griddle and then opening all the windows to let out the smoke from its burning fat is part of Christmas. It is extremely delectable and I have come to count on it as part of the holiday tastefest.
Pieces of eel neatly removed from their bone, ready for the griddle.
And I realize how blessed we are to be able to eat it, considering that Lino remembers there were people, when he was a lad (and for centuries before, probably), who were so poor that they would go to the fish market on Christmas Eve and ask the vendors for the offal — the heads and innards of the eels — to have something to make their risotto with. I did not make that up and neither did he.
Yes, you can have bass or bream or canned tuna or whatever else you might prefer. But eel is the Ur-fish for Christmas Eve. Just for the record.
Then we eat some pieces of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, which is the perfect antidote to the fish taste lingering in your mouth. (Actually, we eat its humbler cousin, a cheese called grana padano. Sorry, but it’s just as good.)
Now you can get panettone that is iced and festooned. Where will it end?
Then some radicchio from Treviso, either chopped as a salad or grilled on the stove. The bitterness perfectly offsets the cheese flavor lingering in your mouth.
Yes, it’s all been figured out and would be very hard to improve on, in my view.
Then there’s a free-for-all involving nuts, fruit, and nougat (soft? hard? with almonds? peanuts? it’s up to you). And if you like — and I certainly do — a few spoonfuls of mostarda, which comes in various styles but which is essentially applesauce that has been debauched by the sharpest mustard imaginable, studded with pieces of candied, flaming-flavored fruit. If you remember Red-Hots, you only have to imagine them as nuggets of fruit.
This, and opening the presents, gets you to the verge of midnight, and it’s off to mass. They tend not to do pageants, but there is a smattering of Christmas songs which tag the event as festive. You wouldn’t know it by the songs themselves; if you hadn’t been informed that it’s Christmas, the music would lead you to suppose that the ritual was something between Ash Wednesday and the Day of the Dead.
I will resist the temptation to express my views on how the glorious traditions of music have deteriorated in the old Belpaese; I’ll just say not to expect to be hearing soaring cantatas or any of the sublime compositions with which the great masters, many of them Italian, blessed the world. If you think of church music here nowadays, at least at the parish level, you must imagine peeling plaster set to two guitars and a piano played by someone who hasn’t yet taken his second lesson.
The congregation does sing “Adeste Fidelis” and “Silent Night,” but in the most lugubrious way possible. If it were any more lugubrious, the singing would come to a complete stop. There is also a special Christmas song (undoubtedly there are more, but it’s the only one I hear around here) called “Tu scendi dalle stelle“ (You came down from the stars) which in its sincerity and simplicity could really squeeze your heart. Unfortunately, this too is sung as a dirge. Happily, I have found a version which gives much more of a sense of the beauty of this little carol; the translation isn’t very good but it’s better than nothing. Meanwhile, though, I think the music will have the desired effect.
You get home past 1:00 AM but don’t think you’re headed straight to bed: First you have to eat some slabs of panettone and drink some prosecco.
Eating and drinking: What an original idea; it’s only been two hours since we hauled ourselves up from the table.
Then it’s off to bed, so we can sleep until it’s time to get up on Christmas morning. Which means going to mass (again), but this time at the basilica of San Marco, followed by MORE FOOD.
Christmas lunch! Tortellini in broth, an elixir made yesterday by simmering beef and chicken and a couple of hefty beef bones along with onion, celery and carrot. It’s going to be heavenly, I can tell just by looking at it.
For Lino as a lad, and for mostly everyone else, Christmas was food. “Who knew anything about presents?” he recalled rhetorically. “We hardly had a tree, either. At Christmas you ate — you ate things you didn’t have at any other time of year.” His mother made the pasta herself, and then the tortellini. Then came hunks of the boiled meat. In the evening, veal roast with polenta. Lest you imagine his Christmas as something Dickensian, he knew people — they lived upstairs — who didn’t have meat, period. I know some elderly Venetians who recall that the crowning moment of any holiday meal was chicken.
We will be preparing something radically different for Christmas evening (but not so radical as to qualify as an americanata): Roast pork with fennel seeds. Oddly enough, this unusual recipe got the official stamp of “Well, let’s give it a try” approval. This decision was pushed over the top by my enthusiasm for roast pork, which I think he may never have tasted. I hope my memories have not deceived me, as they so often do.
This is verging dangerously close to being an americanata. That, or the house is inhabited entirely by children.
But it’s not over: The next day is the feast of Santo Stefano, a national holiday not unlike Boxing Day in England. There are no rules about the menu, but it’s not composed of leftovers. Generally, assorted configurations of relatives get together for this too. Hours and hours spent sitting at a table; even if you eat just one bite (well fine, two bites) of what’s offered, you will go home feeling like one of those inflatable punching clowns.
Back in the Great Days, the celebration of the feast of Santo Stefano was remarkable, even for Venice. When the body — the entire body, not just a tidbit — of Christianity’s first martyr was brought to Venice from Constantinople in 1009 AD, it was placed beneath the high altar of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. (Yes, there is a church of Santo Stefano, but it was built later and by then, everyone was used to the relics being elsewhere.)
The story goes that the people rushed to implore doge Ottone Orseolo to go venerate this relic on the feast of Santo Stefano, and to require their descendants to do likewise every year. He obliged, and this event became a national holiday (of the nation of Venice, obviously).
In fact, the ducal visit became two: One on Christmas night, and one on the following morning. The reason for this has not been revealed to me, but I can report that the nocturnal visit (the one time in the year that the doge was allowed to leave the Doge’s Palace at night) became an event that was spectacular, even for Venice.
In her classic work, Origine delle Feste Veneziane, Giustina Renier-Michiel outlines this moment (translated by me):
As soon as the Christmas mass was ended in San Marco, it was already getting dark. The doge boarded his magnificent barge [note: not the Bucintoro, but a slightly smaller craft known as a peatona], accompanied by his counselors, the Heads of the Quarantie [several bodies including the Supreme Court and the Mint], and other administrators, as well as the 41 men who had elected him doge.
He was preceded by boats carrying lights…and followed by innumerable small boats of every type, also supplied with lights, all together they covered the space between San Marco and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. This area was illuminated also on the right and left by certain floating lamps called ludri, made of rope impregnated with pitch, which made a brilliant effect visible from far away, and whose reflections on the water produced a magical effect.
When His Serenity disembarked, he passed under an elegant covered gallery which had been specially constructed, all the way to the church door. On this occasion…the Dalmatian troops were lined up, gorgeously dressed, with the banner unfurled, the military band playing…
The doge was received at the church door by the Abbot; they exchanged greetings and entered the church together.
In the meantime, the Venetian noblewomen were disembarking from their gondolas, all of them dressed in black dresses with long trains, and their heads, necks, bosoms and ears were all adorned with precious jewels, their faces veiled with the most delicate black lace. Then they too entered the already crowded church.
Then of course the whole thing was repeated as everyone left the church and returned to Venice.
I can tell you that the holidays will not be resembling much of that — though I think I can dig out a fragment of a precious jewel somewhere. But it will be very close to that in my spirit, and I hope in yours also.
The best Nativity scene ever: Floating on a platform in front of the boathouse of the Generali Insurance Company rowing club.
