The Garden of the Forgotten Venetians: Francesco Querini
Francesco Querini isn’t exactly forgotten, even if the inscription on his monument has become totally illegible, but the casual passerby has no way of identifying him. He’s hard to miss, though, considering that his statue has a front-row seat in the Gardens, and he makes quite an impression — in Venice one certainly doesn’t expect to see a man in Arctic gear with his huskies, staring at the horizon.
No, he did not bring the serum to Nome. I suppose he could have, but he had been dead for 24 years by then. Oh wait — we don’t actually know when he died. We only know when he was last seen: March 23, 1900. So basically he’s famous not for what he did, but for what he didn’t do: Make it home safe from the North Pole.
Querini was born on December 16, 1867, a member of the San Silvestro branch of one of Venice’s most illustrious and ancient families; he was also a decorated naval officer, and a scientist. He spoke English, French and German perfectly, and he was up to speed in Latin, though it probably wasn’t something he often needed in conversation. He was prepared for many things in life, but he wanted more than what even the most eventful naval career could offer.
In 1899 Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoia-Aosta, duke of the Abruzzi, organized an expedition to the North Pole, and asked Querini to join; his responsibilities were to be the collection of minerals and acting as the right-hand man of Captain Umberto Cagni (KAN-yee) for the scientific observations.
This may not sound like anything impressive today, but theirs was the latest in an already long series of efforts to certifiably reach the North Pole. It had become something of an international competition.
The immediately preceding attempt had been Nansen and Johansen in April 1895, who reached latitude 86°14′ North on skis before they turned back. Each expedition was getting closer to the goal, and the duke, already famous for his extreme adventures, was determined to be the one to get there.
The group of 21 members departed from Archangel on July 12, 1899 aboard the revised whaling ship “Stella Polare,” and in the course of the expedition various members suffered the usual Arctic horrors, from frostbite to amputations to their eyes freezing shut. On March 11, 1900, after the long winter in the ship preparing for the assault, and a failed first start, it was off for the Pole.
Ten men were divided into three sections. The duke had to stay in camp due to slow recovery from the aforementioned amputation (of two frozen fingers). Cagni had three men, Cavalli Molinelli had two men, and Querini had two men. I don’t know how the 104 sled dogs and ten sleds were apportioned.
The temperature dropped to -53 degrees C (-63 F) but worse than the cold were the ridges. Colliding ice floes often create ridges, and progress was much slower than the men had anticipated (four kilometers in 12 hours, or 33 meters/100 feet per hour, or a little more than one foot per minute). Supplies began to dwindle, and after 12 days of struggle forward it was clear that there wouldn’t be enough food for everybody to reach the Pole and return.
On March 23, 1900 Cagni ordered Querini and his men to turn back toward base, and shortly thereafter Cavalli also headed back. Cavalli made it, after 24 days of trekking, and Cagni also made it after a harrowing two solid months (subtracting dogs and abandoning equipment along the way). But Querini and his two intrepid companions, Felice Ollier (a mountain guide from the Val d’Aosta, 30 years old) and first macchinista* Enrico Alfredo Stokken (Norwegian, 24 years old, who had asked to be taken along), were never seen again.
Cagni’s four-man squad had reached latitude 86°34′ on 25 April — Saint Mark’s day! — setting a new record by beating Nansen’s result by 35 to 40 km (22 to 25 miles), stopping at about 382 km/237 miles short of the Pole. I’d like the fact to sink in that an Italian team established a polar record that stood until May 12, 1926, when Amundsen and another Italian, Umberto Nobile, verifiably attained the Pole. More about them in the next installment.
Naturally the whole expedition was aghast at Querini’s disappearance. The duke organized a search party that went east for 12 days. But by August 16 the group decided they finally had to depart, and the “Stella Polare” weighed anchor from its harbor on Prince Rudolf Island. They left abundant provisions of every kind, as well as eight dogs (and food for same), plus a small boat, and shaped their course for Norway.
Does it seem strange that somebody could just disappear? It’s strange that it didn’t happen more often, up there surrounded by several million square kilometers of empty white.
They were walking on ice, which tends to form in ridges, “small ‘mountain ranges’ that form on top of the ice…that can easily be two meters/six feet or higher,” states the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “Ridges create significant obstacles to anyone trying to traverse the ice. One usually encounters 4 or 5 pressure ridges per kilometer, but the number may rise to 30 per kilometer in places.”
Furthermore, the ice is floating. Setting aside the dread danger of “leads,” or water breaking open between the stretches of ice, the men were trudging across floes that were subject to four forces: “Wind drag, water drag (current), Coriolis force (a force resulting from the earth’s rotation, which acts at right angles to the velocity vector of the ice …), and lateral forces resulting from the pressure of the surrounding ice floes,” as explained in “The Physics of Ice.” ” The earth is rotating from west to east. If the forces of wind and current move the floe to the south… the floe tends to lag, and acts as if a force were pushing it westward.” The motion of the ice was one reason Cagni’s team took two months to make it back, as whole days were lost as the men walked forward on ice which was moving backward.
As Querini’s fate was reluctantly accepted, the memorials began to appear.
In November of 1900, the Italian Geographic Society awarded its silver medal to “the Hero fallen in one of the most arduous battles of science.” Dramatic as their race to the Pole was, the men were also pursuing important research, among which were the exact determination of the oceanic circulation, the location of the magnetic pole and its influence, light phenomena in the polar night, the thermal economy of the atmosphere and the Arctic seas, the formation and drift of the ice, the force of gravity, and measuring the depression of the planet toward the North Pole.
Early in 1901, the city of Venice advertised a large reward to anyone able to give news of the men. On May 22, 1901, Count Filippo Grimani, mayor of Venice, bestowed on Querini’s father, Nunzio, a gold medal as a token of “the city’s sentiment toward the memory of his son.”
On May 16, 1901, Count Piero Foscari met with 20 dissatisfied members of the Royal Rowing Society Bucintoro and founded a new rowing club named in honor of his lost friend: the Royal Rowing Society Francesco Querini.
Refusing to abandon all hope, even after frequent questioning of whaling crews brought no information, the duke sent a ship to Franz Josef Land in the summer of 1901, commanded by the father of machinist Stokken. They too returned with no news whatever.
In May of 1903, the Italian Navy sent the family a medal honoring all the members of the expedition.
On October 12, 1903, the city council of Venice unanimously approved the commissioning of a monument to Querini (the famous statue), to which the duke of the Abruzzi contributed 10,000 lire (this was only slightly more than the annual salary of an upper-echelon civil servant). It also voted to establish a scholarship in Querini’s honor for the sons of Venetian seamen or military officers applying to the Naval Academy at Livorno.
It is reported that a further phrase was incised — if it was on the pedestal, it also has disappeared — to honor Querini’s comrades. It said “A PERENNE MEMORIA / SI SCRIVONO QUI I NOMI / DEGLI ALTRI DUE COMPAGNI PERITI NELLA SPEDIZIONE / ENRICO ALFREDO STOKKEN 1 MACCHINISTA / FELICE OLLIER GUIDA.” “In perpetual memory / are written here the names / of the other two companions who perished in the expedition / Enrico Alfredo Stokken first macchinista / Felice Ollier guide.”
For the record, there is a monument to Felice Ollier in Courmayeur in the Val d’Aosta, also offered by the duke. I have yet to locate any mention of a memorial to Enrico Alfredo Stokken.
One doesn’t want to imagine Querini’s last days, or at what point he and his companions realized it was over, or when it actually was over for the last of them. Did they starve? Freeze? Drown? Were they killed by polar bears? It seems as if they simply evaporated, and I, for one, profoundly wish that could have been true.
- On a steamship, the macchinista was responsible for operating the machinery in the engine room in response to the captain’s orders from the bridge. Before automated controls, when the man at the wheel would call an order (“full steam ahead,” for example), the macchinista did whatever was necessary to whatever machines were required for the maneuver.
Selvatico postscript
When I mentioned that then-mayor Riccardo Selvatico was the guiding spirit behind the huge undertaking of building (and paying for) healthier housing in Venice, I left it at that. It sounds important, but kind of lame.
Until you consider the conditions that many (not all, of course) Venetians were living in at the end of the nineteenth century.
So even though the clean, foursquare handiwork of these reformers may not look picturesque or romantic (whatever that may be), I hope you will look with deeper respect at these more modern tracts around the city when you consider how they changed the lives (starting by saving them) of many families. I am sure that nobody living in one of those picturesque houses missed it at all when something dramatically better presented itself. A few of Lino’s friends in early childhood lived in circumstances which weren’t of the best; one of his clearest memories about a friend’s house summarizes their family’s situation: “The smell of cold ashes.”
The Garden of the Forgotten Venetians – Riccardo Selvatico
This sylvan glade was created by Napoleon when he went through Venice like the Destroying Angel, razing and demolishing scores of churches, convents, scuole and other buildings that were inconsiderately sited where he wanted something else to be, or that happened to contain things he wanted such as gold, jewels and works of art.
Nowadays the Giardini Pubblici (Public Gardens) are best-known for accommodating the original pavilions of the art extravaganza known as the Biennale. Also, being a garden, the area is full of trees and flowers and shrubs, plus an attractive little playground. It even offers a useful amount of space to handle thousands of runners at the finish line of the Venice Marathon.
However, this 13-acre piece of Venice is more than a shrine for art lovers or a bosky dell for the relief of exhausted tourists. It is a garden of remembrance(s) of people and/or events of which hardly anybody remembers anything. That’s a wild guess on my part, based on the general nonchalance with which people wander through. Look at the bronze bust of Giorgio Emo Capodilista; it has “And now the weather report from Oblivion” written all over it. Not to mention Carlo de Ghega, another extremely worthy Venetian whose crumbling memorial plaque is only about 45 seconds away.
So I’ve decided — SEEING THAT THERE ARE NO HELPFUL EXPLANATORY SIGNS ANYWHERE, THE KIND THAT MANY TOWNS WHOSE CITIZENS AND OFFICIALS FEEL SOME CIVIC PRIDE OFTEN PLACE NEAR WORTHY LANDMARKS — to remedy this oversight. I’m limiting myself to the Gardens at the moment, because I intuit that trying to address the skillions of other personages “remembered” around Venice would be a life’s work. Not a reason not to do it, just a reason to evaluate it carefully.
But the Gardens are calling. May I present Riccardo Selvatico, our first example of departed glory:
Selvatico was born in Venice in 1849 and died in 1901. Trained as a lawyer, he was mayor of Venice from 1890-95. He was also a poet and writer of comedies (I guess politics could help you with that) written in the Venetian dialect. When he wasn’t scribbling he did a number of important things. For one, he established a fund to finance the construction of healthier housing, replacing swathes of dwellings which were worthy of New York’s Lower East Side or Rio’s favelas; he would have lived through several cholera epidemics, so he didn’t need anybody to explain the problems of slums.
And if that doesn’t seem especially herm-worthy, he was also the person who came up with the idea, approved by a city-council vote in 1894, of holding an international art exposition in Venice every two years. In other words, he invented the Biennale, which now runs for at least six months, and sometimes seven, every year. It brings glory to the participants and boatloads of money to the city — I have no way of knowing which aspect inspired him more. Maybe it was a draw. The opposition party, naturally, stigmatized it as yet another example of his administration’s tendency to waste money on projects of barely discernible utility, in order to favor its friends and clients.
So he wrote a little poem called “Metempsicosi” in which he imagines that if it were true that we can be reincarnated as some animal, he’d like to come back as a pigeon in the Piazza San Marco, watch the people, fly around, and poop on the hats of a couple of individuals he isn’t going to name.
His five years as mayor were busy, of course, partly due to an ongoing battle between his highly eclectic and non-religious government and the opposition party marshaled by Giuseppe Sarto, then patriarch of Venice but later Pope Pius X. In 1895 Sarto’s faction won the election and Selvatico was back on the street. Separation of church and state was not an important principle at the time.
Selvatico clearly accomplished more than your usual assortment of Bepis and Tonis (“Bepi”and “Toni” are the immemorial nicknames of the quintessential pair of Venetian friends, up to and including today). I’m glad his efforts were appreciated, though the encomiums came after his death, as usual.
I Recini da Festa (“The best earrings”) is a comedy in two acts set in Venice, first performed in Venice to great success at the Teatro Goldoni on April 4, 1876 (14 years before he became mayor, so people knew what they were getting into, so to speak, when they elected him). One critic calls this comedy as “light and intricate as a piece of Burano lace,” still a stellar example of the best of the theatre in Venetian dialect of the time. Then as now, everybody spoke Venetian, so it wasn’t necessarily seen as a quaint way of talking, or even typical of a particular social class.
A poverty-stricken young married couple — also, she’s pregnant — is living with her parents because the husband has been rejected by his rich father who was opposed to the wedding. This opposition is based on an old quarrel between the two fathers-in-law dating from their youth, about which the newlyweds know nothing. Her father can’t support them all, so his wife breaks the piggybank in which the money for the crib was being kept.
But the baby MUST have a crib so that the father can at least put up a good appearance, therefore the daughter (soon to be mother) decides to pawn her best earrings. The person who resolves all the twists is the big-hearted and astute midwife, who’s ready to make any sacrifice to settle the matter. In the end the two old enemies make peace, and the rich father himself gives the earrings back to his daughter-in-law. Happy ending for everybody!
One critic calls this little confection “fresh, simple, full of domestic intimacy, which even today one hears willingly.”
Perhaps even better-known (among Venetians) is his poem “Brindisi” (toast), written in honor of the Regata Storica of 1893, and read by Selvatico at the then-traditional dinner given for all the racers the Thursday evening before the big event on Sunday.
That year the festivities were grand — nine new gondolinos had been constructed, and six bissone were bedecked at a cost of 3000 lire ($15,678 adjusted value). The rockstar pair of rowers, the Zanellato brothers, weren’t competing, and that left three crews which were virtually equal. Emotions were high even before the wine began to flow.
Like most poetry, it’s infinitely better spoken than read in silence, and I can only imagine the exultation that greeted the last few verses. I will translate, knowing that things like this come out in translation as if they’d been soaked in bleach. The original is below.
There are some who tremble/Looking around/And seeing that the world/Keeps going along every day
It seems that Venice/Once so beautiful/A little at a time/She too has changed
Mincioni/Let me say it/Venice doesn’t change/No matter how much people shout (terms in italics explained below)
The calle de l’Oca/has gone to hell/But the Grand Canal/For Lord’s sake, who would touch it?
They’ve gone to hell/parties and gambling houses/Dances, country festivals/
The Forze di Ercole/the puppet shows
So fine– but there is always/our Regata/There is always the festa/That nothing can affect (literally “impact”)
Cape, wig/ hat shaped like a raviolo/They’re dead and buried/But there is still the boatman!
And as long as this breed/Of arms and lungs/Of men who are tressi/sbragioni but good
As long as this breed/I repeat, is like this/Venice doesn’t change/Venice is beautiful!
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Mincioni: Refers to the male member; I’ve tried and can’t confidently give an English equivalent in the sense intended here, which summarizes all the great qualities of men’s men, in a good sense, even while using a word which usually implies the opposite.
Forze di Ercole: These “strengths of Hercules” were complicated human pyramids, spectacular exhibitions of endurance and equilibrium put on during festive occasions such as Carnival.
Hat like a raviolo: Tricorn
Tressi: A person who is a “tresso” (here he is using the plural to characterize boatmen in general) is big, strong, burly, muscular. I can imagine this inspiring an enormous burst of laughter, table- and friend-pounding, general uproar. What’s even better is that “tresso” is also the piece of wood which strengthens and unites two things that without it would collapse — for example, the legs of a chair (technically known in English as the “stretcher”). Calling somebody a tresso suddenly seems like a great thing.
Sbragioni: People called “sbragioni” are those who tend to yell when talking, especially with the belief that yelling will make the shouter win the argument. More laughter.
This is only the first personage to be rediscovered in the Garden of the Forgotten Venetians. Next chapter coming soon.
“Brindisi” for the Regata Storica by Riccardo Selvatico 1893
Gh’è certi che trema
Vardandose a torno,
E visto ch’el mondo
Camina ogni zorno,
Ghe par che Venezia
Un dì cussì bela,
Un poco a la volta
Se cambia anca ela.
Mincioni, mincioni,
Lassè che lo diga;
Venezia no cambia
Per quanto che i ziga.
Xe andada in malora
La cale de l’Oca;
Ma el so Canalazzo,
Perdio, chi lo toca?
Xe andai in so malora
Festini e ridoti,
I salti, le sagre,
Le forze, i casoti:
Va ben, ma gh’è sempre
La nostra Regata,
Gh’è sempre la festa
Che gnente ghe impata.
Velada, paruca,
Capelo a rafiol
Xe morti e sepolti;
Ma gh’è el barcariol!
E fin che sta razza
De brazzi e polmoni,
De omeni tressi,
Sbragioni ma boni,
In fin che sta razza,
Ripeto, xe quela,
Venezia no cambia,
Venezia xe bela!
The fontegheto also has changed its look
While my mind is still loitering around the Giardini Reali, soon to be refurbished, titivated, and otherwise brought back to life (the Giardini, not my mind), I thought I’d show a glimpse of how the immediate area looked before Napoleon moved in and there went the neighborhood.
Between the early 1800’s and the 1930’s, the white stone bridge so gracefully arching over the canal didn’t exist, for the simple reason that Napoleon and those who followed wanted the Gardens (royal, remember?) to be appropriately separated from the rest of the city on that side.
Slightly further back in history, there once was a perfectly serviceable bridge, and without parapets or steps, which was more the norm than not. It led to that now-closed archway, which then was a perfectly serviceable passageway (sotoportego) that went through the Fontegheto de la Farina.
