Health returns to Venice, on schedule
Yesterday one of the most important days in the Venetian (hence in my) calendar came around again: the annual feast of La Madonna della Salute, Our Lady of Health.
Health is one of those things, like air or the ability to speak your mother tongue, that you don’t give much thought to till it’s been impaired. Or removed.
In a city that has the highest median age of any city in Italy, health is a subject that’s right up there on the short list of things to really worry about, several places ahead of acqua alta and even a close second to tourism. Considering that the city government is currently debating (or not — I can’t keep track) whether to close the hospital here and send everybody who needs help to the big hospital on the mainland (pause for screams of rage and disbelief), health is clearly a big issue.
But let us return to the health at hand. This feast was established in 1630 in thanksgiving for the Madonna’s response to the desperate plea of the city of Venice for deliverance from arguably the worst plague in its history, though the pestilence of 1574 was also noticeably catastrophic.
If anyone (such as me) has ever tried to imagine what an epidemic of plague might entail, a few passages from “The Betrothed” by Alessandro Manzoni might help. They certainly provide a way to grasp the magnitude of this festa (not to mention the votive church, which took 50 years to build).
The plague of 1630 exterminated much of northern Italy, and drawing on contemporary documents, Manzoni describes the plague in Milan. I presume that it was much the same in Venice, where 80,000 Venetians died, including the doge, though here the carts obviously were replaced by boats.
…sickness and deaths began rapidly to multiply…with the unusual accompaniments of spasms, palpitation, lethargy, delirium, and those fatal symptoms, livid spots and sores; and these deaths were, for the most part, rapid, violent, and not unfrequently sudden, without any previous tokens of illness….
All the doorways into the streets were kept shut from either suspicion or alarm, except those which were left open because deserted or invaded; others nailed up and sealed outside, on account of the sick or dead who lay within; others marked with a cross drawn with coal, as an intimation to the monatti [men who removed the bodies] that there were dead to be carried away….
Everywhere were rags and corrupted bandages, infected straw, or clothes, or sheets, thrown from the windows; sometimes bodies, which had suddenly fallen dead in the streets, and were left there till a cart happened to pass by and pick them up, or shaken from off the carts themselves, or even thrown from the windows….
And while corpses, scattered here and there, or lying in heaps…made the city like one immense sepulchre, a still more appalling symptom, a more intense deformity, was their mutual animosity, their licentiousness, and their extravagant suspicion…not only did they mistrust a friend, a guest; but those names which are the bonds of human affection, husband and wife, father and son, brother and brother, were words of terror, and dreadful and infamous to tell! the domestic board, the nuptial bed, were dreaded as lurking-places, as receptacles of poison…
Men of the highest rank might be seen without cape or cloak, at that time a most essential part of any gentleman’s dress; priests without cassocks, friars without cowls; in short, all kinds of dress were dispensed with which could contract anything by fluttering about…And besides this carefulness to go about as trussed up and confined as possible, their persons were neglected and disorderly; the beards of such as were accustomed to wear them grown much longer, and suffered to grow by those who had formerly kept them shaven; their hair, too, long and undressed, not only from the neglect which usually attends long depression but because suspicion had been attached to barbers…
The greater number carried in one hand a stick, some even a pistol, as a threatening warning to anyone who should attempt to approach them stealthily; and in the other, perfumed pastils, or little balls of metal or wood, perforated and filled with sponges steeped in aromatic vinegar, which they applied from time to time, as they went along, to their noses, or held there continually.
Some carried a small vial hung around their neck, containing a little quick-silver, persuaded that this possessed the virtue of absorbing and arresting every pestilential effluvia; this they were very careful to renew from time to time…
Even friends, when they met in the streets alive, saluted each other at a distance, with silent and hasty signs. Every one, as he walked along, had enough to do to avoid the filthy and deadly stumbling-blocks with which the ground was strewn, and in some places even encumbered. Every one tried to keep the middle of the road, for fear of some other obstacle, some other more fatal weight, which might fall from the windows…
…the sick… were wandering about as if stupefied; and not a few were absolutely beside themselves: one would eagerly be relating his fancies to a miserable creature laboring under the malady; another would be actually raving; while a third appeared with a smiling countenance, as if assisting at some gay spectacle.
…two horses, which, stretching their necks and pawing with their hooves, could with difficulty make their way; and drawn by these a cart full of dead bodies, and after that another, and another, and another; and on each hand monatti walking by the side of the horses hastening them on with whips, blows, and curses. These corpses were for the most part naked, while some were miserably enveloped in tattered sheets, and were heaped up and twined together, almost like a nest of snakes unfolding themselves….at every trifling obstacle, at every jolt, these fatal groups were seen quivering and falling into horrible confusion, heads dangling down, women’s long tresses disheveled…
Not wishing to spoil the party, I think it’s not a bad idea to acknowledge at least briefly that the day was fixed to express gratitude (or desire) for heavenly intervention in matters of life and death, and not primarily so we could buy balloons of Nemo and Spiderman and eat cotton candy and slabs of deep-fried dough slathered with chocolate.
The weather was perfect, by which I mean cold, raw, damp, foggy, and breezy. I’ve been to the basilica of the Salute to offer my candle on days when it was sunny and the temperature in the sixties, and I can tell you that it just feels wrong. This isn’t a happy holiday, it’s a solemn, penitential, I-really-mean-this kind of day, even though there are plenty of balloons and highly sugared and fat-laden treats being sold from stalls behind the church. It’s probably years before Venetian kids grasp the fact that the day isn’t dedicated to Our Lady of Fat and Sugar. Amazing, now that I think of it, that she should be honored as the guardian of health with this payload of calories. They ought to depict her — no disrespect intended — holding an insulin syringe.
Back to the weather: The worse it is, the happier are the Ladies who Mink. I’ve remarked before that this city is an unrepentant recidivist on the animal-skin subject. (I don’t count shearling in this category.) One winter evening I counted 11 mink coats on the vaporetto going home. Someone I know told me about a little old lady on the Lido who was packing her steamer trunks for a holiday in the Dolomites with four peltish coats. This was the minimum a woman could rationally consider bringing; no telling what your friends would think if they should see you in the same old fur, day after day.
Therefore Lino refers to this legendary day as the feast of Our Lady of the Fur Coat. And laughs on the rare days when it turns out to be, as I mentioned, sunny and warm, because wearing their fur coat to the basilica is more important to these ladies than offering a candle for their husband, or maybe even for themselves. We enjoy imagining them hanging tough in the heat, wrapped in mink, wearing terrycloth headbands, like sweating tennis players.
Yesterday, though, I only saw one fur-like garment, and I am dead certain it was fake. This does not bode well, but I’m not sure for what.
It's hard work to take people's candles, light them and install them. Because you also have to remove somebody else's flaming candle first. These young men spend the day covered with wax drippings.
Castello’s patron saint
I have a new hero.
He emerged from oblivion a few days ago wrapped in the shadows of a bygone regata which is being resuscitated this weekend, and I think he deserves more space than the regata and I want you to know about him not only for his own sake, but to demonstrate that Erla’s Venice does not consist exclusively of moldy leftovers and mismatched socks and intelligent people who believe crazy things and not-so-intelligent people who believe those things are brilliant.
His name was Luigi Graziottin (GRA-tsee-aw-TEEN): Born in Castello in 1852, died in Castello in 1926, and forgotten in Castello ever since.
The regata he was involved in organizing and promoting was inspired by the city-wide desire to celebrate September 20, a crucial date in the amalgamation process of the newly united Italy. The festivities in Castello were a huge neighborhood event.
The race was first known as the Regata di Castello, then the Regata of XX September. It was held ten times between 1887 and 1913, skipping some years for various, ever-more-political reasons, with assorted modifications. Then people stopped commemorating the date and the race had no reason to exist.
I know all this thanks to an excellent book, “La Regata di Castello o del XX settembre,” by Giorgio Crovato. Too bad it’s only in Italian, it’s crammed with fascinating stuff.
Back to Graziottin. He was a carpenter by trade, who worked in the Arsenal, and was also an ex-NCO of the Italian Navy. He furthermore devised a cure for cholera which saved a couple of hundred lives in the national epidemic of 1886, no small feat when you consider how many cholera epidemics decimated Venice and/or Italy in the nineteenth century (1835-36, 1849, 1854, 1886). He told a Roman reporter that he was known in Venice as the “king of cholera” — sounds funny unless you’ve been through a cholera epidemic, which I haven’t, thank God.
Most important — and this is where the heroic element comes in — he was Castello’s guiding light, a one-man social services agency who, without any particular qualifications, became the paladin of the poor, of which Venice at the turn of the century had an enormous supply. More than once, the regata’s festivities, apart from fireworks and the regata, included the distribution, organized by Graziottin, of “bread, yellow flour (polenta), and…wine to the poor of Castello.” Which means he had first managed to inspire donations from local merchants, which also impresses me.
Crovato describes him this way (translation by me):
“He is short and swarthy, with an unkempt beard, long hair….without much income and often in need himself, who runs where he sees the need of some social or civic intervention, without any direct political authority, but as defender of the weakest….”
He wrote so many letters to the Gazzettino to publicize his abundant concerns that the paper summed him up as “…a sort of local Garibaldi, who runs wherever there is need, engaged on diverse fronts, especially in the social realm. Honest and ingenuous, and loyal to his country, as a Venetian and an Italian.”
A man, in short, to whom the phrase “What’s in it for me?” would be incomprehensible, even if spoken in his native language.
In 1888 he wrote a letter to the mayor requesting new clothes for a poor shoemaker who had saved the life of a little girl who had fallen into the canal of Sant’Anna (as it happens, the canal that comes ashore at high tide just outside our door).
On the same day, he alerted the city that the shipyard workers at Sant’ Elena were in imminent danger of losing their jobs.
He got a meeting with the mayor to discuss the dire situation of 70 out-of-work boatmen, suggesting that the schedule for excavating the canals be modified in order to start, say, immediately.
He took four women to Padova to ask the wife of an important politician to intervene on behalf of the women’s husbands, imprisoned for their supposed participation in a sort of rebellion of the porters at the bridge of the Veneta Marina.
The next day he wrote a letter to the newspaper to solicit donations to help a 38-year-old woman with four children whose husband was in jail for homicide. I notice that he didn’t take on the husband’s case, focusing instead on the plight of his destitute family.
He also personally saved more than a hundred people from one life-threatening incident or another.
And on, and on, and on.
Eccentric as he may have been, with his proto-hippie persona buttressed by a blue-collar pragmatism — I picture him as looking something like a cross between Frank Zappa and Rasputin — Graziottin must have gleamed with sincerity and confidence, because people at every level responded. His personal motto, if he’d had time to bother with one, must have been “Get it done.”
The reason I have made room for him in my personal pantheon of heroes (in fact, he made room for himself) is not primarily his energy, or even his successes. It’s his altruism. I can’t express how startling and radiant that is in a city which seems unable to recognize any motive other than “ulterior.” I don’t doubt that the people to whom he appealed may have had many of their own reasons for responding, but I don’t perceive that he had any ambition other than to help people who had nowhere to turn.
I also can’t imagine him answering the numberless cries for help with the by-now ritual responses to problems of any sort or size: “I’ll think about it,” “We don’t have any money,” “I don’t know,” “Probably not,” “I wish I could,” “Maybe next year,” or merely “No.”
Now we have unions and Facebook and special-interest groups and talk shows and all sorts of ways to make our voices heard, even if they are ignored. But there seems to have been something in Graziottin’s voice that was more effective than your average riot, march, or hunger strike. And compassion fatigue seems never to have set in.
Not to idolize the man, I’m just observing the chasm that separates his view of the world and the orientation of large numbers of people here. Of course there are many who labor to help the needy. I even know some of them. But in general, those who have the power to improve things, even little things, don’t. And those who don’t have the power, they also don’t. There’s always time to complain, though.
Graziottin! Thou should’st be living at this hour:/Venice hath need of thee: she is a fen of stagnant/Waters…..
But there the similarity between Wordsworth’s Milton and our own little Luigi ends. Because while Poet A apotheosizes Poet B on the basis of B’s innate grandeur and magnificence, I would skip the sonnet and send a crate of compliments to Graziottin for his simplicity, integrity, and tenacity.
He could probably also have used a gift certificate to a day spa, which I’d happily include, but I doubt he’d waste his time getting his nails buffed and his beard trimmed. He’d probably give it to somebody who really needed it.
Papal visit leads to gondolier smackdown
Perhaps your local gazette hasn’t mentioned it yet, but Pope Benedict XVI is planning a big trip soon. He’ll be touring Northeast Italy, and will be in or around Venice on May 7 and 8.
Venice has a long and prodigious history of state visits — King Henry III of France and Poland, in 1574, was one of the more famous guests, just one of a seemingly infinite procession of princes, ambassadors, potentates, emperors and, of course, popes coming to see the sights, visit the doge, and usually ask for some favor, like money or soldiers. Reading the list of deluxe visitors over the centuries gives the impression that the main business of Venice was hosting foreign notables, while other activities such as running an empire filled the random empty moments, kind of like a hobby.
Yet His Imminence has aroused not only joy and excitement among the faithful, but tension and recrimination and a series of increasingly regrettable remarks among the city’s gondoliers concerning who is going to get to row him the approximately five minutes it takes to row from San Marco to the church of the Salute, and in what boat. By a mystic coincidence, gondoliers are also known as pope (POH-peh), because they row on the stern (poppa) of the gondola. I have no idea what this might portend.
Don’t suppose that the battle to transport the pontiff is any particular evidence that gondoliers are so pious. A pious gondolier would be a distant cousin to a pious illegal-clam fisherman, or a pious doctor of a cycling champion. I’m not saying it’s impossible, just kind of unusual. But they do like to be the center of attention and, in fact, they’re used to being regarded as some sort of star. At least to the damsels they may be so fortunate as to row around the canals.
Popes aren’t supposed to cause dissension, they’re supposed to resolve it. But Benedict has unwittingly set off a sort of collective seizure.
First: Luciano Pelliccioli, vice-president of the gondola station heads (and a gondolier) offered to join Aldo Reato, president of the gondola station heads (and a gondolier) to row His Sanctity in Luciano’s extremely elaborate and glamorous gondola.
No!! The cry went up. Why should those two men profit by their position and crowd out equally (I mean, more) deserving gondoliers? Why, indeed?
Furthermore!! Champion racer Roberto Busetto, never at a loss for an opinion (he isn’t a gondolier, but that’s a detail), objected on the grounds that if Luciano should ever think of selling his gondola, he could easily make a huge profit by marketing it as the gondola that had carried the pope. Busetto gets five bonus points for crassness, though that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
Anyway, Luciano withdrew his offer of his gondola and himself. Reato also withdrew, but the incessant calls have continued. There are 425 gondoliers and by now probably each of the remaining 423 has called him at least once. Some of them have fantastic reasons to be chosen: “Padre Pio came to me in a dream and said you should pick me,” said one. Another person suggested Giorgia Boscolo, the first woman gondolier. That idea burnt up on reentry into reality.
Then somebody suggested the “Strigheta” brothers, Franco and Bruno, sons and heirs (and gondoliers) of one of the greatest racers/gondoliers of all time, Albino “Gigio” Dei Rossi, known as “Strigheta.” (He rowed not only one, but four popes in his day.) They’re loaded with credentials and nobody hates them, which helps.
Then somebody suggested a four-rower gondola, rowed by the current racing champions, the Vignottini and D’Este and Tezzat. I think the idea was that rowing the pope could somehow magically bring peace to these two savagely feuding pairs, though somebody else opined that it wasn’t appropriate to expect the Holy Father to resolve every little neighborhood squabble. In any case, the four men have declared their willingness to row the Pontifex Maximus together, which is already a big step forward.
Then somebody asked: Why should it be a gondola? Excellent question, considering that the city of Venice owns a more capacious gondola-type boat called a balotina, on which Pope John Paul II was borne along the Grand Canal in 1985.
Then some daring person suggested using the “disdotona,” or 18-oar gondola, which belongs to the Querini rowing club, and which in my opinion is not only the most spectacular boat in the city, by far, but would provide 18 men the chance to Row for Holiness.
Naturally, this idea got nowhere, because nobody thought one club should be given preference over another. We’ve all got great boats, the thinking goes — why them and not us?
I’m surprised nobody has yet suggested using the “Serenissima,” the huge decorated bissona with a raised stern, making the pope easy to see plus providing space for his entourage and some trumpeters, if that seemed appropriate. But so far no mention of this little coracle.
Which brought up the next question: Why should the rowers be gondoliers? Another useful point. In the olden days, a visiting potentate — such as John Paul II — would be rowed by the necessary number of “re del remo,” men who had won the Regata Storica five years in succession. There aren’t many of them, because it’s fiendishly hard to do. That would instantly reduce the number of candidates to something manageable.
And by now there has been at least one practical joke. Someone purporting to be Aldo Reato (president of the gondola station heads) called the Gazzettino and said the matter had been settled: Luciano’s fancy gondola was going to be used after all, rowed by Franco Girardello, a retired gondolier who goes by the nickname “Magna e dormi” (eat and sleep). This fantasy was quickly dispelled by all concerned except the anonymous prankster.
The most recent bulletin is that the matter will be put to a secret vote among the gondoliers. The mind rather reels. Busetto thinks the papal gondola is going to cost the moon at resale? How much is a gondolier’s vote going to be worth, at this point? No checks, no credit cards.
Comments from bemused readers of the Gazzettino run from “The pope doesn’t care who rows him” to “What a farce” to”Actually, Padre Pio came to ME in a dream and said I should do it.”
A certain Riccardo made the following suggestion:
“Requirements for candidacy:
Never to have blasphemed; Never to have used foul language; Never to have spoken in a coarse tone of voice. In the case of more than one valid candidate (doubtful), preference will be given to the one who has a good knowledge of the principles of Catholicism, and/or who has read at least one of the 16 chapters of the Gospel of St. Mark, patron saint of our city.”
This pastoral visit has been in the planning stages for at least three months — probably more — and yet here we are, at the last minute, dealing with the frenzied bleating of the flock.
Meaning no disrespect, I think it would have been better for everybody if they had given a crash course in rowing to a Rastafarian and a dervish. I can’t think of a gondolier who could possibly be cooler than that.
March 22: Yet another historic day in Venice
1848, if you’ll cast your minds back, was a year that produced a bumper crop of uprisings, insurrections, and assorted revolutions all across Europe. It was a brief, incandescent period variously known as the “Spring of Nations,” “Springtime of the Peoples,” or “The Year of Revolution.”
It happened in Venice, too.
Venice, by then, had spent 51 years — two generations — under an Austrian army of occupation, except for a few scattered years when it was the French instead.
But on March 22, 1848, the independent Republic of San Marco was declared by a group of visionaries led by a Venetian named Daniele Manin (Mah-NEEN).
Historic Irony Alert: He was a relative, by adoption, of Ludovico Manin, the last doge of Venice.
I’ve often reflected on how odd it is that there should be more memorials to Daniele Manin around Venice than to any other individual (I’ve counted five so far), and yet it seems that he has become, like so many other heroes, just another distant star in the galaxy of indifference to which even the most passionate and brilliant people seem to be consigned. If anybody utters his name today (or any day), it’s probably because they’re referring to Campo Manin.
I’m offering this brief disquisition in order to enlarge your view of what history in Venice can entail. It wasn’t just doges and fireworks, it was also patriots and blasting artillery.
I suppose you could live in Venice if you didn’t care about history, though I don’t quite see what the point would be. But if you were to actually dislike history, you should probably move to Brasilia or Chandigarh. History is what Venice is made of, and history is made of people.
In addition to Campo Manin — which you can grasp is named for a person, even if you don’t know what he did — there is the more inscrutable street name of Calle Larga XXII Marzo: The Wide Street of the Twenty-Second of March.
On March 22, 1848, Venice rose up against the Austrian occupiers, and the flag of the independent Republic of San Marco was raised in the Piazza San Marco. It was war.
Not only did the Austrian army fire on the city with cannon placed on the railway bridge (which they had built two years earlier), it also made one of the first attempts at aerial bombardment. They sent hot-air balloons aloft loaded with incendiary bombs rigged with timers; the wind, happily, blew them back to where they came from.
The Venetians and their allies fought ferociously, but whereas once the fact of being surrounded by water had been a defensive advantage, now it became a fatal handicap. The Austrians clamped a siege around the city, reducing it to starvation, which was accompanied by an epidemic of cholera.
One of the best-known poems from this period is “Le Ultime Ore di Venezia” (The Final Hours of Venice), written in 1849 by Arnaldo Fusinato. He relates the desperate last days in the city, constructing an exchange between a passing gondolier and the poet in which they give a summary of the situation in which the former republic found itself. Each stanza concludes with the poignant refrain, “Il morbo infuria, il pan ci manca/Sul ponte sventola bandiera bianca” (Disease is raging, there is no more bread/on the bridge the white flag is waving).
It had to end.
On August 22, 1849, Manin signed the treaty of surrender. The Austrians re-entered Venice, where they remained until 1861. Manin, like several of his ministers, went into exile. He died in Paris in 1857, at the age of 53.
His body returned to Venice on — yes — March 22, 1868, to a city which had finally been liberated from the Hapsburg domination and become part of the Kingdom of Italy. A solemn funeral ceremony was held for him in the Piazza San Marco, and he was placed in a tomb against the north wall of the basilica.
Lino has often told me the anecdote of the little old Venetian lady who was crossing the Piazza San Marco not long after the Austrians returned to the devastated city. A soldier walked by, and his sword was dragging — perhaps only slightly — across the paving stones.
She couldn’t take it. “Pick your sword up off the ground,” she commanded him. “Because Venice surrendered — she wasn’t taken.” Starving a city into submission is one of the least noble ways to conquer your enemy, but history shows that it does get the job done.
Final tally: Slightly more than a year of independence, almost all of which time was spent fighting.
When I reflect on much of this — I shouldn’t, but it’s more than I can resist — and observe the condition of the city’s successive administrations over the past 50 years or so, each of which seems to be a copy of its predecessor, except slightly worse, I can’t bring myself to imagine what Daniele Manin and his dreadnought compatriots might be thinking.
I suppose it’s a good thing after all that he has been “disappeared” into the deep space of cultural oblivion.
The tomb of Daniele Manin in a niche of the basilica of San Marco, facing the Piazzetta dei Leoncini.It would seem that the four lions supporting his sarcophagus are the only ones showing any emotion anymore as to the fate of Manin, his followers, and his city.
The extraordinary facade of the Hotel San Fantin is decorated with cannon and cannonballs from the conflict, as well as several majestic plaques. The marble lion surmounts this inscription: "A remembrance of the heroic resistance of Venice 1849."
Brothers Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, with Domenico Moro -- all Venetians -- attempted a raid in 1844 against the Austrians in Calabria, were captured and shot. 
The Campo de la Bragora was re-named in their honor.
[Translation by me]: Italian Soldiers! The war of independence, to which you have consecrated your blood, has now entered a phase which for us is disastrous. Perhaps the only refuge of Italian liberty are these lagoons, and Venice must at any cost guard the sacred fire.
Valorous ones! In the name of Italy, for which you have fought, and want to fight, I implore you not to lessen your efforts in the defense of this sacred sanctuary of our nationality. The moment is a solemn one: It concerns the political life of an entire people, whose destiny could depend on this final bulwark.
As many as you may be, that from beyond the Po, beyond the Mincio, beyond the Ticino, have come here for the final triumph of our common cause, just think that by saving Venice, you will also save the most precious rights of our native land. Your families will bless the sacrifices which you have chosen to undergo; an admiring Europe will reward your generous perseverance; and the day that Italy will be able to proclaim itself redeemed, it will raise, among the many monuments which are here, of the valor and glory of our fathers, another monument, on which it will be written: The Italian soldiers defending Venice saved the independence of Italy.
The Government 12 August 1848 MANIN