I don’t know whether they calculate according to volume or weight. Either way, to borrow a phrase, they’re gonna need a bigger boat. I mean cart.
Of course you have thousands of things to do in preparing for the upcoming holidays, and they will be tiring and inconvenient (I’m guessing). But your day is going to have trouble squeezing more than average sympathy from me because I this morning I got a glimpse of the letter-carrier’s day.
Do the words “weighty, awkward, cumbersome” added to ” a couple of awful bridges” bring Christmas cheer to your spirit? Not mine. This vehicle wonderfully shows the determination of the Italian postal system and its foot soldiers to get the serum to Nome. Sorry, I mean the mail — or your Amazon orders — to you. It reminds me of those fabulous motorbikes, the ones that buzz around Naples loaded with entire families, their sports gear (surfboards, lacrosse racquets, five-person tents), domestic animals, the Supreme Court, the 66th Armor Regiment, and so forth, as if it were nothing.
I used to admire the trash collectors, and I still do. But the letter-carriers have taken the game up to the Expert level.
One might categorize this construction as either a work of art or engineering. There could be anything here. Ernest Hemingway’s lost suitcase of short stories, or the solution to the Zodiac Code, or the Seven Cities of Cibola. Who would know? The letter-carrier was at the far end of the calle slipping an envelope into a letterbox. All I can say is that he must have a brain that goes into extra dimensions, because his route must be designed to a diabolical degree. Imagine arriving at an address and discovering that the item you need is on the very bottom underneath everything.It occurs to me that his trolley has evolved in somewhat the same way of the average newsstand here. There are certainly some newspapers wedged into this pandemonium of paper, but as you see, the owner’s survival clearly no longer depends on the sale of newspapers.
It is admittedly a narrow canal, and not the only narrow one in the city. But places to keep your boat are almost impossible to find, so one has to Make Do. But that doesn’t always Make Happy.
If you are close enough to read this, then this person may well be talking to you.
“Pay attention when you’re maneuvering / The executioners of your dead relatives / There is always damage to repair / at my expense.”
Let me explain about the executioner. “Boia,” depending somewhat on intonation, is one of the baddest of the bad words you can use in relation to people, things, phenomena, events, microbes, anything. To invoke the boia in any expression kicks it up numerous notches. Do not use it unless you mean it.
To draw a person’s deceased relatives into the situation is also an expert level insult. Putting them together means that this person is beside himself. Of course, you yourself can’t be offended by this because you are innocent. You have never damaged his boat when trying to squeeze past in your boat, you have never even gone down that canal. And if you did, as they say here, you were sleeping.
Seen from this angle, the canal does not, to my eye, appear to present any particular challenge to most passing boats. I see that the boat ahead of him still carries a fender that died nobly in service to its master, and you don’t hear him complaining.Seen from this perspective, though, the boat is clearly in a risky position with regard to the 90-degree angle just behind it to the left. A boat turning that corner, entering or exiting, would have to really care about not scraping the boat on the right. If you don’t pay attention the tide will play tricks on you here, whether it’s rising or falling, and your motor won’t do much to save you from contact unless you are already prepared for the tricks. Most people with motorboats don’t even know what the tide is anymore. They may have read it about it once, riffling through Moby-Dick. So our exasperated boat-owner has been reduced to irritable fist-shaking. In his situation, I myself might have considered finding some more effective protection than those three little impotent fenders, but why fix a problem if you can just rant about it.Speaking of narrow canals, this one isn’t much narrower than the one above, but it doesn’t have any insidious corners. Boats on both sides give the sensation of having to slalom past them, though obviously if you go slowly all you have to do is maintain a straight line. Too bad you have to slice through all those clotheslines and laundry on the way…. Notice that there is a wide difference of opinion among the boat-owners concerning the fenders, need for or usefulness of. The quaint little fronds of twisted rope are adorable. I wonder if they were ever effective.In this case, the two boat-owners have hit upon the perfect method for protecting their boats from damage. Just make it impossible for anybody to get through. I have checked with my resident navigator/expert and he confirms that there is no secret way to slither through here. This canal is now blocked. I don’t think this situation would have lasted long, though. One or both of these bright sparks is clearly parking illegally, and it wouldn’t have taken long for someone who really needed to pass to have resolved the problem by calling the vigili. This isn’t annoying, this is ridiculous.
Well, I waited six months to get a haircut, so I suppose I’m not one to criticize a hedge. But I’m confused. Wouldn’t you think that the so-called most beautiful city in the world would do a little more to keep itself presentable? I know my mother would.
Granted, we all know how you just go along thinking everything is fine… you’ll fix your hair/mop the floor/write that thank-you note just any day now…and then suddenly something snaps and you realize that your hair is a freaking mess, etc. etc. The jig is up.
In the case of this hedge, nobody seems to be responding to the jig. Maybe wild-haired hedges are just the latest trend, or something related to the Biennale which is just through the park ahead. But company’s coming to town (and some is already here — I’ve seen the yachts). Tomorrow is the first day of the Venice Film Festival, and if there were ever a time to trim that hedge, I’d think the time would be now. Actually, yesterday. ACTUALLY, a week ago.
But what, as I often ask myself, do I know? I never trimmed my bangs to suit my mother, so it’s clearly just as well I was never responsible for a hedge.
Oh, did you want to see that statue? Sorry, come back later. No, I don’t know when. Later.It’s clear at the end of this row that somebody with a hedge-clipper, or machete, had made a good start. But they got a day off, or had to take their kid to the dentist, or something broke the momentum (or the tool), and here we are.Or it might have been around the time when the hedge finally realized it was never going to play Hampton Court Palace, or the Redberry Maze, or the Laberinto Katira, and just let everything go.
Yesterday morning around 10:00 AM. This is the bacino of San Marco, looking toward the Grand Canal.
During the past two weeks there has been fog: Some days on, then sunshine, then back the fog rolls again. It’s very poetic and romantic, looked at one way. But it’s highly inconvenient if you need to take the vaporetto to do something unpoetic, because some lines are suspended, and the rest are all sent up and down the Grand Canal. This means that you may well be walking farther to your destination than you had budgeted time and energy for. Maybe you yourself can manage that, but if you’re a very sick and frail old lady — looking at you, Maria from upstairs — who has to get to the hospital for her chemotherapy, the fact that your vaporetto doesn’t exist today means you’re forced to take a taxi to the hospital. That’ll be 50 euros please. Going, and then coming home. Not at all poetic if you’re living on 750 euros a month.
But let’s say you’re on one of the vaporettos, living a routine day. Don’t relax completely. Because even though the battelli (the big fat waterbuses) have radar, and so does the ferryboat trundling up and down the Giudecca Canal between Tronchetto and the Lido, that doesn’t guarantee that the drivers are looking at it, or if they are, are understanding what they are seeing. Radar, much like bras or penicillin, is intended to help you, but only if you actually use it.
Visibility was like this this morning, and also yesterday morning.
I mention this because yesterday the fog was pretty thick. And around 1:00 PM, the #2 that crosses the Giudecca Canal between the Zattere and the Giudecca itself collided with the ferry. At that point the two routes are operating at right angles to each other. Everybody knows this. I mean, one shouldn’t be even minimally surprised to find these two boats out there.
But find each other they did. In the collision nobody was hurt, but one passenger temporarily lost his mind and punched the marinaio, the person who ties up the boat at each stop, in the face. Why the marinaio? Because he was there, I suppose. He certainly wasn’t navigating. Nor was the captain, evidently.
This is roughly the area in which the accident occurred. There would have been very little traffic (this photo was not taken yesterday). Plenty of space to maneuver, if one wanted to.
To translate the phrase in the brief article in La Nuova Venezia, “Probably the incident was caused by the thick fog.” I don’t mean to be pedantic, but “The fog made me do it” doesn’t sound quite right. The fog had been out for hours; it hardly sneaked up on the boats from behind. The pedant further wonders why the fog gets all the blame. It didn’t grab the two boats and push them together, like two hapless hamsters. One might more reasonably say that the incident was caused by two individuals, one per boat, who were not paying attention either to the water ahead or to their radar. Footnote: These vehicles operate on schedules. I’m going to risk saying that one could easily predict when they would be, as they put it here, “in proximity to each other.” If one wanted to.
The ferryboat gives Wagnerian blasts of its warning horn when small boats are in its path. There aren’t foghorns anymore, but the ferry’s klaxon can be heard for miles. If it’s blown. (Il Gazzettino, uncredited)This is one of the ferryboats, though maybe not the one involved yesterday. Clearly David met Goliath, but in this case it was David that took the hit. (photo uncredited ACTV)
But let’s return to the poetry.
Rio di San Giuseppe, Castello.Rio di San Pietro, Castello.Rio de l’Arsenal.Admiring the view.Riva degli Schiavoni.Via Garibaldi. Life goes on, and so does the trash.
Rio de la Ca’ di Dio. The forecast is for more fog tomorrow. If I put on my gray coat, I’ll disappear.
