Who knew that three small cans could be a social experiment?
The young man in the Coop supermarket yesterday was either a new kind of tourist, or a new kind of young man, or some prototype of either that I earnestly hope doesn’t move to the production phase.
It was simple, brief, insignificant encounter. Now that I think of it, the moment could have made a moderately useful sketch for first-year acting students.
But we weren’t acting, we (including him) were just living our own banal little lives, stuck in the narrow, crowded aisle amid bottles of olive oil, cans of tuna, and containers of tomatoes in almost every form (the tomatoes, I mean) — tubes of dense concentrate, bottles of thick liquid passata, or puree; cans of tomatoes peeled or pulped. Strange, now that I think of it, that tomato juice was missing.
Anyway, it’s always a challenge to shop in peak tourist season, and going late Saturday afternoon is just asking for trouble. Not only does everybody suddenly realize they have to get yogurt or potato chips or a bag of lemons or 8 six-packs of beer or whatever right then, but it being winter, everybody is taking up twice their space thanks to their bulky down jackets. Especially that tall, strapping young man with his back turned to me.
There was only one package left of three small cans of polpa, and it was far back on the top shelf. Bonus points because at that spot there is a small ramp and I was halfway down the incline, so I had no chance of reaching it myself. But I came for the polpa and I intended to get it.
Cue the tall, strapping young man! Destiny calls! You haven’t reached this height and weight just to waste time training for the varsity clean and jerk. Fate has placed you between a high shelf and a small woman and if you mess with fate you’re doomed to live the last act of “The Flying Dutchman” forever. I guess that’s a little redundant.
Did I mention he was German? Nothing against Germans, honestly, but somehow it matters. It went like this:
Me (one tap on very high shoulder).
He turns around. So far, so normal.
“Puoi tirare giu’ quello?” (pointing to distant object).
“I don’t speak Italian.” English, German accent.
“Could you pull that down for me?” In most of the civilized world — I use the term loosely — that’s generally regarded as a rhetorical question. But here I get a sublimely literal answer.
“Why? I don’t work here.” Completely serious. I already knew that he didn’t work here — it’s the “Why?” that haunts me. I will always regret not having thought to say “Neither do I.” Instead I just said “Do me a favor?” I’m so lame.
He reached up and pulled it down. Turned away. Moved on.
I started to laugh, it was so ridiculous. I hope he heard me.
And so now I dream of Germany, where life is beautiful all the time, you obey the law, follow the rules, stay in your lane, where life is constructed entirely of square pegs and round holes which always fit in their correct and corresponding spaces. This young man must feel like he’s come to a madhouse, here in Italy.
Still, he did leave me a present. “Why? I don’t work here” now sits in a very pretty little crystal box in my mind where I can admire it whenever I need a little boost.
Good thing I didn’t ask him to reach me down one of these.
“Merry Christmas” in pure gold leaf beaten by Marino Menegazzo, the last man in Europe who beat gold entirely by hand. Stefania Dei Rossi’s shop “Oro e Disegni” has plenty of beautiful golden things but the sentiment here is 24 karat.
Naturally I intended to get this out before Christmas, but Christmas itself tangled me up. (Pretty bold move to blame an entire holiday for my own lapses.) Still, I wanted to squeak this into the calendar before 2025 reaches its expiration date.
Just a few glimpses of what I saw as I wandered around. Seems like the holiday was composed mainly of scraps, but they were good scraps.
Heartfelt best wishes to everyone for a peaceful, healthy, safe, nutritionally balanced, philosophically harmonious 2026.
Rio di Sant’Anna looking toward via Garibaldi. The fog helps.Paolo Brandolisio’s forcola workshop has taken a frivolous twist. The forcola now looks like a duck but he gets extra points for making it work.Speaking of frivolity, I bet you’ll wish your house had a Nativity scene arranged inside a monster pasta shell. Someone at the Rizzo shop at San Giovanni Grisostomo deserves admiration and probably also a raise.The fish market at Rialto makes the most of its fishing traps at Christmas.Some bright spark at the Coop supermarket had some spare time, some spare paint and the real Christmas spirit.While we’re on the classic color scheme, let me offer this unidentifiable fruit in a decoction known as mostarda. Nobody cares what it looks like, what people (like me) love is the way its white-mustard-laced syrup is lying in wait to attack your mouth and throat and sinuses. The tiniest bite of this innocuous-looking candied fruit sets off a pyroclastic flow from your throat to your brain. They say it’s intended to aid digestion, but what happens on the way there is what matters. You have sinus trouble? Take a bite of this and you won’t have them to worry about anymore, they’ll be gone.And while we’re on the subject of digestion… These bags, which need no introduction, have been sold in Christmas colors. I have no idea who put these here (of course they’re not supposed to be left on the street), but whoever it may have been has a real sense of humor.I get my boxes of tissues at the Coop, and their Christmas version is very nice. But why did they only put this out on the shelves AFTER Christmas? Lino says they’re trying to clear out the holiday stuff and of course I get that. I just don’t understand why this holiday stuff was never seen before Christmas. So many questions…..One of the prettiest window sills ever. And the person who created this scene has more faith in humanity than, honestly, I ever will.At the Rialto market this sign on the door explained why the Osteria I Compari was closed.“Running off … Maria is born!!! Closed because of happiness.” Nothing to do with Christmas but everything to do with gladness of heart and I want everybody to bask in this.The Arsenale entrance — minimal but basically tells the whole story.Instead of leaves there are lights in front of Nevodi. I like it a lot.Via Garibaldi in holiday mode. Even the women’s bags are red and green. Fun fact: People in the center are walking on a filled-in canal — the edges of which are marked by the white strips along the sides.I don’t know which are lovelier — the lights inside or out. I’m going to say “inside,” but they do work well together.Last year there were lots of little angels fluttering above the creche in front of the church of San Francesco di Paola. This year there are flags. The story here pretty much tells itself.Until a few days ago the cakes in the window at Melita, Mario the pastry-maker’s shop, were about Christmas. All at once (and the countdown has begun) they’re all about New Year. “Buon Anno 2026.” Chocolate huts with chocolate chimneys are absolutely what this world needs more of.There is also a small but aggressive assortment of cakes that have abandoned the innocent greeting in favor of apocalyptic Lord-of-the-Rings shards of Theobroma cacao. Not sure if you’re supposed to eat it or vanquish it.The moon didn’t want to set that morning in early December. It hung on till nearly 8:00, then the clouds crept over it and ordered it to go shine on someone else.
Fiber optic cable is no newcomer to Venice — we’ve had it at home for years now. But clearly our neighborhood is on track for extreme upgrading to intergalactic ultra-fast ultra-wide broadband. Venice might give the impression (briefly, from afar, with your eyes half-closed) of a city left adrift in the backwash of the Renaissance. Yet men have been hard at work these past few days making Venice ever more modern. And I say thanks, but Venice has always been modern.
Behold the mighty Root Cable 185 from Tratos. The company’s website says that it has been “specifically designed for network and telecommunications uses, and is characterized by a high transmission velocity and low attenuation, making it ideal for long-distance connections and broadband applications.” Impressive, but simpler things also impress me, such as the chance (I missed) to watch the procedure of hoisting this monster onto the fondamenta. It does inspire new admiration for the skill and effort that numberless men dedicated to creating Venice (looking at you, Doge’s Palace, belltower of San Marco, etc.). No motors, hydraulic power, and so on. Of course, the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and Romans didn’t have them either, and they also managed to build phenomenal things, so let’s get over ourselves.All this work to install the means by which we can send our million daily messages and memes and photos to everybody we know. But what I really like right here is how much red is going on.There’s a lot happening under all that stone. At this stage it looks like they’re operating on the city’s deviated septum.Bridges don’t just carry you, they carry cables and wires and ducts. Keep an eye on that loose slab of stone.This is a master-class in bridge-building and -repairing in Venice.Back to the bridge of Sant’Anna. Those four open canal-side windows belong to a charming little apartment for tourists. I’m just wondering if the visitors talked about anything else than how their romantic Venetian vacation turned out. The jackhammers really went at it.The romantic-apartment front door is on the right, just before the pile of mud. I mean the bridge.
Today progress in Venice takes so many forms, though by now they’re not what you might call surprising or original. But over the centuries Venice became rich and powerful in large part because it was alert to innovation of many different sorts.
On the social side, the Venetian government passed a law in 1258 requiring doctors, even the most illustrious, to treat poor patients for free. Shocking then, perhaps still somewhat startling. In 1443 the government guaranteed the services of a lawyer to poor defendants at no charge; the lawyer would be chosen by a judge from among the best lawyers in Venice (no fobbing the case off on your newest recruit) and was required to follow the case with maximum care or risk a large fine. That’s become normal, I think, in concept if not in practice. I don’t know about fines today, though.
On the commercial side, the Venetians established the Patent Statute on March 19, 1474, now considered the earliest codified patent system in the world. These patents were granted for “any new and ingenious device, not previously made,” provided it was useful.
However “useful” may have been defined, suddenly useful was everywhere: Between 1500 and 1600 Venice granted 593 patents. (In the same period the Kingdom of France granted 100.) By 1788, Venice had certified 1896 patents.
Speaking of useful, pharmacists were forbidden to sell their medicines without a doctor’s prescription. If this is normal now, credit goes to the old Venetians to whom quality control was an obsession. Maybe they loved quality for itself, but control ensured that their myriad products were not only good, but reliable, hence valuable. It was always all about money.
A zecchino minted between 1779 – 1789 for Paolo Renier, the next to last doge of Venice. (photo seen on eBay, coin for sale by Giamer Antiques and Collectibles)
No, they didn’t invent money. But the Venetian gold ducat, later called the zecchino, became arguably the closest thing to what you might call a monetary “gold standard” for 500 years. The coin maintained a consistent weight (approximately 24 carats) and high gold purity (99.7 percent) from 1284 to 1797. Venice’s strong trading network ensured the zecchino’s circulation throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, from the Netherlands to India. It is the only coin in the world that retained, for the over five centuries of its uninterrupted existence, the same images, the same epigraphs, the same weight and the same purity of the metal. I sometimes complain that in Venice money is king, but that’s freaking impressive.
Back to fiber optic cables. Ninety percent of Venice and its satellite towns and hamlets are served by FTTC connections, while 79 percent has FTTH and the by-now quaint but still serviceable ADSL covers 99 percent. If you’d like to know more, here’s Open Fiber.
So progress jackhammers on. The bridge has been left with scars from the intervention, because there are rectangles of cement where stone used to be and I cannot understand it. We have ultra-fast broadband, but we also still have people who just carry things off, things that aren’t even theirs. Doesn’t feel like progress to me.
Remember that stone slab that was moved aside to allow access to the innards of the bridge? It, and its companions, are obviously gone. I have no idea where, or for what reason. There was stone, now there is only cement. You might suppose that the supervisors decided it was prudent to make future access simpler/cheaper/faster/easier by not bothering with that pesky stone anymore. And yet….And yet, the stones at the summit of the bridge were put back where they belonged. But the others?The same fate befell the stones on the Sant’Anna side of the bridge. True, the steps are still uniformly grayish, so it’s not that they draw undue attention to themselves, and yes, the cement on these steps is smoother and looks less homemade than on the other side. That’s not the point, of course.
I started this post with glowing eyes looking toward the future, and I indulged myself by recalling a smattering of examples of Venetian greatness. But here we are today. You’ve got your interstellar communications cables, and you’ve got steps now made of concrete where a week ago there was stone.
It’s easy to see the seam between stone and concrete. Happily for everyone, you can also see that dogs don’t care. Or was that a lynx?
Gold on its way to being beaten into a leaf seemingly lighter than air. Believe it or not, this leaf is still closer to the beginning than to the eventual end. This is merely the first step; these leaves have just undergone their first pounding (20 minutes under the tilt hammer) and now will be cut into smaller pieces and beaten again.Marino Menegazzo is beating gold leaves on a traditional block of marble, and is sitting because wielding an 8-kilo (17 pounds) iron hammer standing up would massacre his back. Turning gold into gossamer requires from 1200 to 1800 blows of the hammer.
For every “first,” there is a “last.” They come packaged together, kind of like up and down. Maybe you actually want your “up” to come down, so that makes you happy, but this particular “last” is serious. If you are seeking pleasant news today, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Sorry.
Slow-news-day stories from Venice occasionally bewail the shrinking population of the historic center (“real Venice” to me); the disappearing population of artisans, not so much. Venice’s fortunes were built not only on the cunning of merchants but the skills of the artisans who created whatever the people in the fancy houses wanted to sell. Now it’s 2025, and for an artisan to survive in Venice requires a fortitude and capacity for sacrifice that goes unnoticed by anybody except the tax collectors and landlords.
The result? The road to Going Out of Business sales. Two years ago, on April 20, 2023, Marta Artico wrote a report in La Nuova Venezia headlined: Venezia, in dieci anni hanno abbassato le saracinesche 4,000 artigiani. (“In ten years 4,000 artisans have closed up shop.” The statistics cover the metropolitan area, not just real Venice. But still.)
That’s bad enough, but what if an entire craft is slated to disappear? In the case of Marino Menegazzo, despite every effort, that is exactly what happened. Not in the distant past, but mere months ago.
Marino Menegazzo was the last man in Europe to beat gold leaf entirely by hand (I except the 20 minutes of the first beating by a 1926 tilt hammer, as similar hammers were in use centuries ago powered by water). And he didn’t beat only gold, but 17 various gold alloys.
Pure gold, leaf by leaf, seen as it is alloyed down to “white gold” — gold plus silver — in the center.
So now the skill, sensitivity and experience that he has perfected in his lifetime is gone, along with that of the centuries and generations of goldbeaters that preceded him.
Before I proceed, I urge you to read the article I wrote about him that is linked above. His story up to a few years ago is all there, so no need to repeat it all here.
The sign above his workshop/office/shop. (Battiloro means goldbeater.)
The “Mario Berta Battiloro” company was founded in 1926, and Marino had hoped to bring the family enterprise to its 100th anniversary. But no. The up has had to submit to its down. At its height (I refrain from referring to it as the “golden age”) the business had 14 workers producing 1,000 booklets of 10 to 25 gold leaves each every month and, in exceptional cases, even in a week. Impressive? In the 18th century there were some 340 goldbeating workshops in Venice.
Now Marino’s tools are silent, awaiting transfer to the National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, and a craft/skill/art that made Venice shine like the sun will no longer be part of the city’s greatness.
His hammers (l to r) weigh 6, 3, 4, 8 kilos (13, 6, 8, 17 pounds). Pick up something that weighs 17 pounds and imagine doing anything with it besides putting it down immediately. And carefully.
Many, even most, artisans have to grapple with the most basic challenges to their survival, from rent increases to shrinking markets, taxes, the cost of materials, and the occasional debt, a struggle that too often has led to the same mundane conclusion. But the craft of goldbeating deserves more than a “Hey, whatcha gonna do?” Gold leaf continues to be produced in many places around the world, but not like this. Not even close.
These are the leftovers. Bits of gold leaf that are sliced away from the edges of the perfectly-cut leaves are piled together, waiting their turn to be melted down and pounded again.
Marino Menegazzo managed to weather the effects of the pandemic, which blocked his customers for too long, and not all of them returned. But the failure to find an apprentice — there were some, but one by one they moved on — was followed by being compelled to sell his laboratory to pay debts, some reaching back to crises in 2007. (He kept ten workers on until 2015 because “they were part of the family”).
The gold is smelted at approximately 1750 C (3182 F). After smelting, the pure gold is poured into a form to cool as an ingot.This gold has no idea what’s waiting for it.The ingot rolled through the laminator sets out on the long road to gold leaf.Each pass through the laminator results in a longer and thinner strip, the first phase of becoming a leaf.He takes the long ribbon of gold and cuts off whatever size piece is destined for goldleafdom.The rest he folds up and puts in the safe till he needs another piece.
Losing the laboratory was the fatal step. He could certainly have kept going for at least a few more years if he’d been able to find a new one. Sound simple? Not in Venice. Because he works with flame, and has a few other technical requirements, he couldn’t move into just any old empty decrepit storeroom, and the search for an adequate new space was completely fruitless.
Appeals for assistance made to the city and the regional governments, and even to the diocese of Venice, were met either with silence or the kind of offers that are no better than none. Requests for meetings were ignored. A few foreigners seemed interested in coming to the rescue, but time was running out and there were no results. An artisan who in some other countries would be sustained as a Living National Treasure was left to his own devices. He wasn’t asking for favors, just a space! The Arsenal? Nope. A corner of the old ACTV yards at Sant’ Elena? Nope again.
So there you have it. There will be no more golden ribbons curling out of the laminator, no more leaves of gold patiently pounded to literal transparency. There will be no one who is capable of sensing the gold’s response to the winter fog or the summer drought and the heat and the pressure of his hammers.
Another piece of Venice falls away.
One gram of pure gold, circled in red. (One gram = 0,035274 of an ounce.)One gram of gold beaten into 49 filmy-fine leaves.
He is working with the heaviest hammer here. He must adjust the force and the rhythm to avoid overheating the gold. The two packets, or “cutches,” of mylar sheets are held steady by the green “shoder,” made of parchment.
Here he’s working with the lightest hammer. You may think you could handle the hammer, but could you keep track of perfectly counting every strike of it? Because that is crucial, and studies show that the capacity to concentrate is deteriorating under the effects of smartphones and the internet. Goldbeating resembles some form of meditation, with weightlifting added. Is that a thing?
Menegazzo periodically checks the thinness (and the evenness) of the leaf. The nature of the light passing through it reveals how thin it is, or what more he needs to do. He can beat leaves so thin that he can obtain a thousand pieces from just 20 grams of gold. (Photo from his book on the workshop, I regret the quality here.)
After the first beating the leaves are cut into four pieces and interleaved again between sheets of mylar for the final beating. As you see, each leaf must line up exactly with the one before. I probably didn’t need to point that out. Notice the square lined notepaper nearby — it’s there to check alignments when needed. Again I state the obvious.
The final leaves have to be cut to the prescribed dimensions (there are many options). That’s where his wife and twin daughters, and an occasional helper, came in.
Eleonora Menegazzo assembling a “libretto,” or booklet, of the gold leaves as ordered. Like goldbeating, this also has a contemplative aspect, work aided by various tools including her perfect fingernails.
The adjustable cutting tool is called a “wagon.” I suppose I can see that, though it seems like one of those spontaneous “That’s what we’ll call it till we come up with something better” ideas.Sabrina Berta, Marino’s wife and the guiding spirit of the workroom, was born into her family’s life of goldbeating. The workshop has barely changed over the decades.
The slatted floor simplifies the occasional clean-up operation to recover all the random bits of gold that have fallen by the way. Nothing escapes.Sabrina Berta
The angel Gabriel atop the belltower of San Marco gleams with Menegazzo’s gold.
