Hey! Where’d everybody go?
While some people have been working themselves up about the mobs of tourists in Venice (tourists in Venice? I’m shocked! Shocked!) our little lobe of the city has quietly tiptoed away, its denizens going to the mountains, Hammerfest, Saskatoon, the Tuvan Grasslands, anywhere but here where they can enjoy a little peace and quiet and — I hope — not to have become tourists in turn, if you take my meaning.
Between Ferragosto (August 15, as you know) and the onslaught of the Film Festival is this small sliver of time which is like a deep, peaceful breath. Even though the heat continues to enervate us, night and day —
— there is an atmosphere of restfulness along via Garibaldi which is almost like vacation in itself. And that is because many of the shops are closed. Temporary inconvenience to the few remaining inhabitants is more than mitigated by the tranquillity, and besides, it’s not as if ALL the fruit-and-vegetable sellers are gone, and yes, there is one butcher left who can slice you some pork chops. In any case, we now have the mastodontic Coop supermarket to take up the slack (open every day from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM, if you can believe it), manned by staff which does not always look happy to be helping, which I can understand even though they do have air-conditioning.
Let me take you on a brief perambulation of via Garibaldi, rejoicing in the “closed for vacation” (ferie) signs on the windows and doors. It’s as if the supposedly avaricious and insatiable merchants had all suddenly said, “Nah, we don’t care. We should stay here sweltering just on the chance that SOMEBODY might wander in, even by mistake?” Because most of their regular customers are also far away. I’m only here because I have to be, but I get to enjoy this moment and they don’t.
The Venetian menagerie
Ever since tourists have taken over Venice, nobody thinks much about other life forms (except maybe fish), but there have been many more creatures here than dogs and cats and the occasional canary.
Last night we were sitting on a full vaporetto trundling its way from the train station toward the Lido. We were facing forward, but some people a few rows ahead were facing backward. I had seen them, but until Lino spoke up, I had not observed (as Sherlock Holmes would put it).
Lino: “Did you see ‘Little Snail’?” (I refrain from translating his nickname in Venetian; this is a small town, as I may have mentioned).
Me: “No.” (Short answer meaning “Mainly because I have no idea who he is.”)
Lino indicates a now completely obvious person, a man whose chronological engine seems to have stalled just after middle age, kind of like Piers Morgan. The man is wearing a whitish baseball cap with some inscription, and a red windbreaker. He’s alone, looking nowhere in particular.
“He used to live near me,” Lino went on. “For a while, he had a pet mallard. He’d put a leash on it and he’d walk around the neighborhood with it.”
If you might think this is eccentric, there used to be a man who lived near Santa Marta who kept monkeys. His name was Ricco — “Richetto,” as a diminutive. His house was full of smallish monkeys, macaques, whatever they were.
Sometimes he’d go out for a stroll with one of them on his shoulder.
“The neighbors couldn’t wait till he died.”
You can understand it — living next to the Primates Enclosure in Venice wouldn’t be a very great thing, but certainly that was back in the Dark Ages, before consumers and the environment and the health department had been invented.
“No no,” Lino said, “this went on up till the Sixties, even the Seventies.” But hey — Lino’s godmother Eugenia, who lived in the same courtyard where his family lived, kept a couple of geese in the storage room. He doesn’t know why they were there, but he does remember her force-feeding them. This was two steps from Campo San Barnaba, not down in the Po Delta.
But that’s nothing! His cousin Carla (“who lived in the calle de l’Avogaria, you know, where the fountain is that doesn’t run anymore”) lived on the ground floor, and she had a pet rat. Not that she kept it, it just came to visit. “There was a hole in the wall of the bedroom, and sometimes the rat would come out, and she’d pick it up and caress it, call it nicknames…”
And speaking of rats, there was Lino’s friend who lived on the Fondamenta Bragadin, next door to the Spanish Ambassador. The friend kept some chickens in his little courtyard, but sometimes he (the friend, not Lino or the ambassador) would come out in the morning and discover one of the chickens had been killed and sort of half-disemboweled by the rats, who wanted to get at the liver. I used to like chicken livers too, until I heard this story about five minutes ago.
Back to the “Snail.” Something about the name brought back a prehistoric memory of something Lino once told me.
“Isn’t he the one who used to howl like a wolf?”
“Yep. He’d come home really drunk some nights, like at 2:00 AM, howling just like a wolf.” (Whisper: “Ah-WOOOOoooooooooooo….”)
If you might wonder what kind of work a person with that skill might do, he was a gondolier. Not a job that usually calls for howling, though I have to say it would have been cool if he’d taken his duck with him. You know, “Take your duck to work” Day.
Lino: “But he only worked for a couple of years, then sold his license and just lived on the money ever since. He had seven or eight brothers, he was the littlest.”
“In size, or in birth order?” (I need to understand what I’m being told.)
“Birth order. He’s the last one left. He’s got a nice house and everything.”
Any children?
“Nope. Never married.”
I guess I could see that. The wife would never know whether “Honey, I’m home” was going to be carnivorous keening or a couple of heartrending quacks.
Floating music
We had the radio on very low this afternoon — a makeshift substitute for the soothing sound of an imaginary Alpine brook — when I realized I was hearing an extremely beautiful aria that I hadn’t heard in ages. (For the record: “Mi par d’udir ancora” from Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers,” though I don’t know who was singing. I’ll gladly settle for Beniamino Gigli, though, just to keep it in mind.) Here is the link: https://youtu.be/8B_Vhth7nis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B_Vhth7nis
Lino also hadn’t heard it in ages, but it immediately brought back some happy, and very specific, memories of a hot summer evening when he was a little boy. I want you to be listening to this seductive barcarole — though perhaps it was more lovely at a slightly less funereal tempo — as you imagine this scene:
“I was standing by the Rialto Bridge with my sisters on the evening of Ferragosto (August 15),” he told me.” (If you’ve never been in Venice on August 15, it means “hot.”) “And the galleggiante was coming slowly up the Grand Canal and there were the chorus and musicians from La Fenice playing, and this is what they were singing. And there were hundreds of boats following along behind, rowed by just everybody.”
The galleggiante (literally “floating”) was a platform made of two peatas lashed together, perhaps towed, perhaps rowed, he doesn’t remember. Here is a picture of a peata, which was used for everyday work of massive dimensions till the Fifties, at least. 
A gazebo-like dome had been constructed on which little lights were shining — I’ll pause while you adjust your mind to the very idea — and the summer-night music was wafting up along the canal as the boats drifted by.
The mere thought of such an event brings a “knot to my throat,” as they say here. Evening promenades were nothing new in Venice — over the centuries they were often indulged in by Venetians of all ranks and stations seeking a breath of cooler air in the sultry summer nights. There were even boats designed for these nocturnal perambulations, such as the gondola da fresco, the mussin (there is one still to be seen occasionally), and the pupparino. Even today, if someone asks me how I stand the summer heat here, I say “We go out on the water, that’s how.”
If music in the Grand Canal seems like the best idea ever, I would concur. A group of women have organized a somewhat similar event over the past few years, but although I haven’t participated, I have the impression that it wasn’t very much like the evening Lino remembers. For one thing, Venetians (few as they are nowadays) tend to go to the mountains in August. But I can tell you that if I’d been there with him, I’d never have forgotten it either.
Another little link…
…in the chain, if you will, connecting Venetians to each other. Or to Lino, anyway.
In my post about going to the movies in the old days here, I mentioned Lino’s recollection of the man who stood at the entrance to the cinema Santa Margherita making and selling taffy.
In today’s episode, we were on the 5.1 vaporetto this morning traveling from the “Guglie” to the “Giardini.” Boarding behind us, and sitting in front of us, was a tall, unkempt man in that unmappable region between 70 years old and expiration. He was talking continually to the elderly lady with him in that peculiarly annoying voice that can’t be called LOUD but which everybody on the boat can hear. Or rather, cannot avoid hearing.
After a few stops, they get off. Lino says, “You know who that was?” I don’t bother replying, but wait.
“That was the son of the man who sold the taffy in front of the cinema Santa Margherita.”
The story never ends, it just keeps adding chapters.