Venetian-ness | Venice: I am not making this up

the merry month of spring

April 7, 2025 24 Comments

A friend mentioned in a friendly way that it might be nice for me to lighten up (she didn’t put it that way, but that’s what I heard) and share some glances at Venice these days. Nothing easier.

In the search for diversion you can never go wrong with laundry. Here we have black clothes and white, and their children in the middle.

That was the day reserved for all the pink clothes. Or one red item that ran.

I can’t imagine that they have anything to talk about. They might have tried, once.

Inside and outside are such bourgeois concepts. They manage to mingle rather well.

I stopped for the reflection but stayed for everything the heck else. The palm frond is typically an appurtenance of ultra-pious Catholic groups. The nearby surveillance camera does hint at a belt-and-suspenders approach to security, though. The clips on the wall once anchored now-removed shutters. The significance of the flower in the pot eludes me. I am in love with the drainpipes.

I hesitate to deconstruct this moment’s delicate equipoise. But I think this father is happiest in the service of his daughter, the empress, so at ease with power that she doesn’t need to even look at her faithful servitor. No sarcasm here, I mean it. They’re both exactly where they want to be, and how often can that ever be said.

I loathe my cellphone’s camera, for obvious reasons, but it was my only way to grab this extraordinary conjunction of hair before they all got off the vaporetto. They seemed not even to know each other, but most likely they were all going to the nearby high school. Perhaps these tresses are required of some adolescent cult. I’ll never know.

I was there, and yet I still can’t explain why they all had open umbrellas. Yes, it had rained, but the street reveals that the danger was long past. They Just Were.

The city can’t win. It puts out a trash bin AND an ashtray. But these passersby did not believe in using either. Their disdain almost seems to express some message. Yes, we understand what you want, but we will defend to the death our right to not dispose of them as you require.

This tombstone carver is somebody I’d like to know. Or maybe he’s one of those people whose wit doesn’t come through except on paper. Or marble. Here he has substituted the standard “Mario Rossi” with the name of the “Universal Genius.” The sentiment is more modern: “We will always love you, your dear ones.” The dates are funny, though.

And here we’re laying this script and design on the shoulders of the divine Dante. I doubt that any classical scholar ever wondered what the tombstone would have looked like as the Supreme Poet wandered the underworld. But here at least the dates are correct.

Okay, if this were music it would be trills, arpeggios, scales, and the occasional mordent. I have no idea what the two geniuses mentioned on the marble would think about how their names are being treated, but I’m pretty sure a bereaved spouse or parent would fall apart in the face of all these possibilities. Butterflies for Michelangelo would be an audacious option, don’t rule it out too soon. (If anyone is interested, “N” stands for “nato/a,” or born; “M” is for morto/a, the opposite of born.)

The view from the belltower of San Giorgio never disappoints, especially if you appreciate this vision of Giorgio himself in his “bring it” pose, waiting for his dragon. If I were a dragon I’d have been far away, reviewing my life choices.

Venetian-ness

Christmas in Venice — the letter-carrier cometh

December 19, 2024 9 Comments

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.

Venetian-ness

watch those maneuvers

November 30, 2024 8 Comments

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.

Venetian Curiosities, Venetian-ness

hedge gone wild

August 27, 2024 9 Comments

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.

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