Sensing Venice: Smell

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking of what immediately precedes a flushing sound.

This is a trick photo because it only looks like something that ought to smell. But it doesn't, or at least not much, and definitely not the way you probably expect. I just wanted to set the mood.
For an astonishing number of people, this is the only odor that Venice brings to mind.  But it’s not so simple.  In fact, the aforementioned aroma is not all that frequent anymore, even at low tide, thanks to long and patient dredging of the canals, and the installation of septic tanks in most public buildings and many private ones.  So let us not become fixated on biological byproducts.
While we're on the subject, however, this innocent-looking tube will be giving off a stronger odor than five average canals. It is the conduit of the contents of some septic tank. Happily, it's a job that doesn't take long.
The tube leads to a "honey-boat," which carries the material to the water-treatment plant. This smell is one of the few things I've never heard somebody complain about. If they're past 60, they may be remembering how home sanitation worked when they were children, which was a lot more direct.

Furthermore, I invite you to consider some of the daily smells in your average mainland city: The perfume of imperfectly combusted diesel wafting from buses waiting at traffic lights, for instance, or your overflowing dumpster under the sun.   I’m not saying I prefer the stench of sewage – there, I said it – I’m just saying there is no city that smells entirely of lavender potpourri.

And another thing. Before someone Beyond the Bridge starts imagining what the objectionable smells might be out here, they ought to include in that list the much more frequent AND PREVENTABLE odor that too many people — tourists or otherwise — emit from their underarms on crowded vaporettos and buses in the summer.  The fact that many of them (usually men, sorry) are clinging for support to something overhead just makes it worse. Often their shirts have no sleeves.

Continuing our sensual tour of Venice — or, as I think of it, enjoying Venice with your eyes closed — I’m going to state that smell may well be the sense that gives me the most pleasure here.  A random walk with your nose attuned will almost certainly awaken you to either an activity, or a product, or a season, or a plant, or something defying categorization that is something that makes Venice beautiful.

Clean laundry. I realize that anyone just walking around the city isn’t likely to be able to inhale this exquisite aroma (though one blithe spirit in Cannaregio was recently discovered at night stealing somebody’s laundry off the line, for reasons that were never very clear.)  But if you are here in the summer and in a position to wash some piece of fabric and hang it out to dry, you’ll have the pleasure of inhaling the air of Venice toasted by the sun.  There is no product you can put in a clothes dryer that could ever match the perfume created by the sun and the breeze, not even if it were something labeled “Venetian Sun and Breeze.”

Yes, it’s tiresome to have to calculate the time needed to dry your clothes outside on the line, especially because that time may not be quite enough to get the job done. Then you have a little psychological struggle to decide whether that sheet is really dry, or if you just wish, really hard, that it were, because it has to be.  But those are details.  This is one of the best smells in the world and I suppose one of the few Venetian ones you could replicate wherever you live, if your neighbors didn’t care, which they probably do.

 

One excellent reason to go out for a walk before dawn is to be able, in certain streets, to smell the bread coming out of the oven.

Fresh bread. If you have never, or not for a long time, walked into or past a bakery really early in the morning, when large batches of bread have just been taken out of the ovens, you might think that this is just another aroma, one of those few that humans are able to detect. (Bloodhounds, if you care, have noses that are ten- to one hundred million times more sensitive than a human’s. And bears are seven times more sensitive than bloodhounds.  Just to give some perspective.)  Is it the yeast?  The flour? The profound need of nourishment that our primitive organism requires? Warm bread.  The limbic system rejoices even if you don’t happen to be hungry.

There are 33 streets in Venice either named “baker,” “bakery” or “bakeries” (forner, forno, forni), the word denoting strictly bread, as opposed to eclairs or cake or muffins or anything else. (When I try to imagine what an average neighborhood in Venice smelled like in the year 1200 — apart from whatever the horses, humans, and roaming pigs contributed — I have to imagine the waftage from that many bakeries.  Not  so bad.) When First Crusader Godfreyof Bouillon set about founding the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, he promised the Venetians that in exchange for their help in his little effort, in every city they conquered their merchants would have their own neighborhood containing “A street, a square, a church, a bath, and a bakery.”  All the essentials, though I’d have started the list with a bakery.

One of my earliest encounters with this celestial aroma and its effect on me was in the dark of a winter dawn, when we were out rowing.  We were headed south along the lagoon shore of the Lido, toward Malamocco, and my attention was mainly on the fact that there was so much fog that I could barely see where we were going.  Suddenly I found myself in an invisible billow of warm-bread smell, drifting from a bakery somewhere behind the trees.  It was beyond magical.  And then it was gone, and we were back in the chilly, gunmetal gray world.

“Our daily bread” — it still means something here.

Pastry.  Walk past certain corners early in the morning — especially Sunday morning — and you will pass through a delectable little cloud composed of the smell of warm butter and sugar.  Come to think of it, I never notice any vanilla or almond or cinnamon tones, though you would expect them.  It’s essentially just butter and caramelizing sugar that are doing the work and the aroma is as gorgeous as a bouquet of peonies.  On a humbler note, you have an even better chance of smelling hot croissants just out of the oven of many bars and cafes — sweet, buttery, crusty.  (I maintain that “crusty” is a smell.) Hardly anybody makes their own anymore; they buy them frozen.  But the smell is delectable just the same.

Anything burning. Obviously I’m not referring to houses or boats here, though I think an incinerated plastic-resin boat (which I’ve seen from afar) must emit a smell that’s truly scary.  And harmful.

Then there is the smoke from the motors on boats.  This is, if possible, even more vile.  There’s more of it, and it seems to contain 97 extra poisonous ingredients.  Cruddy little boats backing up, big bruising barges stopping suddenly with a roar of the retro-rockets, and an assortment of geriatric motors belonging to men who grew up with the notion that it needs to “warm up” for ten or 15 minutes before departure.  Like the old black and white TVs.

You have to imagine greasy gray smoke roiling around this object, which is also roaring away like a mammoth trapped in a tar pit.

And there are motors which have been removed from their boats.  The man who lives across the street (about six feet away), conducted a late-autumn ritual the other day by putting his outboard motor onto a sort of metal trolley so he could clean it out by combusting all its fuel before putting it away for the winter.  So the motor stood there for a good 20 minutes, roaring, excreting thick grey smoke.  Of course this is against the law.  I closed the windows.

I’ve often mentioned the allure of distant woodsmoke (another smoky smell that doesn’t make any fireman feel warm and cozy).  I’m really thinking about food.

The aroma of cooking comestibles could be pork ribs over charcoal (at several saint’s-day festivals), or a batch of chestnuts (Lino does this at home, though I don’t detect anyone else doing it), or anything fishy –seppoline  or grey  mullet or sardines on the skillet.  I’ve developed sufficiently to be able to tell the difference  if I’m downwind of some intrepid cook.  Mostly that would be Lino.  I think people generally boil or bake fish because of the smell, though sometimes I walk through the cloud of somebody else’s imminent lunch or dinner.

This lady sells roasted chestnuts for a few weeks in the fall at the Lido, at the vaporetto stop. It's like the olfactory opening day of autumn.

When Lino was a lad, the smell of fish of any sort crisping up on a sheet of hot metal was one of the most normal smells around, so normal that people probably didn’t even notice it.  Now it’s something that inspires comment, via voices like the ones I heard out the bedroom window from people passing in the street as we were scorching a batch of the little critters.  If the people are past a certain age, their comments will be smoking with appreciation and desire.  If not, the heck with them. Our onlycontribution to good will among men is to avoid cooking them when people have hung their laundry out to dry just above us, because we open the windows and much as I love fish, even I wouldn’t want my underwear to smell like foodsmoke.

The fish smells vary by season. Seppie (cuttlefish) are in the fall (migrating adults) and spring (their babies).  Baby seppie (seppoline), as opposed to bass or shrimp, have some extra element that comes out on the griddle, maybe because they don’t have scales.  I don’t know.  It’s a slightly acrid, slightly salty, slightly bitter scent. It’s a fragrance that seems to connote a party, or at least a small but chaotic family gathering.

 

This long stretch of jasmine has such a powerful perfume that even though you love it at the beginning, after several weeks you can't wait for it to be gone. And it doesn't leave quickly, or willingly. By the time it's gone, you're saying "Thank God."

Flowers.  In April and May Venetian flora goes berserk. Festoons of wisteria, then the magnolia blossoms, then dense bushes of jasmine andpittosporum  saturate the air with a fragrance so powerful it verges on nauseating.  (I said “verges.”)

Followed immediately, in early June, by the flowering of the lime, or linden, trees. I never knew this smell before coming here, and it is absolutely the most wonderful plant-perfume here (exception made for  calicanthus).

I don’t need to see the linden blossoms, it’s enough for me to inhale their perfume, an exquisite mingling of delicate, not-too-sweet, utterly seductive elements.  Somebody knows what they are and what they’re called, but I’m not interested.  I just want to breathe it all in while I can. It doesn’t last as long as I’d like it to — maybe ten days.  I’d willingly shift some of the time the jasmine hangs around and give it to the lime trees.

The lovely, creamy little blossoms of the pittosporum are actually lovely, creamy little perfume bombs. One is enough, no matter how much you may love it.
This is a lime-tree in bloom. I wish you could smell it. If I even tried to describe it, I'd destroy it.

It had been so hot for so long that the rain had hardly begun to fall before we were walking through a Turkish bath.

Rain.  The summer sun beats down on the  masegni, or paving stones, day after day, and nobody notices until it rains.  Especially if the rain isn’t very hard or heavy, the superheated blocks of trachyte release a mist of steam (usually invisible, though not always) that smells of equal parts water and stone.  It smells of cool, it smells of relaxation.  It must stimulate that little part of the brain that responds to the word “oasis” or “waterfall.”

Fog definitely has its own smell. It’s something sharply clean and faintly metallic, something resembling wet iron. Being hot augments the rain smell; being cold augment

Coffee. In the 17th century, an Arab judge, Hadjibun di Medina, was instructed by the Ottoman sultan to settle some social controversy concerning the benefits of coffee.  (There was one intrepid subject who felt about coffee the way I feel about smoke, which created some temporary controversy.)  The good Hadjibun issued this statement:  “Oh you men of open mind, drink coffee and don’t pay any attention to the detractors who with denigrate it with brazen lies.  Drink it generously because its aroma banishes worries, and its fire reduces to ashes the turbid thoughts produced by daily life.”

As my thoughts are dangerously prone to becoming turbid it’s a good thing there’s so much good java around.  Even a whiff as I pass certain cafes on my daily rounds is an ethereal encouragement.  Which keeps me going till I pass the next cafe.

It's worth a trip to Sant' Erasmo for their patron saint's festival in June just for the charcoaled ribs.
Calicanthus, in the market at Rialto before Christmas. Heavenly.
The nose now knows that Carnival is on the way. Our friend Dino Righetto had just made a houseful of frittelle, which were even better than the warm-oil-and-sugar aroma which will probably stick to the upholstery till Easter.
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Follow-up photo

A few days ago I was expatiating on the nature of trash/biological refuse disposal here.  Or lack thereof.

One reader who shares my outlook on many things was moved to send me the following photo she made of one means of poop-disposal left by a Neanderthal somewhere in her ambit.  Not her back yard, I’m pretty sure.

We mustn’t begin to smile at these things.  But then again.

Yes, this does indeed look like some cheerful little mutant rabbit, ears and all. I wonder if it was intentional? I'd be sorry to learn that people who do this can also have a sense of humor. No wait -- that's crazy talk.
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Candlemas-hog Day

I see that Punxsutawney Phil has spoken, and the utterance (you have to imagine it) comes out as “Early spring.”

Here, on this Very Same Day, we also have prognostications.  But we don’t consult just any old random mammal — we go for the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Seeing as February 2 is the Feast of the Purification of the aforementioned BVM (meaning no disrespect), and seeing that candles have somehow become involved in this observance over the centuries (I’d tell you why but I don’t have time to check right now), the day is also called Candlemas.  Here, specifically, it’s called Candelora.  It sounds like a detergent of some sort, but it’s not.

The Venetian doggerel of the day goes:

De la Madonna Candelora

del inverno semo fora

se xe piova o xe vento

del inverno semo dentro.

(It’s the Madonna Candelora and we’re out of winter; if there’s rain or wind, we’re still in winter. Hey, it rhymes.)

In other words, we’d be getting six more weeks of winter if the BVM doesn’t see her shadow.

Today, the sun is blazing down as if to say “Take that!” to everybody who has spent the last two months whingeing about fog, rain, and freezing cold.

I’ll take it!  I’ll take it!

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The “First Row of the Year”

So we have all somehow managed to hack our way out of the calorie-entangled canebrake of the holidays, and you might suppose that now we would all return to our lairs for three months of hibernation before thinking about going out and rowing around.

Maybe some people hibernate, but for the past 33 years, the rowing club “Voga Veneta Mestre” has rousted everyone who is roustable to come out on the earliest possible Sunday in January to form a boat procession, or corteo, in the Grand Canal.  This undertaking is known by the homespun title of the Prima Vogada dell’Anno, or  the first row of the year.

A snippet of rainbow from the hanging around, waiting to get going: Blue and white of the Settemari, blue and gold of the Voga Veneta Lido, red and white of the Club Ponte dei Sartori.
A snippet of rainbow as we all wait to get going: Blue and white of the Settemari club, blue and gold of the Voga Veneta Lido, red and white of the Club Ponte dei Sartori.

Of course people already have been rowing this year, your correspondent included. But the motivation for this event isn’t merely rowing, but rowing with the purpose of Doing a Good Deed. The corteo ends at the nursing home at San Lorenzo, behind the church of San Giorgio dei Greci, where the Mestre club prepares a festive sort of party/lunch/scrum, cooking a vat of pasta e fagioli, bringing useful gifts, and providing plenty of loud and cheerful talking and singing to entertain the inmates — sorry, I meant residents.

Quadruple parking as the early-arrivers wait for everybody else: purple and white of the club San Polo dei Nomboli, blue and orange of Voga Veneta Mestre, and a random blue-garbed man from the Querini.
Quadruple parking as the early-arrivers wait for everybody else: purple and white of the club San Polo dei Nomboli, blue and orange of Voga Veneta Mestre, and a random blue-garbed man from the Querini.

I have only gone once to this climactic phase of the morning.  We usually just keep rowing in order to make it home at a decent hour, so I can’t tell you much about the denouement.

But I can tell you that I think the Prima Vogada dell’Anno is one of the best little boating exploits in the whole year because it has absolutely no public relations value whatever, no touristic or fancy-poster or let’s-find-a-sponsor or we-have-no-money or who-shot-John or any other of the aspects that often begrime waterborne events here. There are just too dang many situations in which floating Venetians  are used as decoration to provide some kind of folkloristic color to somebody else’s hoedown. And God forbid that the event should be televised — then they tell you where you have to go and how long to stay there, even if you had come with the quaint notion of being a participant and not merely some kind of anonymous oar-carrier.

So the great thing here is that it’s Just Us Folks, and if the weather is raw and foggy, which it was on Sunday and still is today (the foghorns are blowing as I write), all the better.  There are fewer people out to snap pictures, and the fog makes all the colors of the boats and their rowers’ track suits really come alive.

A simple sandolo from San Polo dei Nomboli standing by, hanging onto us.  As you see, the Christmas Forcola has finally gotten out of the house and back to work.
A simple sandolo from San Polo dei Nomboli standing by, hanging onto us. As you see, the Christmas Forcola has finally gotten out of the house and back to work.

So the boats gather, in the usual disorderly way, between the train station and Piazzale Roma. Rowers wave to each other, call out mildly rude comments, check their cell phones for messages, and so on till the caravan moves out at 10:00.

There is relatively little traffic at that time on a fuzzy winter Sunday morning, so we have the Grand Canal pretty much  to ourselves.


Wherever we are at the beginning is not usually where we are at the end.  Lino likes to be near the front of any corteo, and rarely resists the temptation to perform all kinds of tiny, deft and seemingly impossible maneuvers to sneak past the other boats one by one and get ahead.

Gianni Bullo in the bow of his caorlina before the start. Perhaps he's rethinking his repertoire. ("Should I start with 'Un Bel Di?' Nah, let's just see what happens.")
Gianni Bullo in the bow of his caorlina before the start. Perhaps he's rethinking his repertoire. ("Should I start with 'Un Bel Di?' Nah, let's just see what happens.")

I’ll never forget how vastly he entertained himself one night a few years ago in a corteo for Carnival. The boats were all kind of mashed together in the semi-dark and we found ourselves wedged in behind a gondola of the Francescana club, rowed by four men. Giorgio Fasan was standing on the stern; he, like Lino on our 8-oar gondola, was the captain and steersman of the boat. At that time he was already very old but he was still as irrepressible as, I gather, he had always been, and still just as capable.

And we're off.  Generally speaking.  No rush.
And we're off. Generally speaking. No rush.

Lino, as always, was so perfectly in control of our boat, and so alert to everything and everyone around him (it’s long since become instinctive), that he decided to break the monotony by annoying Giorgio.  So we inched up behind Giorgio’s gondola, and with an imperceptible push on his oar Lino gave his gondola a little nudge against the stern.

Normally everybody tries to avoid touching, knocking against, running into, or otherwise coming into contact with other boats. Which means Giorgio wasn’t expecting his boat to move for any reason other than whatever he or his crew were doing. Lino’s little push, however, made his gondola unexpectedly begin to veer off-course, to the right.

"Mestrina," the 14-oar gondola and flagship of the Voga Veneta Mestre fleet, moves to the head of the corteo, as is only right and proper.
"Mestrina," the 14-oar gondola and flagship of the Voga Veneta Mestre fleet, moves to the head of the corteo, as is only right and proper.

Therefore Giorgio’s natural reaction was to start yelling at the man rowing in the prow, who he assumed was to blame for this deviation by having given a stroke that was just a little too hard.

“Why are you rowing?” he shouted.  “Can’t you see we don’t want to go right?  Tira acqua!”  (A counter-stroke that would have corrected the situation.)

I bet Lino nudged that gondola at least five times, just to watch Giorgio get more flustered and more mad — and of course, to listen to the exchanges between Giorgio and his supposedly incompetent but completely innocent crew member, which became increasingly warm.

Lino thought it was hilarious and I did too, I have to admit.  Childish?  Sure.  But I also thought it was pretty cool that he was able to pull it off, and it was so much the sort of thing I could imagine them all doing when they were all canal-rats together that I knew it wasn’t malicious.  Giorgio never did figure out what had happened.  He’s been rowing angels around the heavenly canals for several years now, but I bet he’s still blaming that guy in the bow.

Nothing like that happened on Sunday, though.  People stuck to the business at hand, Lino included, though after we passed under the Rialto Bridge, Gianni Bullo, in the bow of a caorlina from the Canottieri Mestre, suffered some sort of attack of euphoria (“rapture of the Rialto”?), and began singing snatches of a song, or maybe several.  Maybe he thought other people would join in — it happens sometimes, which is really nice. He was happy, though, and that’s something that always sounds good, though in his case it sounded better from a distance.

Me, I was savoring the boat-music, the sound of us swooshing along, and the boats around us also swooshing, each producing its own special swoosh-notes according to the size and shape and weight of the boat, not to mention the size, shape and weight of its rowers.  For once the main sound in the Grand Canal was not the snarling of taxi and barge and vaporetto motors, but just the water and the oars and the air combining in their own rhythmic, convivial, completely unorchestrated a cappella chorus.

I don’t think these guys, including Gianni Bullo, could possibly sing any song at the nursing home that would be more wonderful than that.

Coming out of the Grand Canal into the Bacino of San Marco, the boats tend to wander away from each other, becoming less of a procession and more of a small herd.
Coming out of the Grand Canal into the Bacino of San Marco, the boats tend to wander away from each other, becoming less of a procession and more of a small herd.
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