It’s not exactly the swallows returning to Capistrano, but a few mornings ago saw the arrival of a modestly historic moment in the calendar: The amusement park began to set up shop.
One of the ferryboats that normally plods between the Lido and Tronchetto makes a special run (and there will be more) loaded with trucks that are going to turn into irresistible rides, games and food stalls. Irresistible if you don't mind the cold weather, and the prices.Admittedly Venice, in its long history, has often seen its embankments loaded with heavy objects destined for commerce -- timber, marble, and bricks come to mind -- but there is something a little startling about trucks.
The rides and games, not to mention the stands selling cotton candy, fried dough slathered with nutritional hot-air balloons such as Nutella, caramelized peanuts, and anything else that can emit a powerful odor of imminent obesity, started to disembark, all folded up inside the trucks, on the Riva dei Sette Martiri at the head of via Garibaldi. They will be open for business on Saturday and will remain until the end of Big Famous Bloated Carnival, which this year will be March 8.
Just to avert any possible misunderstanding, BFB Carnival is known here as, well, Carnival, or if you prefer, Carnevale. This little county-fair assortment of playthings is generically called a “Luna Park.” Probably after an Ur-version somewhere bearing that name which I have been unable to identify. It’s no competition for Coney Island or the Prater in Vienna but as everyone knows, available space in Venice is calculated in millimeters.
Till last year, this annual event was set up on the Riva degli Schiavoni between the Arsenal and the next canal on the way to San Marco. But the residents’ complaints about noise, confusion, smells, and garbage finally overrode the carny-people’s desire to be as close to the center of the touristic hurricane as possible.
You can't just drive ashore -- you must prepare the way very, very carefully with damage-blunting boards. Even so, the fondamenta when they're gone is pocked with cement patches where the stones have somehow disappeared.
So last year they were moved just a little bit downstream, to an area beyond the invisible demarcation line separating Tourist Motherlode and Just Somewhere Else in Venice. Hence we now have residents here in this new strip of space that are just as unhappy as their predecessors were over the way, plus unhappy carny-people because they’re missing out, they believe, on loads of business.
They probably have a point (and they ought to know, considering that they’re the ones standing out there in the freezing cold for hours waiting for customers). Whatever their dreams may be of cashing in on the typical tourists, my impression is that this amusement park is frequented almost exclusively by locals.
Which means: Parents and grandparents with small children, and shoals of bored teenagers who will go anywhere in any weather as long as they can hang out with each other and not be home. Of course weekends are the prime moments, but the stands are open every day from mid-afternoon till about 8:00 PM, even though there are few things on earth as unappealing as an amusement park in the middle of a weekday afternoon. The magic of this extraordinary collection of stuff and stimulation, at least for people over ten years old, is that it happens in the dark under glowing, flashing lights. Otherwise this wonderland is just Norma Desmond before her coffee, so to speak, even if it is in the most beautiful city in the world.
This is so much what the stand-owner doesn't want to see. He's thinking about making it up on the weekend, and during Christmas, and Epiphany, and the two weeks of Carnival.
In any case, next year, if the plan is fulfilled, they will move to yet another location, at Tronchetto. This will have the advantage of offering more space, and will solve the problem of irritating the locals with the noise, etc., because there are no locals. I have deep doubts that they will make anything like the money they do here, because Tronchetto is about as convenient to everybody in the city, tourists as well as Venetians, as Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.
I’ll be sorry to see them move away, because no matter how funky it may be, this Luna Park does a lot to sparkle up the winter atmosphere, at least in a neighborhood like ours where the minute you go out the door you run into the same old people doing the same old things making the same old comments. I can tell you that it’s as much fun to watch all the goings-on as it is to participate (I speak as a veteran of the kiddies’ roller-coaster, who last year appalled and offended the two little girls in the car ahead of me not only because I’m an adult but because I screamed on the turns. One of them turned around and asked me scornfully, “Aren’t you a little old to be on this?” This made me laugh, which by the look on her face was not her intention).
Correct answer: Of course I am. So sue me.
Sunday afternoon during Carnival in the sunshine. This is more like it. Marie Antoinette is training for Monza.
But even if after three months you've grown completely used to it, an amusement park in Venice is still a very curious thing to have.
The real news is not that a statue was put where the street lamp used to be — this happened a year and a half ago.
What’s worth talking about is that the resulting public protest may be having some effect.
Protests here usually involve some letters and op-ed pieces in the paper and a lot of discontented murmuring in the bars and cafes. But now Facebook has made itself felt, which has made protesting a whole new game.
It all involves the Opprobrious Case of the Lamp and the Frog. Translation: Yet another in the endless procession of municipal decisions which are made for reasons which mean nothing to the dwindling indigenous population; in this case, the removing of the old street lamp at the Customs House Point to make room for said undraped youth.
The Customs House Point (Punta della Dogana) is virtually in front of the Piazza San Marco. People are going to notice whatever you put here,whether they like it or not.
To make it worse, this administrative Coup de Lamp has occurred on public space coopted for private something: Gain, notoriety, or any other motive not involving Venetian history or its inhabitants. Or, as I think of it, another example of the insatiable desire felt by people in business to use the city as a stage set for personal gain. It is an impressive bit of scenery against which to place your product, this is undeniable.
Here is what has happened and how the story may — MAY — turn out to have a happy ending.
The Customs House building (1677), sitting at the eponymous point, the tip of Dorsoduro facing the Bacino of San Marco, was dilapidated and unused for years.
Then in 2007 or 2008, an intergalactically rich French businessman named Francois Pinault worked out a deal with the city: He would pay for the restoration of the historic building in exchange for the right to transform it into a modern art museum displaying his own intergalactically famous modern art collection. Named Punta della Dogana (Customs House Point), the museum opened on June 6, 2009.
Here is the lamp. True, in this case the moon is brighter, but wattage is not the point.
I’ve noticed that modesty does not usually, or ever, aid you in amassing unfathomable wealth, and I present Mr. Pinault as a case in point. He owns a holding company named Artemis which comprises Converse shoes, Samsonite luggage, the Vail Ski Resort, Chateau Latour, and Christie’s auction house. You don’t make a fortune of $19 billion by playing “Mother, may I?” You just forge ahead.
Bear with me for another paragraph or two, because context is important.
For some 20 years, Fiat, the car company, was the proud owner of the museum housed in the Palazzo Grassi. It was the go-to place for important mega-shows, like “The Etruscans” or “The Celts,” that kind that require advance reservations and standing in long lines and you leave exhausted lugging an expensive catalog that weighs eight pounds which you will never look at and only occasionally dust. It was the sole place in Venice that was capable of presenting shows of that caliber and it was always full.
Whether the boy and his frog are more beautiful than the lamp is obviously a personal opinion, but you can't deny that the lamp has the advantage of being useful. (Photo: www.house42.com)
In 2005 Fiat was facing bankruptcy, and the last thing they needed was a museum on the Grand Canal. So Mr. Pinault became the new owner, and he dedicated Palazzo Grassi to his personal collection. If you want to see something other than, say, a huge skull made entirely of tin cans, or an enormous shrieking-pink balloon-dog poodle made of metal, you’ll have to go elsewhere. And forget the Etruscans and Celts, they now have nowhere in Venice to stay.
But evidently that was only fun for a little while, because then he wanted another museum. Hence the Punta della Dogana. Conversion accomplished by intergalactically famous Japanese architect, Tadao Ando, with the warm support of the mayor and Renata Codello, the Superintendent of Beni Architettonici e Paesaggistici (Architectural and Landscaping Patrimonies — “landscape” in the sense of physical environment in its aesthetic and historical aspects). You may remember her as the putative guardian of the city’s monuments who so cooperative in allowing the use of Venetian monuments as scaffolds for commercial billboards.
It’s interesting that this shred of municipal land has fallen under her jurisdiction — there are so many categories to which this building/area might perhaps belong. Not only Architecture, but Art, or Culture, or History, or Archaeology, or maybe even Ethnoanthropology. Yes, these are all categories into which Italy’s infinite number of treasures may be administratively shoehorned and within which they struggle for dominance, or at least survival. And they always struggle for money. Just another of the many ways in which my life resembles an Italian art work.
However, the process of this transformation revealed that Mr. Pinault was given to consider the territory surrounding his museum as also belonging to him. This isn’t surprising, considering that he also flies the flag of Brittany from the roof, where the flag of San Marco would look much better. Flying your own flag from a historic building that isn’t really yours is so uncool.
But THEN he (or they) removed the very old and beloved street light from the point itself and replaced it with “Boy with Frog,” a sculpture by American artist Charles Ray — a white statue of a naked, larger-than-life-size pre-pubescent lad. From his outstretched hand dangles a dead frog. And the frog is not the dangle-age that attracts the most attention.
Superintendent Codello was shocked to hear that the public found this objectionable. But that hasn't stopped scores of other billboards from taking the city's buildings hostage.
This has made a lot of Venetians mad. It’s not that they especially care about artistic enigmas or naked boys or their assorted appendages. Nor would they care to hear that the frog typically symbolizes resurrection, healing and intuition, transitions, dreams, or opportunity.
But they do care that their street light was taken away to make room for this object. Not only was the light beautiful, and romantic, it was also useful if you were returning at night in your boat. None of which could truly be said of the bareskinned lad and his amphibious accessory.
They also care that — as per virtually usual — a number of laws that restrict the use of public space for personal motives were overridden, ignored, or forgotten by the administrators entrusted with their enforcement. They care that there was never any public discussion of this decision. They care that something that has personal emotional significance has been treated like just some old thing that was in the way.
Even if you love the statue and think it’s greater than Michelangelo’s “David” or the Winged Victory of Samothrace or Christ of the Ozarks or the Bronze Horseman, it doesn’t belong on the Customs House Point and it certainly had no reason to displace something beautiful as well as useful that had stood there for as long as anyone can remember. Actually, longer.
So a citizens’ protest movement began on Facebook and it has grown to almost 3,000 members. Even we signed a petition in the dark in the rain to add our names to the list of people who want the lamp back.
Should you feel moved to join this group, log onto Facebook and sign up. Just write “lampione” in the search field and you’ll get to “Lampione della Punta della Dogana,: NOI lo vorremmo indietro!” (“Streetlight at the Punta della Dogana: WE want it back”). Click on the “join” icon and then write your comment, should you feel so inspired.
But it now appears that this spontaneous peaceful uprising may be having an effect. The latest news is that the mayor talked to Superintendent Codello and Mr. Pinault. The Gazzettino explained that the statue was put there as part of an exhibition, “Mapping the Studio,” and that when it closes (March? May? June? the date is oddly difficult to pinpoint) the statue will go and the lamp will return. Probably. They mayor has left a couple of tiny loopholes open in his last, apparently positive, declaration of intent.
Superintendent Codello, perhaps feeling a bit nettled by all the fuss, defended the removal of the lamp on the grounds that it isn’t historic (dating only from the 1980’s and “of no value.” Yes, that’s what she said.) Facebook group founder Manuel Vecchina says no, it was made in the 19th century by the Venetian foundry of the Gradenigo family. Whichever may be true — and it’s too bad that I find Vecchina more credible than Codello, who of all people ought to know such things — I draw the line at her assessment of “value.” As in, what has none. I mean, it’s not as if we needed her appraisal for insurance purposes.
But at least up to this point the vox populi seems for once to have made itself heard.
Speaking of frogs, it was funny when comedian Peter Cook created an imaginary restaurant which he called “The Frog and Peach.” But in the end, his fictional founder had to admit that the venture had turned out to be “A gigantic failure and a huge catastrophe.”
I don’t know that I’d call the “Boy with Frog” a gigantic failure — a gigantic something is certainly is — but it does belong in the “catastrophe” column of the municipal-credibility-and-responsibility ledger.
And put some clothes on the kid, he must be freezing out there.
I saw something today that I have longed — longed — to see, and had despaired of ever seeing. Ever. And had ceased to believe that my grandchildren, if I ever had any, would see it either.
Signs. They have finally installed signs showing route maps on the vaporettos indicating each blessed stop of the blessed line being ridden. You can’t believe it? I can’t either, but there they are.
Not only does the sign exist, it has been placed in a useful location (there's another on the other side of the aisle), and it's legible, unlike the other supposedly useful announcements you can just barely make out stuck to the right-hand window. They thought of everything.
The Big Cities I know have always done this on their buses and subways: New York, Paris, Moscow, London, Rome, San Francisco … I think Oslo, too, but I can’t remember at the moment. Probably. Norway’s supposed to have the highest quality of life of any place on the planet, and I’d put bus maps right up there with free flu shots in the Great Scheme of Human Development.
In any case, it’s such an obviously simple and useful thing to do that not doing it must have required an impressive amount of density and sloth on the part of everybody here who could have made it happen.
But then again, there are countless things in life that seem so obvious, so simple, so helpful, and even so inexpensive, that it seems impossible that there should be people who can’t see the need or find the means to do them. Kissing your kid goodnight, say, or putting your hand on your heart when your national flag goes by, or running to help somebody get up who’s just tripped on the sidewalk.
But in Venice, the obvious and the simple have found an oddly inhospitable environment, where “We have no time,” “There is no money,” “The guy who knows how to do it is on vacation/ retired/dead” smothers a very large number of ideas on how to make daily life just a little bit more liveable.
This sign is a thing of true beauty. I wouldn't put it in the same league as the ABAB sonnet, but it's close.
Why — I have asked myself ever since I first came here, back in the Bronze Age –why should public transport have been made so thrillingly complicated for ordinary people who, let’s face it, comprise 98 percent of the world’s population and 99.9 percent of the visitors to Venice? (I made that up, but it could still be true.)
I don’t know the answer. But I do know that many, many people whom I have seen with these very eyes have struggled not only with their luggage and their hysterical offspring and their own fatigue and lack of fluency in Italian, but with a bus system which gave you no intelligent means of knowing where you are or how to get where you’re going.
I have seen frantic people with big suitcases pull up to the Lido stop and ask the vaporetto conductor, “Is this the train station?” Not only is the correct answer “No, it’s not,” but the full phrase is “The station is at the other end of town and it will take you 50 minutes to get there. Sorry about you missing your train.” (Actually, they don’t say “Sorry.”)
Then they decided to put another map further back in the cabin, showing both of the routes which this type of vehicle is likely to take, plus the N, or night-time abbreviated route which begins around midnight, depending on where you are.
In any civilized settlement in the world, from Scott City, Kansas on up, the traveler would have had some means of confirming his progress by consulting a conveniently placed and easy-to-read map, then looking out the window at the name of the upcoming stop. It takes less than half a second to know if you’re headed in the wrong direction.
Of course there are plenty of maps around. Tiny, Gordian diagrams in guidebooks or given out by the hotel, with supposedly helpful colors and numbers of lines, but the colors twist themselves into macrame and some of the numbers no longer exist. You can spend a long time waiting for the #82 before you find out that it doesn’t run after September 13. And that it is now called the #2.
Or the route map on the bus-stop dock. It would be an intrepid traveler indeed to be able to read, and remember after boarding, what the next stops are called which lead toward one’s destination as one struggles through the wildebeest-migration that occurs on most docks.
Say what you will about the not-so-new mayor, Giorgio Orsoni; he seems to have put a few people in positions of authority who not only have intelligent, grown-up ideas on how to make things work, but have figured out how to bring them to pass before the next Ice Age, which by the way is probably never going to happen considering which way the climate is going. But you see my point.
So I give two thumbs-up to Carla Rey, the new councilor (or as I translate assessore, sub-mayor) for Commerce, Consumer Affairs, and Urban Quality. I don’t know that she is behind this leap into the future, but what she has done so far in other areas leads me to believe it’s highly likely. Hers is a title which never existed before and has a bracingly modern, Big-City ring to it.
“Urban”? Little old us?
So what’s my next Impossible Dream? Large to Very Large public trash bins placed everywhere. To be specific, I want there to be at least one large trash bin no further than 50 feet from any point in the entire city where you may be standing. Wherever you stop, you need to be able to see a trash bin. This is not, I can assure you, the case at the moment.
I know, it sounds like crazy talk. But now there are route maps on the vaporettos.
Of course you already know that “La Madonna della Salute” does not mean “Our Lady of the Salute.” She is Our Lady of Health, and every year on November 21 everyone in Venice who can walk, and even some who can’t, make the pilgrimage to her church to offer a candle and say however many prayers are filling their hearts.
Just as at the feast of the Redentore, a votive bridge is installed -- here spanning the Grand Canal. It is intended to carry the faithful piously over the water, but it's also an excellent vantage point for snapshots.
Yesterday was not a propitious day, meteorologically speaking. For two or three days the Gazzettino had been feverishly predicting acqua alta of 120 cm [four feet] that morning. (It didn’t happen.) There was plenty of water, however, in the form of a frigid rain. It wasn’t heavy, but it was determined, the kind of rain that isn’t thinking about anything else. And it got dark early.
Perhaps they look innocent enough to you. That's because you can't smell them.
There had also been an anxious sub-theme, which began circulating several days early, on the impending castradina famine. Castradina the basis of the traditional dish for this festival, a soup made of cabbage and a haunch of mutton which has been dried, smoked, aged, slathered in dark malodorous spices, and possibly even beaten with sticks and dead-blow hammers. It’s an impressive little piece of meat.
But this year, the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, or Festival of Sacrifice, fell in the same period. Which meant that the general supply of castradina — which has never been huge, seeing as the tradition had fallen into general disuse — had suddenly shrunk to almost nothing. I have now learned that Muslims favor this foodstuff for their religious observance, and that they offered a better price to the few remaining wholesalers who carry it.
This is amusing, in a way (it takes so little to amuse me), because for years many people didn’t care about castradina. We’ve had Venetians over to dinner who had never eaten it. We’d see these hunks of black flesh hanging in the butcher shops and would wonder what they did with the ones they didn’t sell.
But in the past year or two, castradina has come back into fashion. So Venice, according to the Gazzettino, was pullulating with desperate people seeking castradina by any means, in any place, at any price. I can’t think of a credible substitute. You couldn’t fake it even with tofu.
Getting ready for the big day doesn't mean just cooking castradina. It means getting the area ready for every contingency.
Back to the weather. It was cold, dark, and wet. Just what I think of as perfect weather for this feast, though the women in the mink coats were thwarted by the rain. As you know, they come out in force on this day even in the driving sun. The need to show off their fur is just too strong. If you’re wearing beaver or seal, fine. But minks do not like rain any more than their humans do. I kind of missed seeing these self-contented matrons in their luscious garb. They do love it so. Lino calls this the feast of Our Lady of the Fur Coats.
And the delivery of several hundredweight of neatly boxed candles.There are at least five stands and they all sell exactly the same thing. I don't get it.
This year, to my surprise, we got into the church without having to battle a rugby scrum, and we walked right up to the candle-lighting station and handed over our candles. This was an odd but very pleasant sensation. Last year there was such a crush of people that I honestly thought we’d be trapped there holding our candles till Christmas Eve.
Then, as usual, we joined the file of people who elected to walk past the high altar and venerate the little Madonna on the other side, crossing themselves and tossing some cash, and walking out through the sacristy. We found two seats in the heavy wooden choir stalls and sat down to watch people go by. Even though there weren’t massive crowds, the flow was steady. So far, so normal.
You can’t force pious thoughts. If you try, they just slide off your brain. So I sat there not thinking at all, somewhat lulled by the rosary recitation floating over from the other side. And then a thought came to me — more a realization than a thought. I realized that we were being faithful.
All those thousands of frantic, distraught Venetians had been watching people die of the plague all around them till all they had left to offer in exchange for their lives was to promise the Virgin that if she would intercede and save what was left of the city, they would build her a church and come to offer her candles and gratitude every November 21 forever. And after 380 years, people (us) who are so far away from the original promisers that their vow could be thought of as symbolic, or even meaningless, are still maintaining that vow.
Crumpled-up little old people, children of every shape and temper, families of various nationalities, teenage boys, an assortment of tourists — anybody who was there formed another link in the chain tying us to those helpless, despairing people who made a promise that they believed we would keep.
