I love the fact that this neighborhood is running over with children, like some cosmic bathtub.
If your mom forces you to go shopping with her first thing in the morning, at least you can make it easy on yourself by hitching a ride.
Contrary to the Italian national average birthrate, which at 1.37 per woman is almost the lowest in the European Union (only Spain and Greece are lower), here in the heart of darkest Castello offspring are definitely not produced in fractions. I suppose they are seen as — well, I’m not sure what. Necessary? Fun? Inevitable? Normal? Probably all of these, and more.
In the morning, all is effervescence and charm; the little urchins are full of high spirits as they set off to conquer the world. Toward afternoon, though, the scene turns darker. Something happens to those shining little angels, tousled, chirping, frolicking, laughing in twinkly little voices, beings that can make you want to have a dozen just because they are the concentrated essence of happy-to-be-alive-on-Earth-with-youness.
As 5:00 PM slinks toward you, Things Change. It is the Hour of the Crying Child. You hear crying in the distance, or even nearby, as the little people begin to troop homeward, often goaded by their intolerant and domineering older siblings. (Yes, they have siblings here. It’s great.)
On St. Martin's Day (November 11,) kids dress up and come out in droves, banging pots and buckets and demanding candy or money from the neighbors. The afternoon turns into something of a controlled riot.
The crying, or screaming, or incoherent baby-vulture-like screeching, gets closer and closer, and as it approaches it also gets louder and more grating. Often it is lubricated with angry, exhausted, exasperated, helpless tears, the kind the kid can’t turn off even as they overwhelm him or her. The kind that gets ratcheted up with each attempt, increasingly harsh, by its adults to bring the hysteria to a halt.
A little boy was crying like this the other day as he and his entourage passed along the fondamenta across the canal from us. It was a sound somewhere between a shriek and a whine, more temper than pain, and was definitely under his complete control. It was that “I’m going to punish you till you snap” noise that you know he can keep up for hours, if need be, that stops being about anything other than itself.
I was heading over the bridge toward him, to do some errands. Two American girls crossed the bridge, coming toward me. As they passed, I heard one say to the other, “I’m never having kids.”
I went down the other side. Standing at the bottom of the bridge were three little old ladies — they’re always in three, like the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. As I passed, I heard one say to the others, in Venetian, “We always had a smile on our faces. Always.” Of course she was referring to the Golden Age, when she was the little boy’s age and life was hard but happy and people were simple and honest and children were perfect.
Kids can claim virtually any part of the street for themselves; if they had a flag they could declare their own independent republic. Which would be ruled by dictators, thousands of them.
Yeah, right. Everybody was ready with a comment, no matter how irrational. I choked off the temptation to turn around and shout at all of them, “You’re lucky your mother isn’t here now!”
Late yesterday afternoon I was headed toward via Garibaldi at the Moment of the Swarming Children (when they all obey some primal signal and come out to, well, swarm), a festive interlude which briefly precedes the Hour of the Crying Child.
As I was walking along the fondamenta, I saw a little blonde girl, maybe four years old, standing at the railing looking into the water of the canal. Her mother and a couple of her female friends were standing near her but involved in hashing over whatever needed to be hashed. Meanwhile, the girl was transfixed, staring down.
As I passed by, curious to glimpse what she was looking at, her older brother went over to her. He might have been seven. She looked up at him and I heard her say two words: “E’ morto.” It’s dead. A pensive little voice stating a simple little fact.
It was a pigeon, floating in the water. I had a strange rustic impulse to say “Great! One less! That leaves only about ten billion to go.” But I didn’t. First, I try not to invite myself into other people’s lives, especially if I don’t know them (though via Garibaldi grants a lot of leeway for spontaneous badinage even among strangers).
But I couldn’t do it. Something in her voice had struck me. It wasn’t that she was sad, or repulsed, or anything you could identify with a single word, or even several words. She was standing there doing her best to grasp the fact that something which had been alive wasn’t alive anymore, and wasn’t ever going to be alive again. She made me feel strangely respectful.
I am sure that if I had said anything — anything at all — I would have made it worse. I think her brother sensed the same thing, because as long as I was in earshot, I didn’t hear him say one thing. They just stood there, looking down, waiting for their mother to stop talking.
It may be that your eye is not drawn wallward as you stroll along the canals of Venice when the tide is low.
Perhaps you don’t find the mats of squishy green clinging to the building foundations very appealing. Perhaps you don’t wish to notice how many small life forms are scurrying around, unhindered by that pesky water. Perhaps there is a general sort of sliminess that reminds you uncomfortably of just how biological the Venetian environment is, and how little the lagoon cares about posing for you and your romantic photographs.
But let’s say those things don’t bother you; let’s say you’re curious to find out what’s beneath the waterline, or almost. If you look carefully, you may very well see this:
This incised capital C with the line beneath it is called the “Comune Marino” (hence the “C”), which roughly means “average sea.” Or perhaps “sea average.” This one, as it happens, is in the canal just outside our little hovel.
Water level measurements were formalized in Venice in 1440 when the Water Authority (Magistrato alle Acque) began to measure the upper level of wet algae on canal embankments by carving the letter “C,” which indicated the normal high-tide level. Water fosters certain kinds of algae which flourish in an “intertidal zone”, which is alternately wet and dry, and the line of algae corresponds to the level of water. Obviously.
So “Comune Marino” refers to the line created by the algae, a line which clearly indicates the upper limit of the tide.
Good to know, but why? Because there are many situations in which an engineer would want to know where the average upper limit would be — if he was planning to build a bridge nearby, for example, or even an entire building.
So far, so general. Keep in mind, though, that in each place the “C” is a marker of the average sea level in that canal at that point. Its height only matters in relation to what’s next to it — the water level will be “high” (or low) compared to a building foundation or embankment. If the “C” appears to be going down (or the algae to be going up, like elevators in a French farce) it might indicate that the building is subsiding, or even that the canal is silting up and becoming shallower. Factors such as these all bear some influence on where the average sea level will be in that place and whether you find it innocuous or annoying.
A look at the mark when the tide is out. This illustrates the difficulty of answering the frequent question, "How deep are the canals?" As in, when the tide is high, or when it's low?
An analysis of the displacement of the “algal belt” also gives engineers some idea of the long-term trend of apparent rising of the sea level. This is a subject that is far too great for this little post, but I merely note that the algae is playing its part in informing the world about the state of Venice.
Don’t be too quick, though, to think that just because there’s some algae above the “C” that the city is sinking inexorably into the lagoon. The algae has its own growing period (late winter to early autumn) and if the average high-tide level should rise one year, for one or many of several reasons, the line of algae will also rise. If it should go down the next year, there will be less algae at the previous level. Exceptional peaks in the high-tide level may cause temporary new growth, but it won’t necessarily survive the sunshine and dryness that returns when the tide level goes down.
Algae growth is also influenced by whether its location is on a sunny or shady side of the building, or whether the stone or brick it’s inhabiting is particularly porous.
Field observations have shown that the fluctuation in the height of the “algal front” is no more than 2 cm (7/10ths of an inch).
So all is well? Not really. One factor the Venetian engineers of 1440 didn’t have to deal with was “motondoso” — that’s a polite way of saying “water constantly splattering from the waves caused by motorboats.”
I’ll be devoting plenty of attention to motondoso on a future page, but I recommend that you draw conclusions very carefully about water level based solely on the line of algae. It’s highly likely that whatever spot you’re looking at is getting drenched by waves day and night, encouraging algae in an extravagant way, something that wasn’t happening back when they were busy carving “C’s” all over town.
The constant and extreme "motondoso" in the Giudecca Canal has created the perfect environment for algae on what used to be considered dry land, so its presence here doesn't tell you anything useful about average sea level. Do not ever step on this kind of algae, it's more slippery than a slice of raw bacon.
The Daily Trivia: Regular measurements with instruments began in the 1870s. In 2004, mean sea level was found to be 25 cm (9 inches) higher than it was in 1897. Yet all water-level measurements continue to be based on the mean sea level in 1897.
We like to cling to the old ways here. Or something.
Via Garibaldi used to be a canal, which you can tell by the white stone border on each side. It contains everything needful for human life, including two pharmacies. The fact that they both stay in business tells me something about the neighborhood but I'm not sure what.
If someone in Venice were to ask me where I live, the generic answer would be “Castello,” which is the name of the sestiere, or one of the six neighborhoods into which Venice is divided. But that’s just a little too generic, considering that Castello is fairly large and has several hundred little subsets with all sorts of variations ranging from the sublime to the moderately mystifying.
The more precise answer is “Via Garibaldi.” We don’t actually live right there — we’re down beyond the end of it. But it’s an answer which represents not only geographical coordinates and a zip code, but an entire biosphere of its own with its own history and climate and fauna, a zone which to Venetians of other sestieri still connotes verging on the exotic, even vaguely hazardous.
Carnival means the street is clogged with kids, the only difference from every other day being that they're in costume. Otherwise, it's just chaos as usual.
Once, when we were living in Dorsoduro, we overheard a mother snapping at her kid: “Stop shouting! You sound just like somebody from Castello!” And when we moved away — to Castello, of all places — Lino could hardly believe how far down in the world he had come. To his relatives, he might as well have gone to Tasmania. In fact, Tasmania would have made some sense. But Castello?
Many, if not most, people who visit Venice think of the city of palaces and monuments, and maybe also some trendy boutiques and clever little galleries. Our part of Venice is a gristly precinct beyond and behind the Arsenal. The Arsenal was the shipyard where Venice’s fleets were built, the foundation on which Venetian power — economic, military, political — rested. It’s thanks to the Arsenal that all those palaces and monuments exist, so Castello doesn’t have to apologize to anyone if it has chosen to remain in its primordial state. During Venice’s Great Days there were as many as 10,000 people working in the Arsenal, and their dwellings and relatives surrounding it constituted what amounted to a company town. Although very few, if any, locals still work in the Arsenal, I’m convinced there are people here who still haven’t discovered fire.
A member opens the clubhouse of the Mutual Aid Society of Carpenters and Caulkers, a flourishing remnant of the old Arsenal days when the workers had only each other to turn to for help.
If Venice isn’t a place for everybody, Castello is even less so. And Via Garibaldi is the axis of a Hogarthian world where the men’s bodies swarm with tattoos; where men and women alike use hand-hewn phrases which can’t be translated and shouldn’t be repeated, and their rampant children have two basic ways of communicating: Yelling and crying. They’re a lot like London’s East Enders (denizens of another once-great seaport enclave) — tough, practical, unromantic yet sentimental homebodies to whom family and neighborhood are the universe, where grown men call each other “love” and women call each other “girls.” It’s not that they don’t know there’s a world out there, they just don’t find it all that interesting.
I love Venice in a complicated way that I don’t understand very well. In the midst of the obvious beauty and grandeur and all, the city is also composed of so many aspects which verge on ugliness but which, strangely, also have their own sort of allure. Nelson Algren once wrote that “It isn’t hard to love a town for its greater and lesser towers … but you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too.” You discover this in unexpected moments and glimpses, where she doesn’t mind you seeing her without her girdle: no excuses, no apologies.
The “alleys” would be out here, with the ingenious, illegal, improvised sewer outflows, and the “What, me worry?” deposits of dog poop and the hand-lettered signs vilifying the anonymous neighbor who has left his bag of garbage under your window, and the mismatched lifelong friends in the bar shouting at each other — the one who’s right and the one who’s wrong — about something that happened years ago. In fact, they’re both right. Or wrong.
What happens is this: Some people put out plastic bags of garbage long before the collection is due to begin. Sometimes they do this on a Saturday afternoon, which means the bags will sit there till Monday morning, thereby giving the seagulls plenty of time to bust open the bags and scavenge. Now the pigeons have started to take up the habit as well. Everyone knows this, including the people who put out their bags, bags which would be collected from their very own doorstep, but which they prefer to bring secretly to this anonymous corner. It's so stupid it's almost beautiful.
This is not nostalgie de la boue; many things about life down here in the bilges range from infuriating to only slightly flinch-worthy. Then there are the aspects you can’t easily categorize — say, the septic tank somewhere on the other side of our canal which for far too long desperately needed pumping out. When we had company for dinner I used to pray that the wind wouldn’t shift. They say you can get used to anything, but I’m here to tell you: Not that.
I was walking down the via Garibaldi one early evening; there was a middle-aged Venetian couple coming toward me.
There had been a few airplane crashes that month: One in the sea just outside Palermo, another that hit near Athens, now one in Venezuela somewhere.
Anyway, I reach earshot just as the woman is saying to her husband, “Not me. I’ll never go on an airplane. Forget it.”
He says, “What about a ship?”
“Not even a ship. I’m staying home, I’m not going anywhere. If I die, I’m going to die right here in Via Garibaldi.” (Wait a minute — “If” you die?).
That’s what the true voice of a neighborhood sounds like — especially this one. Via Garibaldi to the bitter end.
I’m with her.
You'll always run into somebody to talk to -- or about -- on Via Garibaldi.
Vitale Rossi was the last luganegher (yoo-ghan-eh-GHAIR) in Venice, and his shop and workshop happened to be just across the canal from our first apartment. In the shop, he and his implacable wife Anna sold the myriad pork products he had created: prosciutto (cured and cooked), pancetta (smoked and otherwise), sopressa, salame, culatello, zampone, and so on. If it had been any relation to scrofa domesticus, it was fair game to him.
More important to me — as after all this time I still have only a cordial, if not passionate, relationship with swine products — Signor Vitale was my guardian angel. I deeply regret not ever having taken even one picture of him, but I doubt that a mere camera could have captured, much less conveyed, the profound kindness that radiated from his eyes, his smile, his follicles, his synapses, his DNA.
Facade of the former scuola of the luganegheri, on the Zattere at number 1473. At the fall of the Republic in 1797 there were 684 individuals registered in 198 shops working exclusively with pork.
Back when I was totally new here, knowing nobody and speaking only the most rudimentary pidgin Italian, he would gaze at me as I attempted to order with the gentlest and most patient expression I’ve ever seen. If I came into the shop on the verge of closing time, at the end of a long and tiring day, and asked for a mere bottle of water or two rolls, in some silent way he convinced me that this transaction was the best thing that had happened to him all day.
There were many, many afternoons around 4:00 or so when I would go over to buy some fragment of something just so I could absorb for a moment his extraordinary aura. He would relax for a few minutes by expressing some opinion on the current state of anything, or relating assorted tidbits about his past, or about the business, or the finer points (explained very carefully but lovingly) of curing prosciutto. Occasionally he would take me back into the laboratory and show me the various pieces of meat undergoing treatments and processes involving smoke, salt, and time.
As a workplace, it couldn’t have changed much from the pork labs of the Dark Ages. But for Signor Vitale, raising a herd of Olympic heptathletes would not have required more devotion or given him more satisfaction than he felt every day as he tested and turned and smelled the progress of his assorted hanging hocks.
Their patron was Saint Anthony Abbot, who is often depicted with a pig. Monks of his order would support their charities by raising swine.
On dark, foggy winter nights, the light shining from the shop window was the only illumination on that entire stretch of fondamenta. It was the lighthouse of the neighborhood, in more ways than one.
As my language skills improved, so did our conversations, obviously. I still depended on the smile, but now was much more curious to hear his opinions and ruminations. He never disappointed me. Talking with him did me more good than five homilies.
One January morning I stopped in for something and there he was, alone. This was great — it meant he had a minute to “exchange four words” with me, as he put it.
I started: “Did you see the eclipse of the moon this morning?” (We had gotten up before dawn to go out and witness the event.)
He smiled. “I have to work.”
“Working at 4:30 in the morning??” I asked.
“I was sleeping.” His eyes smiled at me. I don’t know how he does it. If I were a pig, I’d say “Yes, come slaughter me. Just as long as you’re happy.”
I said, “Well, it was beautiful. We didn’t get up at 4:30 — we saw it from 5:30 to 6:00. But we’re up then anyway.”
He looked startled. “I get up at 6:30,” he said. “If I’m going to work a 12-hour day, at nearly 80 years old, I need to get some rest. No point staying up late or getting up too early.”
Which brought to mind the subject of age, which segued almost immediately into the topic of one’s departure from this life. The notorious exiled politician Benito Craxi had died of a heart attack the day before, and the funeral was today, in Tunisia. So people out and around have been discussing him, with heavy moralistic overtones (anything from “What a pity, he was a good, innocent person who didn’t deserve to die” to “What a crook, he should have died years ago”). No one, clearly, taking into account that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and whatever you do, your train is headed in the same direction as everybody else’s.
“Look at Craxi,” Signor Vitale volunteered. “”What use was all that struggling for power and money? There he is, dead at 66. Didn’t do him any good at all. You don’t need a lot of money in order to live.” He touched his forehead, to indicate that the only requirement was a functioning brain. “People need to learn to content themselves with what they have. We need to learn how to take life for what it is.”
“Yes, but he wanted to be big,” was my very unoriginal observation.
“You can’t be big,” Signor Vitale stated. “Or anyway, not past a certain point. You know the balloons kids have at the fair? They blow them up and blow them up to the point where the balloon can’t hold anymore and it explodes. The same thing for us. We can’t be big past a certain point. After a hundred years, nobody will remember we even existed. You know?” He seemed completely at peace with that fact.
“He wanted more,” I said, just to keep things going.
“Well sure,” Signor Vitale replied, one of his large, machete-like knives in his hand. “Mussolini wanted more, and he got it, too” — he made a thrusting motion with the knife and smiled seraphically. “Yep, he got more.”
At 6:00 the same evening I found myself back in the shop. Needed milk and butter. Signor Vitale was at the helm alone again, but this time there’ was a lady wearing an extremely gorgeous mink coat buying some milk and few other oddities. As I waited, I stared at the mink, struggling not to reach out and caress it — it was one of those furs that is so lush and gleaming that it not only screams “Money,” it also screams “Touch me.” I didn’t, but I stared.
When she left, I said to Signor Vitale, “Did you see that coat?”
He shrugged. “I’m no expert on fur.”
“I’m not either, but even a civilian like me could tell that it was something exceptional.”
He looked unimpressed. “Doesn’t it seem a little much, to wear something like that to go shopping?” I’ve gotten so used to see women here wearing fur coats, especially mink, that it hadn’t occurred to me. She has to wear something, after all. But of course he was right.
“Was it mink?” he asked.
“Indubitably,” I replied.
“I guess it usually is.”
“Well yes,” I said, “but there’s mink and mink.”
“I don’t know,” he went on. “Some people try to make themselves appear to be something greater than they are. Look at Craxi.” This was clearly the topic du jour, a very useful tool should you want to calibrate your personal values along with the barometer.
“He went so high, but people who go so high, who achieve all those glories, usually have humiliations to match. It’s better to be content with what you have. All that money. What was it for? He could still be alive” — he seemed to be implying that the desire for pelf was one contributing cause to the man’s demise. I didn’t know that “love of lucre” could be listed as a cause of death, but there was no doubt in Signor Vitale’s mind.
“The important thing is to love your work,” he declared, smiling that incredibly benevolent smile. His eyes beamed on me. I felt like a mink coat. “If you can work with serenity, you’ve got all you need in life. You need to be honest.” Evidently Craxi’s dishonesty — which he dishonestly denied, of course, up to the last palpitation of his flawed little heart — was another reason for his dying so young.
“What you need in life,” he continued, “is to work, to listen to the birdsong, to look at a beautiful woman” — he smiled, but seemed to sense he might be wandering onto tricky terrain, “to read a good book,” he neatly recovered. “This is what matters in life.”
These were clearly not opinions he was expressing, but facts. You can’t argue with a philosophy like this, especially when you know that the person expressing it spent several years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany during World War II, and raised four children, at least one of whom is a doctor, on the money he made from a batch of prosciutto.
Anyway, he was preaching to the converted. I had just noticed, crossing the bridge, the exquisitely pale, violet gleam of the winter sunset, and how the transparent sky was beginning to show tiny dots of stars. (I had also noticed a small water rat swimming sturdily from the drainpipe on one side of the canal to the other, leaving a perfect rippling V behind him or her. It’s all nature.)
I wondered if the woman in the mink coat would have noticed the same things, and if they’d have given her spirit the same lift they gave mine. Or does mink act as a sort of protective layer against more than mere cold? (Let’s be fair here, even philistines have to keep warm.) I have to watch out that I don’t fall into the mindset of those Russians who boast that they’re more spiritually alive than the materialistic clods in the West, even as they’re scraping the mold off their last piece of bread. It’s a very tempting frame of mind sometimes. The old “less is more,” but taken to metaphysical extremes.
This is the sort of musing that Signor Vitale almost always lures me into. Still, it so obviously works for him that you’re really, really tempted to believe it.
