One of the things I love about our neighborhood is that there are children here. Lots and lots of them, of every size and attitude. Shoals of them, migrating herds of them, like the wildebeest on the Serengeti.
If you walk down Via Garibaldi at around 6 on a summer evening, you will realize that this is one corner of Italy in which the word “birthrate” isn’t associated with “falling.”
But an unusually perceptive person would already have known all that from the scene I noticed outside one of the tobacco/candy/lottery ticket/toy stores here.
What these three alarmingly pink doll-size strollers reveal is:
That there are little girls living nearby.
That there are lots of them, enough to create an important market for toys, especially those designed for little girls, a market that requires serious inventory.
That they are extremely demanding customers, who require choice in the products they insist their relatives buy them, whichever relative has recently shown a weak spot that can be exploited.
That any color is good, as long as it’s pink.
I hope I’m here when they grow up, I really want to see how they dress.
Lino told me something that happened on the vaporetto yesterday which falls into my personal category of events I term “Venetian moments.” Actually, they could more generally be called “small-town moments,” but we’re here and besides, I still sometimes marvel at how many connections form the web that hold this city together. Kind of like a truss.
This lady isn't just admiring the boy's adorable little sibling. She's already gathering and filing away large amounts of information about the new arrival. The group behind her may be discussing the cost of mozzarella, but I'd be willing to bet that they're updating each other on their families and friends.
Venetian moments either need to involve a Venetian, or occur in Venice. They can happen to foreigners but only after they’ve been here for a while. And of course they’re usually fleeting little experiences (sometimes only glimpses, not even verbal). I love it when they happen to me and I think that Lino was secretly pleased about this one, though he didn’t make a big thing out of it.
So he was on the #1 vaporetto, the trusty local, headed uptown, and a little old couple got on at the stop nearest a nursing home called the Ca’ di Dio. He glances at them out of the corner of his eye, like you do on public transportation.
Then the little old lady addresses him in a tiny, bent-over voice:
“Lu no xe da la parochia dei Carmini?” (“Aren’t you from the parish of the Carmini?”) They continued in Venetian, but I’ll spare you and keep the thing going.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Because I’m from the Carmini too,” she continued.
“I’m Leda’s little brother,” he said. He didn’t need to bother adding a last name, or a street name, or any other clue. And putting it this way meant that he already knew that in her day (when he was a tyke) there was only one Leda in the parish.
“I thought I recognized you,” she said.
They exchanged a few little generic comments, and then he got off.
It isn’t surprising is that she recognized him; parishes were very tightly knit and usually were composed of plenty of large families. And people of her vintage have phenomenal memories for faces and names — they’re like anonymous little griots wandering through the supermarket, comparing the cost of tuna while brimming with memories of people, events, places, who knew/did/said what and where and also why. And with whom. Stretching back unto the fourth and fifth generation. They’re completely overgrown with the shrubbery of family histories, each one of which is a complete saga.
From across the canal it looks like a friendly early-morning chat between friends. That's part of their secret...
When neighborhoods were still intact, these little old ladies were plentiful, and they weren’t usually endearing — they were to be feared and placated with offerings because they knew everything about you. They knew things about you that literally nobody knew, nobody could know. Things not even you knew about yourself. This amount of knowledge and diabolical skill at using it is one of those primal forces, like the atom, capable of life or death. Or, as Lino puts it whenever he might be tempted to drift into something like nostalgia for the old days, “Those little old ladies knew how many hairs you had on your ass.”
In this case, it didn’t matter that he’s now 71 and probably hasn’t been seen by her since he was 22 and moved to another neighborhood — he was imprinted on her memory and will be there for eternity.
They're almost always in three's. It must be something occult.
Speaking of eternity, don’t think that this knowledge will disappear when she dies; she’s going to take it with her so she can find her friends up there and sit around all afternoon talking about people who aren’t there to defend themselves. It’s true that they acted as a steady underpinning to the life in the courtyard, a sort of 24-hour neighborhood watch. But as Lino also says, “Their gossip destroyed whole families,” and he’s not joking.
The bow that tied up this moment was the fact that he remembered her too, though by name, instead of face. “She’s gotten really old,” he remarked. Still, they were landsmen, that’s the point of it all.
If there were a code word or a secret handshake for the people of the Carmini, they’d have used it. He was struck by the fact that she identified herself according to parish, in the old way. Back then, people didn’t identify themselves so much according to their sestiere, or district, the way they do now since everything’s gotten all stretched out of shape. They went by parish. If somebody asked where you lived, you’d say “I’m from the Carmini,” or “Anzolo Rafael,” or “San Cassan.” That’s the way it was.
It’s obvious, once you know it — or even stop to think about it — that the pipes and cables carrying water, gas, electricity and so on are under the paving stones of the streets.
Work underway in Campo San Vio. The site looks remarkably like an archaeological dig -- the water pipe alone appears to be a relic of an early Iron age cult.
(When they have to cross a canal, they cling to the underbelly of the nearest bridge in a marsupial kind of way.)
What happens with the water pipes is that they leave traces — not of the water itself, but of the condensation they cause because of the difference in temperature between the water in the pipe and its surroundings.
Example: It’s deeply hot now in Venice, the days are dazzling with heat and sun, though the air, thank God, isn’t very humid. At night, things cool down somewhat, and in the early morning, this appears on the fondamenta near our house:
In the winter, the opposite phenomenon occurs, as you see:
Nothing revolutionary here, I just find it diverting.
I’m thinking about World War I today, partly because yesterday, May 24, used to be a date engraved in every Italian’s consciousness. Yet it passed unremarked in any way, which to Lino is yet another sign of the general deterioration of just about everything.
We were walking along the fondamenta yesterday morning when all of a sudden Lino said: “It’s May 24! …‘il 24 maggio l’esercito marciava…” and he was off, declaiming the four long stanzas of the “Legend of the Piave.”
This is one of the great patriotic songs, immortalizing the departure of the army to war against the Austro-Hungarian Empire on May 24, 1915. Some of the most ferocious battles toward the end took place along the Piave River. It is a pleasant little stream which starts in the Alps and empties into the sea not far from Venice, but more importantly, it formed the front which finally stopped the enemy advance and led to its ultimate defeat. The Piave is therefore also known as “The river sacred to the motherland.”
Schoolchildren used to be taught these impressive chunks of poetry and as you see, it stuck. This feat was perhaps made a little easier by singing; the music of “The Legend of the Piave” is so distinctive that you can’t get it out of your mind no matter what you try to put in its place. Everybody knows it. It was in the serious running to be designated the Italian national anthem.
“My father fought in the war,” Lino was telling me, “on the Asiago plateau. He was taken prisoner, and they took him to Trento, to the Castle of Buonconsiglio. He took me there once, when I was little, to show me. We went into the big room and he said, ‘That’s where the judge was sitting, and that’s where the bench was where I was sitting.’ He always told me he was going to take me to Asiago to show me the trenches he was in, but he never did. I’ve always been sorry. ”
The military judge’s job was very simple. All he had to do in order to know what to do with a prisoner was to ask where he came from. Large areas of what are now Italy only became demarcated as such after hideous battles. So if the prisoner came from Venice, or anywhere south of there, he was treated as a normal prisoner of war because he was fighting for his own country, Italy. Lino’s father got sent to the internment camp at Mauthausen for the rest of the war, came home, and went back to work driving the train from Venice to Trento.
If, however, the captured soldier came from Trento or Trieste or any of the many northern, now-Italian, towns which were then still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, he was considered a traitor and dealt with accordingly. Firing squad,say, or hanging (Nazario Sauro, August 10, 1916), or hanging and garroting (Cesare Battisti, July 12, 1916) — it was all good. These are famous martyrs of the Italian resistance. Despite living in Austrian territory they considered themselves Italians were fighting for Italy, while according to the Austrian viewpoint they were supposed to be fighting against it. These men were epic heroes. I can’t understand why their life stories haven’t been turned into tragic operas. Where is Verdi when you need him?
So the First World War, which to many of us seems extraordinarily remote, is still part of the lives of many people — like Lino — still walking around loaded with memories. Did I say memories? He and his twin brother, Franco, have lived their entire lives carrying the names of two of their mother’s brothers who were killed in the war. Every Venetian parish, as well as the Jewish Ghetto, displays a memorial plaque listing the names of the local boys who died in the carnage. The names of Lino’s doomed uncles are inscribed on the memorial in Campo Santa Margherita. Whenever I go by I stop to look; I have this odd feeling that they’re part of my family.
The Piave, let it not be forgotten, was also where Ernest Hemingway was wounded at the age of 19, after only two weeks at the front. Because his poor eyesight prevented him from enlisting as a soldier, he volunteered to work with the Red Cross ambulances bringing soldiers down from the action on Monte Pasubio.
He was sent to Fossalta di Piave, a town on the river not far from Venice. At midnight on July 8, 1918, an Austrian mortar hit the trench where he had gone, more out of curiosity than merely to distribute cigarettes and chocolate.
“The 227 wounds I got from the trench mortar didn’t hurt a bit at the time,” he wrote to his parents from the American Hospital in Milan, “only my feet felt like I had rubber boots full of water on. Hot water… But I got up again and got my wounded into the dug out… I told him in Italian that I wanted to see my legs, though I was afraid to look at them. So we took off my trousers and the old limbs were still there but gee they were a mess. They couldn’t figure out how I had walked 150 yards with a load with both knees shot through and my right shoe punctured in two big places… ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘My Captain, it is of nothing. In America they all do it! It is thought well not to allow the enemy to perceive that they have captured our goats!”
When the bravado wore off, he was left with nightmares, insomnia — I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body — five months of physical therapy, and his vivacious American nurse, Agnes von Kurowski. In the end, she jilted him and shattered his soul into more pieces than the shrapnel ever had.
Bombs even fell on Venice here and there (there were victims in Cannaregio). There is even an unexploded bomb which was retrieved from the roof of the basilica of the Frari, and which is mounted on the wall near the Pesaro altarpiece as a memento to this small, perhaps, but marvelous moment of salvation.
Speaking of bombs, there is a slowly disappearing stone in the Piazza San Marco. It has been worn away by millions of undiscerning feet. Sometimes I pause and just watch people walk over or past it, oblivious, snapping their pix, thinking about work, looking for a bathroom. It marks the spot where an Austrian bomb fell on September 4, 1916, five steps from the entrance to the basilica. It is just another stone, mute, but eloquent.
Every barracks and City Hall in Italy (as here, at the entrance to City Hall in Venice) displays a large bronze plaque made of melted-down enemy cannons. It gives the full text of the address given by General, later Marshal, Armando Diaz, chief of general staff, announcing the Italian victory of the Battle of Vittorio Veneto and the end of the war. It manages in very few lines not only to report the precise details of the enemy’s undoing but to convey every emotion conceivable in the victors of a struggle beyond human comprehension.
The war against Austria-Hungary which, under the high command of His Majesty the King, the Italian Army, inferior in numbers and means, initiated on May 24, 1915, and with unwavering and tenacious valor conducted fiercely without interruption for 41 months, is won.
The gigantic battle engaged on the 24th of last October and in which took part 51 Italian divisions, three British, two French, one Czechoslovakian, and one American regiment, against 73 Austro-Hungarian divisions, is finished.
The rapid and daring advance of the XXIX Army Corps on Trento, blocking the enemy’s means of retreat in Trentino, overwhelming them on the west by the troops of the VII Army and on the east by those of the I, VI, and IV, determined yesterday the total ruin of the adversary’s front. From Brenta al Torre the irresistible surge of the XII, the VIII, and the X Army, and of the cavalry divisions, drove the fleeing enemy even further back.
On the plains, His Royal Highness the Duke of Aosta rapidly advanced at the head of his undefeated III Army, longing to return to the positions which they had already victoriously conquered and had never lost.
The Austro-Hungarian Army is annihilated; it suffered grave losses in the fierce resistance of the first days and in the pursuit it has lost huge quantities of materiel of every sort and virtually all of its stores and warehouses. It has left in our hands about 300,000 prisoners with entire general staffs and not less than 5,000 cannon.
The remains of what once was one of the most powerful armies in the world is ascending, in disorder and without hope, the valleys which it haddescended with such proud security. DIAZ
For me, though, the most powerful and poignant epitaph to war — military, emotional, or both — is what Hemingway wrote as one of the 40-some endings he crossed out for “A Farewell to Arms”:
“Many things have happened. Everything blunts and the world keeps on. You get most of your life back like goods recovered from a fire… It never stops. It only stops for you. Some of it stops while you are still alive. The rest goes on and you gowith it.”
It is a pleasant little stream which starts in the Alps and empties into the sea not far from Venice, but more importantly, it formed the front which finally stopped the enemy advance and led to its ultimate defeat. The Piave is therefore also known as “The river sacred to the motherland.” 
These are famous martyrs of the Italian resistance. Despite living in Austrian territory they considered themselves Italians were fighting for Italy, while according to the Austrian viewpoint they were supposed to be fighting against it. These men were epic heroes. I can’t understand why their life stories haven’t been turned into tragic operas. Where is Verdi when you need him? 
It gives the full text of the address given by General, later Marshal, Armando Diaz, chief of general staff, announcing the Italian victory of the Battle of Vittorio Veneto and the end of the war. It manages in very few lines not only to report the precise details of the enemy’s undoing but to convey every emotion conceivable in the victors of a struggle beyond human comprehension.