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

First day of spring

March 21, 2019 3 Comments

Spring in Venice doesn’t usually come wafting across the lagoon in warm breezes to caress your newly-bare arms. Judging by the riotous amount of flowering trees to be seen the past few days, which all suddenly seem to be in a race toward something, spring has come more or less all at once. The chilly nights and rambunctious windy days and the unreliable sun don’t appear to add up to what I’d imagine that a flowering tree would call “spring,” but that statement just proves I’m not a tree.

So in honor of today, feast your eyes on some of the splendor to be seen here in merely mid-March. If you ever thought you might want to celebrate spring in Venice in May, all the best parts will be long over by then. So I will share some of them now (I’m sure there are many, many more which I haven’t discovered, and tomorrow may well be too late). Let the vernals begin!

The more resplendent trees seem to be found on streets which have no other redeeming characteristic. I wonder if they’re there because somebody else noticed that.

These small but intrepid trees are another example of wonderful contrast to one of the most nondescript pockets in deepest Castello.

I discovered them for the first time as I was coming around the corner from the other side of the grassy campo. It was quite the little surprise.

This tree, on the other hand, is a faithful harbinger which I watch for every year about this time. Too bad you have to go into the hospital to see it, but it certainly gladdens the atmosphere there. I’m sorry its delicate pinkness doesn’t come through as well as I’d have wanted, but that’s just the way it is with ephemeral things. And with my cell phone camera.

As my eyes were gorging on the flowers, Lino immediately noticed the bird. He called it a type of pigeon (white-collared, in translation), but it looks more like a dove to me, with a broad band of white around its neck. Any ornithological experts, please make yourselves heard.

I’ve walked countless times through this odd little stretch of structures behind the closed-up church of Sant’ Anna, so I was well acquainted with the jauntiest graffito lion in the city (the little wing is the best). But the tree was just a tree until yesterday, when it became a sort of botanical fountain-firework. I was in no way prepared for it!

Venetian-ness

Hints of spring

March 11, 2019 11 Comments

They’re only hints, mind you, but they brighten my outlook considerably.

You might not notice them if you weren’t looking for them, but I was. Violets are one of the earliest, rashest signs of spring. They ask no questions about long-term commitment from the first rays of warmth, they just bloom.

Leaves on the trees at Sant’ Elena are equally irrepressible, thank heaven.

At this fleeting stage they seem more like flowers than leaves, though of course I know that’s totally wrong, botanically speaking. But they aren’t going to be outdone by any mere blossoms.

Peach blossoms. They’re not from around here, but they are just as dependable a sign of primavera as some of the fish in the nearby market.

Ditto the pussy willows (Salix cinerea). The silvery sheath on each bud is at least as beautiful as sterling. When they bloom, these flowers — which don’t even look like flowers — are rock-star providers of nectar. And to think I always treated them as a curiosity that was just fun to play with.

An old German card shows the pussy-willow tradition at Easter and/or Palm Sunday in northern and eastern Europe, as well as Ukraine, Russia, and among the Ruthenian and Kashubian Catholics (I just threw that in.) Here in the sunny Mediterranean the pussy willows are long gone by Easter, but it’s a lovely thought.

This year the ever-faithful and -predictable forsythia has just been replaced in my pantheon by this bewitching shrub at the entrance to the Morosini Naval School. Its perfume captured me before I had even noticed its flowers.

If any reader can identify this marvel, I’d be grateful. Otherwise I’m just going to have to invent a name for it myself, and it will probably be a long one, like a champion dog. (The pink buds are just on their way to opening into cream-colored flowers, a magical moment which will undoubtedly occur tonight when nobody’s looking.)

I imagine it happening not long after sunset, which shades into night much too quickly. Tomorrow will almost certainly reveal some new wonder.

Venetian-ness

Space problem? What space problem?

October 22, 2018 3 Comments

We complain — justifiably — about tourists who take up too much space on the vaporettos with their steamer trunks and expedition backpacks, though I have to say that Venetians with children in strollers the size of tanks is becoming an even more annoying, and even dangerous, problem.

But the other day I encountered a new twist on the “I’m here, deal with it” mentality as evidenced by an exhausted Venetian mother. (Perhaps “exhausted mother” is redundant.) In any case, she was evidently in “standby” mode, mentally speaking. But she was sufficiently alert to have offered me her seat as I passed by, which surprised me.

She wasn’t sufficiently alert, though, to register that she wasn’t at home in her living room, where clearly chaos reigns. I sympathize with that, considering that her little boy, sitting on her lap, appeared to be about two years old. The fountainhead and source of chaos, in other words.

But I am helpless to further interpret her spatial awareness. So I will say no more.

The little boy helpfully clutched it. People walked around it. I failed geometry in high school but even I understood the nature of 90 degrees. I’m not sure what planet we’re living on.

Venetian-ness

Funeral footnote

August 15, 2018 6 Comments

That picture I showed of the people outside the church for the funeral of Renzo Rossi and Natalino Gavagnin yesterday? I unwittingly took it too late. The florist’s tags on the flowers said the funeral was at 11:30, so I went home for a few minutes. When I returned, the ceremony had already started and I thought everyone standing around was waiting for it to begin. I definitely did not grasp the scope of the event.

Turns out there were SIX HUNDRED MOURNERS inside the church. There evidently wasn’t even enough space for air, which is why these folks are outside. Breathing.

Today the sun rose on a sunny, breezy, pleasant morning. Somebody in the canal just outside had tied up his motorboat while loading things for a happy day out with the family.

The man’s friend was passing on the fondamenta. “Hey!” the man called out. “Did you make your will?”