My personal account of living real life in real Venice, and more
This has nothing to do with Venice but everything to do with smiling, which one needs to do early and often here. Just like voting in Boston.
For the record, I have seen dolphins in the Ionian Sea, just down the road from Venice, and there have been reports of them out in the Adriatic, where I gather they have become rare. Rumors of one in the lagoon have not been confirmed, at least not by me. In any case, this little divertimento was filmed in Cardigan Bay, Wales.
My earlier post about Race Day as a whole didn’t say anything about what I was doing while the world was ending for some of the racers.
I can tell you what I wasn’t doing: Screaming my lungs out for the Vignottini, which would have been ridiculous considering that they were already five car-lengths in the lead. No danger of anything rear-ending them last Sunday if they’d come to a sudden stop. I felt cheated, somehow. I fully intended to be screaming. Never mind. Life will probably provide another opportunity for screamage.
What the Storica means for us at the club — and it’s more or less like this every year except this year it was even better than usual — is the following:
Saturday morning: Whoever is free comes to titivate their boat. There was a small chain gang working on the caorlina, and an even smaller one (including me) working on the gondolone. We had to sandpaper and polish all the brass, including the big ornamental ferri of the prow and the bow. Lino and Lucio worked at nailing and screwing down various bits that had gone adrift over the months, and then there was varnishing the whole thing. She is now a dazzling vision of delight, and will remain so for, oh, maybe a month. It depends on the weather how fast the brass will lose its luster.
At 2:00 we dressed in our club best — blue and white tank top and white skirt (women), white pants for the men. Lino was dressed in his judge’s outfit, as he was on duty for two of the four races.
We rowed across the lagoon with some breeze but not too much. We crossed the Bacino of San Marco (waves, as always, but not as bad as usual because the traffic is limited this afternoon) and dropped Lino near San Marco, where he went to join the rest of his merry band of judges at the Tourism Office (regata division).
We rowed around the Bacino for a little while until it was time for the corteo, or boat procession, to form up. There is no real Italian way to express the concept of “forming up,” as the concept doesn’t exist. I’m not sure there is even anything close that you could compare it to, in order to explain to someone here what it might involve, or why it might matter. They’d just give you that “Well you’re perfectly welcome to try it if you want to but don’t get me involved” look.
Each boat has a number on its bow which indicates its order in the lineup. The number’s only discernible use is to help the speaker on the reviewing stand (the “Machina,” MAH-keen-ah) to identify the particular organization the boat belongs to as it drifts past. That part actually works pretty well.
We had number 11 and were probably two-thirds of the way back when the thing got going. You ask why we were so far back? Because the corteo wranglers had given absolutely no signal of any kind to indicate the imminent departure of said corteo. Evidently order isn’t foremost on their list of concerns either.
So we rowed in a slow and stately way up the Grand Canal (sometimes I surprise myself, at how normal doing something like that has come to be — then I suddenly snap to and think, Holy Crap! This is incredible!). The first regatas that might correspond somewhat to the current “regata storica” were arguably the series of races organized in January 1315 by doge Giovanni Soranzo. (In the 19th century it was called the “regata reale,” or royal regata). The corteo was added to the program much, much later, to evoke the arrival in Venice in 1489 of Caterina Cornaro, a Venetian noblewoman who was briefly also queen of Cyprus. It’s as good an excuse as any to add just that much more glamour — or glitter or marabou or whatever looks good — to the event.
At certain points along the route we perform an alzaremi, or oar-raising, the classic Venetian waterborne ceremonial salute which looks thrilling. Too bad it’s been done to death by now. Lino thinks it should be limited to very few and very important moments, and I agree. But on this occasion, there are clumps of people all along the way who yell “alzaremi” at every boat just so they can snap a picture. It’s just one of the many, many ways in which a person here begins to be made to feel like a walk-on in somebody else’s entertainment.
But the sun is shining, there is music playing over lots of loudspeakers, people are leaning out of palace windows everywhere taking it all in, and it’s all just too splendid for words.
Then we turn around — I remember when we used to go as far as the train station, but every year people tend to break ranks and turn around sooner. There are some reasons for this, one of which, I think, has to do with resisting the idea of being compelled to perform for other people’s entertainment. That’s my theory. At least I resist that idea.
So we find a good place to park, as close to the finish line near the San Toma’ vaporetto stop as we can manage (on the shady, not the sunny side), and we tie up the boat. We pull out the vittles — cookies, tiny pizzas, peanuts, squares of homemade cake, fruit, etc. — and beverages, which are wine, water, and fruit juice. Very important, beverages. The heat can trick you and the one thing you don’t want to be in a boat is thirsty.
There’s another thing you don’t want to be in a boat, and we bring a small bucket for that. Nobody has ever had to use it.
This event used to have a dramatically different aspect. For decades, Lino would come early in the afternoon in his own little boat — as most people did — find a good place to tie up, and then eat and drink all afternoon, sharing with his neighbors, clambering over boats to go visit friends, and so on — much like the Redentore, but with races instead of fireworks.
In those days, the corteo consisted only of the bissone, or fancy ceremonial barges, and a long procession of black gondolas carrying every authority figure within reach — mayor, councilors, presidents of things, even the President of Italy on occasion. Then came the year when the Italian Prime Minister, Amintore Fanfani, had the misfortune of being rowed up the Grand Canal to the jeering shouts of a doggerel rhyme that works very well in Venetian (Fanfani! Fanfani! Ti ga i morti cani!). This is one of the absolutely worst insults in the Venetian universe and it basically means that your deceased relatives are dogs. I don’t think you have to speak Venetian to understand that it’s not your day.
This happened about 1976, as Lino recalls. Not long thereafter, the political party in power shifted to the Communist party and that sort of thing wasn’t tolerated at all. To make sure it didn’t happen by mistake, they just stopped sending their authority figures.
At the same time, after the first Vogalonga in 1975, there was a boom in new boat clubs, so the corteo began to be generally populated by boats like ours. civilians from rowing clubs who may also be tempted to shout rude things at each other, but it doesn’t make any difference when they do it. Since I’ve been here I’ve never seen a gondola with an official or notable aboard — just tourists, or paid costumed walk-ons.
Furthermore, for most of the “Storica”‘s history there was only one race: The gondolini. The races for women, boys, and men on the caorlinas were added gradually over the same mid-Seventies period. If you had to do triage and get rid of any races, I can tell you the only one they’d try to save would be the gondolini. Although the other ones are very nice.
The most serious change in the past 20, or even 15, years is the steady decline in spectator boats. As I mentioned, Lino could climb over boats from hither to farther than yon all afternoon, but each year fewer Venetians come in boats to witness what was once one of their central events of the year. Even I have noticed the diminution of number of boats watching. There are many reasons for this but one of the primary ones is that the regata, on the whole, has been reshaped for tourists, either on land or watching TV, and therefore (for reasons I’ll spare you) it’s less interesting to be a participant. And the increase in motorboats has fatally weakened what was once a common language and connection with boats that are rowed.
From being a crucial element of daily life for everyone, rowing has become a sort of boutique activity whose appeal is probably stronger as a picturesque curiosity to non-Venetians than to most locals, especially the younger ones.
Back to us. So we spend the afternoon hanging around watching the races and screaming if we should feel the need to for whoever our favorite racer(s) might be — and there have been times I have screamed so hard that I probably blew out some synapses, mine as well as the people nearest to me. I know the racers can’t hear me, but I also know they would notice if my voice weren’t in there somewhere. I know this. It’s a mystic racing thing.
As soon as the gondolini have crossed the finish line, everybody starts to leave. Instantly. Imagine everybody after the game trying to get out of the stadium parking lot at the same time. Lots of motors (not everybody who comes rows here anymore, unfortunately), and lots of motor-revving and choking exhaust fumes from these lovers of the oar.
Now comes almost the best part of all, which is the row back to the club. This takes about an hour because we’re not in a hurry; the sun is setting — it’s after 7:00 PM now — and the lagoon is calm and everyone is feeling happy and relaxed and it’s just one of the loveliest rowing interludes in the entire year.
We always stop, not far from the club, to open a bottle of wine (okay, two) and just sit and savor the moment out in the water all by ourselves. This year it was even sweeter than usual. The caorlina was not far behind us, and so we waited and then we tied the two boats together and just let the day and the moment and the sunset and the calm seep all the way through us.
The moon, enormous and shining and orange, rose slowly above the treetops on the Lido. It was so beautiful it verged on the preposterous; Italians say that something like this, the final perfect touch, is the “cherry on the cake.” It was actually the moon on the cake. I’m sticking with that, at least I know what I mean.
The corteo is very nice, of course. But it’s something thousands of people (80,000 this year, by police estimates) can see, and anything that imitates something that once was genuine can hardly compare with something that is completely genuine right now. The corteo was a sort of imitation, but this was really ours. There were very, very few people who saw the lagoon as we did in the twilight with evening breath drifting around us and the moon’s radiance blooming out of the sky.
It all belonged to us and it needed no spectators or commentators. What a beautiful thing that is in this world, and how rare.
On the first Sunday of September, one of the biggest events in the Venetian entertainment calendar (and absolutely the biggest one in the Venetian rowing calendar) takes place: A series of races in the Grand Canal known collectively as the Regata Storica, or Historic Regata.
It’s hard to explain why this might be important to anyone without providing a great deal of background, stretching back one, two, five, 20, and eventually 700 years. I would love to provide all that, and at some point I probably will, but for now I merely want to say that if you happened to hear an unexpected explosion yesterday, wherever you are (I’m imagining something similar to the sound of Mount Pelee’ erupting), that would have been the hopes, ambitions, sacrifices, passions, and dreams of two mighty men being blasted to eternity, despite the fact that it wasn’t fire, but water, that was the obliterating agent.
The immediate aftermath — continuing in the aural mode — was the sad, persistent wheeze of the air seeping out of the hopes, ambitions, etc. of two other men who were the immediate beneficiaries of the disaster, but who were men who also had spent a year preparing for a battle to the death and who realized as soon as they saw their adversaries swimming that none of the four them was ever going to be able to say which of the two pairs of competitors really was the best of them all.
This sad wheezing sound was amplified by the disappointment of all the spectators who had been thoroughly worked up about the event because they (including me) had spent years watching these two pairs of men turn each race into something gladiatorial. Over the years there has been rage. There has been bitterness. There has been euphoria. And now there has been a win with no victory, a loss with no excuse. “No contest” may sound great in a court of law, but it’s a calamity for athletes and spectators alike.
Venetians have been racing boats forever. At first there were hundreds of men aboard galleys racing across the lagoon, a practice organized and encouraged by the Venetian government in order to ensure that there would be enough seriously trained rowers ready at all times for whatever naval battles might be coming up. This would be roughly from the year 900 to 1300 AD.
Smaller races began to proliferate as the fruit (wealth and power) of the said naval battles began to give Venice many reasons and occasions to show its most important visitors how very rich and strong it was. The most spectacular of these races were performed on one of the world’s most spectacular stages, what Venetians call “Canalazzo,” or the Grand Canal.
I will tell you more some other time about the history of racing, boats and champions, the way the races have changed in the past generation or two, and much more which I find irresistibly fascinating. But for now, let’s get to the men in the water.
The most important race of all races is the last one of the day, which pits pairs of men on the racing gondola, or gondolino, against each other. This is the only race in which this boat is used, and it is only raced by men. Generations of boys have slaved at working their way up through the racing ranks to reach the pinnacle which is this event, something so important that even to have failed in the eliminations is a strange source of pride.
Why is it so important? Yes, there is a money prize, but each official race awards money to the competitors. Yes, there is a pennant — red, white, green, and blue — to the respective racers finishing first, second, third, and fourth. (The following five boats get the swag but nothing more.) As with many competitions, the ones who win also get all the adulation, envy, and awe that they could ever want, spiked with the dangerous drug which is the insatiable desire/need to win again. And again. And again.
The most powerful lure of the Regata Storica is that whoever wins this race five times in a row is glorified with the Venetian equivalent of the laurel wreath, the bull’s ears, the green jacket, and the America’s Cup, which is the title “Re del remo,” or king of the oar. It sounds fruity in English, but it is so fiendishly hard to win five times in a row that I have to say that anybody who can do it deserves whatever he wants. The last pair to accomplish this feat was Palmiro Fongher and Gianfranco Vianello in 1981. And yesterday was Year 5, the day of glory, for Team A.
Team A: Ivo Redolfi Tezzat and Giampaolo D’Este, who is commonly referred to as “Super D’Este” or “the Giant” because of his physical size and athletic prowess. They have won this race each year since 2005.
Team B: Rudi and Igor Vignotto, cousins who are known as the “Vignottini,” or “little Vignottos,” as they hail from the island of Sant’ Erasmo where theirs is one of the most common last names and this nickname helps distinguish them from the rest of their assorted rowing relatives stretching over generations.
The Vignottini had been within reach of this prize once (having won each year from 1995 to 1998, only to be defeated in the crucial fifth year by the same D’Este with a different partner). They started the count again in 2000 and got as far as 2003, when D’Este again stuck his oar in their spokes, so to speak. It just went on like this between them, back and forth, till nobody could stand it anymore, especially them, I’m guessing.
But D’Este and Tezzat were on a roll, having won each year from 2005-2008, and yesterday the moment of glory for which they had been striving seemed finally to be within their grasp. And everyone knew that not only did the Vignottini want to win, they wanted it with a fanatic determination I can hardly imagine in order also to savor the revenge of having ripped from their rival’s hands the very honor which those rivals had ripped from theirs.
It was going to be big.
We were all sitting in the gondolone, tied to a piling in the Grand Canal along with a slew of other boats, waiting for this. The race began at 6:00 PM, and usually takes about 35 minutes to run its entire breakneck course from the Giardini across the Bacino of San Marco, up the Grand Canal to the railway station, around a temporary piling and back down the Canal to the “volta de canal,” the traditional finish line in the curve of the canal at Ca’ Foscari.
Being as we were parked near the finish line we didn’t see the disaster, which occurred far away toward the entrance to the Canal, but we heard the incredulous voice of the announcer suddenly saying, “The blue boat has capsized!”
Here is the only bit of video which I’ve been able to find of this epochal instant (evidently everybody was looking somewhere else at the moment). You see, from left to right, the brown boat (Vignottini), blue (D’Este-Tezzat) and green. Look carefully at the right edge of the screen and at second 18 you can see the splash (helpfully highlighted by the sun) of Tezzat’s plunge from the stern; you see D’Este struggle to keep the boat stable, then at second 48 he falls and the blue hull capsizes.
watch?v=P62kXdfaiD8
Impossible to conceive that something like this could happen to these two paladins (water? isn’t that what they walk on?), instantly followed by the inconceivable idea that they were actually out of the race. Not because they’d been disqualified, but merely because by the time they’d have gotten the boat floating and raceable again, it would have been time to go home anyway.
Rumors immediately began to buzz. Clearly the Vignottini weren’t guilty of anything tricky, because they had almost immediately taken the lead and were several boat-lengths ahead when this happened. But had it been the green boat, which had been coming up on the left? Was it deliberate? Was it an accident? If it was an accident, how the hell could such a thing happen?
As questions crashed around in everybody’s overheated brains, the Vignottini rowed the entire course pretty much on cruise control, far enough ahead of the rest of the herd that there wasn’t much need to think about much else than where they were going to have the party. Because by then they knew that the entire island of Sant’ Erasmo was going to be dancing in the streets (I think there are two), not only because of their obvious victory but because the victors of the women’s race and the boys’ race were also from Sant’ Erasmo. In fact a friend of mine told me that as soon as it was dark, fireworks began to flare over the island.
We spectators, though, were sitting there feeling like somebody had just shut off the lights and left the building. An emotion which I have no doubt the Vignottini were also feeling, at least a little. And D’Este and Tezzat as well, as they were pulled into motorboats and taken away, shortly thereafter to be photographed in dry clothes but wet with tears.
Here is what happened, according to some authoritative sources (not the victims, of course, who immediately began to cry “foul” even though there was no sign of any such thing).
First, the starting line-up. D’Este and Tezzat knew they were going to have a bear of a race on their hands because of their position at the start. The Vignottini had a great position, D’Este not so much. When you’re racing in the lagoon, you’re dealing with factors even more challenging than your boat and your adversary, you’re dealing with the tide. Unlike swimming pools or crew basins, the lagoon is always moving, and not uniformly, either.
The positions are drawn by lot precisely because of this reality, to avoid any possibility of favoritism. Seeing that the tide was going out at 6:00 PM yesterday (and very powerfully, because the moon was just past full), everyone was starting out against the tide, but those closer to the shore were more handicapped by the outflow than those at the end of the lineup, out in the middle of the Bacino of San Marco. This is because the water moving out from the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal hits against the shoreline at the Giardini (because the shore is curved) and then does a sort of turn back upstream, thereby creating some forward-moving current for the people who are further out. Like the Vignottini.
I know this from personal experience, as I participated in a race years back in the Canale delle Navi which has a pretty strong flow with the incoming tide. Except that I was second from the shore, so I was facing the same turnaround phenomenon mentioned above. Thus the rowers out in the middle of the canal were flying away, and I, as the saying here goes, am still rowing. As Lino says, the “number in the water” can really punish you.
To prevent total anarchy, each boat is required to stay in its lane for 164 feet (50 meters), at which point the leaders and followers are supposed to be sufficiently far apart to allow for maneuvering without dangerous craziness. The dynamic is very much like a horse race, supposing that the horses had to stay in their lanes for the first ten seconds.
Second: Tension and human error. Tezzat (rowing astern and also steering the course) was obviously feeling the pressure. I can say that because who wouldn’t? The Vignottini were ahead but Tezzat hoped to overtake them, except that he couldn’t do it on their right because the entrance to the Grand Canal is relatively narrow and he would have found himself bottled against the pilings on the right and then running straight into a vaporetto dock. So he and D’Este slowed down for an instant to drop behind the squeezing boat and pass it on its left.
So far, so fine. But as soon as Tezzat did that, he discovered the next boat over on his left, the green gondolino, was moving rightward and on a potential collision course with him. So he instantly made a counter-stroke to turn his boat slightly to the right, out of the path of danger. He was already rowing pretty hard, because he was working against the tide, as I mentioned.
It was a matter of nano-seconds. The force of his counter-stroke was just a little too hard and his oar popped out of the water, throwing him off balance — just enough so that on a moving boat he couldn’t get it back. He fell overboard but the boat, obviously, kept going. This sudden unbalanced trajectory meant that D’Este, in the bow, lost his balance, because he wasn’t prepared for his boat to suddenly shift under him. He tried instinctively to correct the forces of gravity, inertia, momentum, whatever all that stuff is, but the boat had already taken on some water from its first swerve over onto its side and over he went, taking the boat over with him.
The word “over” is probably one which will never be uttered in the D’Este and Tezzat households again, for any reason. Because at that point everything was over. The Vignottini had debuted in “Canalazzo” in 1991, after years of rowing at the more junior levels. D’Este’s debut in “Canalazzo” was in 1992; Tezzat’s in 1994. They had all been facing off five times a season, on different boats, in different parts of the lagoon, for nearly 20 years. That’s roughly a hundred races, if I’m not wrong. And now that the five-year count has begun again for D’Este and Tezzat, it’s physically unlikely that they will be at peak form, as they were yesterday, the next time they could hope to have another chance at the title.
It’s over for the Vignottini, too, but in a happy way, even though this isn’t the happiness they’d dreamed of. They finally did it, but their joy is deeply dented by the fact that they won’t ever be able to vaunt the deepest meaning of “re del remo” because they didn’t truly defeat their adversaries.
So they are all unhappy, to one degree or another, including the men on the green boat (remember the green boat?) who did nothing wrong but who appeared to be the proximate cause of all this. Andrea Bertoldini, the stern rower of the pair, was near tears at the finish line. “Everyone is always going to think we’re to blame,” he said, th0ugh I suppose when people start to calm down they’ll see that he’s right.
So I was mulling all this over today, and feeling very bad as well for the wives of these guys, women who’ve also sacrificed years of family time for their husbands’ endless training sessions, not to mention sharing the tension and so on of every race. Frankly, I think being the wife of one of the two drowned rats must be as bad as being the rats, because there’s little that’s worse than seeing somebody you love in real pain and not being able to do anything to fix it.
On the other hand, these guys are as tough as Grape Nuts, and have competed in plenty of races over the years in which they’ve been penalized, demerited, suspended, etc. for all sorts of infractions and trickiness. Curses and insults fly. At least one — no names — has a bad reputation for spitting at his adversaries when they get too close. Or at least he used to. This is a game in which haloes don’t help you at all. In fact, they’re a serious handicap.
Third point: They tempted fate. Sorry, but you just can’t do this. Lino says, “Never underestimate your adversary,” and of course that’s true, but it only helps you if you haven’t reached the point where your mania to win overrides every other thought and instinct.
What I found out today was that the D’Este-Tezzat axis had long since booked the restaurant for the victory celebration party. They had it all planned out. And I’m thinking, That’s just crazy. Even I would know not to do that. The Venetians have a saying for it: “Don’t calculate the bill without consulting the barkeep.”
This extraordinary feat of confidence — and I admire confidence even when it’s not justified — is from a category of people (Venetian racers, male) who are known to be so superstitious that some of them won’t remove — or wash — certain articles of clothing which they are convinced bring them good luck. Why would they have thought they could flimflam the fates?
Luck — whatever that may be — is not a toy. Small children aren’t supposed to play with plastic bags, and grown men shouldn’t play with what they think the future is going to be. I thought we knew that. Now we know it again.
“Every river is compelled to flow toward the sea, and it also carries tears with it.”
I don’t know who wrote that, but it is the perfect epigraph for the Po River. And nearly 60 years ago, there were many, many tears.
Those two words — Po River — are tremendously evocative to millions, especially those living near it, or in some way depending on it. It’s the longest river in Italy, and although it isn’t much compared to the Nile or the Congo, it is Italy’s mythic mass of water.
The Po flows 405 miles [652 kilometers] from Monviso, a dazzling mountain in the Cottian Alps, to the Adriatic, through the core of the north Italian Padania Plain and drains an area of 28,946 square miles [74,970 square kilometers].
Some people think it’s monotonous and boring, but that’s when it’s just rolling along like Ol’ Man River. Then every once in a while it floods, and turns into something cataclysmic, and suddenly people are praying to God to make it boring again. You can read more in the article I wrote for National Geographic in the May, 2002 issue.
I’m talking about all this because of my chronic curiosity about a statue stuck off by itself amid a few trees near the Giardini vaporetto stop.
It’s dramatic yet curiously detached; nevertheless, you realize something serious is underway. A rescue, obviously, but it isn’t immediately clear what the danger is. It’s the Po.
Catastrophic floods have occurred many times, but in November of 1951 there was a confluence of factors which spelled doom for man, beast, buildings, crops, bridges, soil, and anything else that was in, on, or near the river. People seem to get all worked up about high tide in Venice, but that’s a Gilbert and Sullivan ditty compared to the Wagnerian devastation the Po visited on 200,000 people, nearly 1,000 of whom lost their lives.
I’m not going to try to describe it; the numbers can do it for me. But I do remember what a friend of mine in Cremona told me about the Po in the major flood of 2000: “The river under the bridge sounded like a waterfall.” In 1951, the volume of water was measured at Cremona at 399,055 cubic feet per second [11,300 cubic meters per second] — it must have sounded like the Last Judgment.
That autumn was especially rainy, not only in Italy but elsewhere in Europe and also in the United States. From November 7-13, two weather fronts — one from the Atlantic, the other from Africa — brought rain that wasn’t particularly intense, but it was continuous. In fact, due to the nature and extent of the catchment basin, it’s long rains, rather than intense ones, that create serious floods.
Before long, the ground was saturated, unable to absorb any more water. Then the rain intensified. A hot southeast wind hit the snow that was falling in the Alps, and melted it. More water.
In the five days between November 8-12, 600 billion cubic feet [17 billion cubic meters] of water fell on the Po Plain, the amount which would normally fall in six months.
The Po’s average discharge is 48,400 cubic feet per second [1,370 cubic meters]; at its flood peak in 1951, the Po’s discharge was estimated at almost ten times that, or 424,000 cubic feet [12,000 cubit meters] per second. That would be Niagara Falls doubled, thundering horizontally toward the sea.
The river was rising because many of its 141 tributaries were also rising, obviously. But when some of these smaller rivers tried to empty into the Po, the power of its flow actually forced them back, where they began to flood their own immediate surrounding territory. That southeast wind wasn’t merely melting snow, it was preventing the Po from emptying into the sea.
Nov. 13: During the night, the church bells in Casalmaggiore (Cremona) and Sabbioneta (Mantova) and all the bells in the surrounding towns and villages begin to ring, to summon the men to try to block the rising water. Urgent requests go out for sandbags.
Nov. 14: The Po exceeds 14 feet [4.30 meters]. At 7:00 pm the river bursts its embankments at Paviole di Canaro. An hour later, it breaks through at Bosco and Malcantone at the rate of 211,883 cubic feet [6,000 cubic meters] of water per second. In a few hours 156 square miles [404 square kilometers] are flooded.
When the flood crest reaches the Po Delta, the area also called Polesine, the level is higher at Rovigo — 15.7 feet [4.8 meters] — than any recorded flood ever.
Nov. 15: An emergency truck evacuating people is caught by the water at Frassinelle Polesine; 84 people, including women and children, die in what is remembered as the “death lorry.”
At 2:00 pm the river bursts the banks at Arqua’ Polesine and the water spreads toward Adria.
Nov. 18: Rovigo is evacuated.
Nov. 19: Adria, Cavarzere, Loreo are completely flooded. The cities are evacuated.
Nov. 20: The embankments at Ceserolo are cut to save Rovigo.
Nov. 25: The crest reaches the sea, and the water begins to recede. After three months, toward the end of February, only about one third of the flooded land is still submerged.
In all, some 425 square miles [1,100 square kilometers] were flooded.
The rescue efforts were massive: The Army, Navy, Air Force, firemen, police, Red Cross, Scouts, and volunteers descended on the stricken towns, working continuously with the help of some 2,000 boatmen. People spent days trapped on the roofs of their isolated houses, hoping someone would come by.
The damage in Polesine: 900 houses destroyed, 300 houses damaged, 38 communities flooded, 160,000 people forced to evacuate, 113,000 hectares of farmland flooded, and 300 hectares of land covered by a layer of sand 6 feet [2 meters] deep.
4500 cattle, 150 horses, 7800 pigs, 700 sheep and goats, and one million quintals [220 million pounds] of fodder, all lost.
37 miles [60 kilometers] of embankments and 52 bridges destroyed.
Of course no one had insurance. What was lost was gone forever. It was Biblical.
Contributions poured — excuse the expression — in, from 65 countries, including Uruguay, Tunisia, Haiti, Indonesia, Lebanon, Costa Rica, Somaliland (as it was known), and Albania, as well as NATO.
Lino remembers the effect it had on people in Venice who, like people for miles around, responded by bringing mattresses, clothes, shoes, blankets, and more to collection points around the city. My friend Roberto, from Milan, was just a tyke at the time, but he still remembers his mother telling him he had to donate one of his toys to the children in Polesine, and not just any toy. She decreed, “Your favorite toy.'”
“It was my favorite teddy bear,” he told me, “but I sent it away.”
Many improvements were attempted to prevent anything like this happening again. One of the measures taken was to build ever higher embankments, often (in the cities) walled with concrete. You know how water behaves when it’s forced into a tighter channel or tube? Think of turning on your faucet very hard. Yes. That’s what the Po does now when it floods.
Therefore, when the river floods in spring (melting snow) or autumn (rains), as it will do until snow and rain cease from the earth, it inevitably gains force as it races seaward.
So floods continue — not much anyone can do about that — but the effects are still, if not as catastrophic as in 1951, expensive and distressing. Because houses and fields and poplar forests planted for cellulose keep increasing, and always closer to the river’s edge.
Oh, and some 30 million cubic yards of sand and gravel are illegally dug out of the riverbed for construction every year. Not good if you were looking for ways to minimize flooding, which if you’re a gravel-robber you probably aren’t.
In 1994, the Po flood caused 70 deaths and 10,000 people lost their homes, due mainly to failures in the flood warning system. The human element — always the wild card.
In 2000, the Po flood caused 25 deaths and 40,000 were evacuated.
And so it goes. The Po. Majestic. Magnificent. But I’d never call it monotonous.
NOTE: About the statue with the double inscription: Everyone but me will already have figured it out — it was originally made to commemorate the heroic efforts of the Army to help the victims of the Po flood in the spring of 1882. (I know that the inscription reads 1885, but I am trusting my source, the immortal Giulio Lorenzetti, for this information.) After the inundation of 1951, the statue was recycled to commemorate the equally heroic rescue work (hence the noticeably non-1951 garb of the figures depicted).
Alberto Vio, Lino tells me, was “famous” for having provided boats for the rescue efforts. I don’t know any more than that just now, but it explains why he is mentioned on the plinth. I can tell you, though, that the statue was made by Augusto Benvenuti in 1885, and that it used to stand in Campo San Biagio, the small area in front of the Naval Museum and church of San Biagio. Lino remembers seeing it there when he was a lad. Then someone decided it should move out and they found this anonymous little spot for it by the Giardini. Kind of a modest end to a work that was entitled “Monument to the Italian Army.” But if everybody’s fine with this, so am I.