As you may already have noticed, the world didn’t end last night.
First, it didn’t rain. So much for the Deluge from Hell. This is also a Good Thing because when there’s lots of rain it not only irritates me, it can also aggravate the acqua alta — not so much because of precipitation precipitating into the lagoon directly, but into the streams and rivers which then, overloaded, empty into the lagoon.
Our street as seen from across the canal at 7:45 AM. The tide is still rising but there is an island (shrinking) of dry pavement.
At 5:00 AM the sirens sounded, and I waited to count the tones. There were three. I enjoyed two seconds of relief, then checked myself because of the clearly demonstrated unreliability of the forecast. (It hasn’t rained yet.) But where the sirens are concerned, it wouldn’t have been the first time that one message arrived, to be followed by a revision. It’s better not to be too quick to heave those sighs of relief.
So I lay there in the dark, listening for clues to the water’s progress. I heard someone walking by the window: Normal footsteps. No water yet. Before long, I heard someone else pass making plk-plk-plk noises: Water only an inch or two. Not long after that, I began to hear sloosh-SLOOSH-sloosh-SLOOSH. Water deep enough to require shuffling instead of stepping. Oh well.
This is a beautiful thing to see: water that hasn't risen beyond our first step.
At 7:45 the water was still rising, which was to have been expected. I went out to get the newspaper. At 8:30 it had peaked and was still well within manageable limits. Excellent! What would I have called this on the official warning scale? Code Mauve? Code Robin’s-Egg Blue?
Water all gone. Now let's think about lunch.
At 10:00 the tide was noticeably falling, and by 11:00 the streets were no longer, in Benchley’s famous phrase, full of water.
The scirocco wind, however, has been fairly strong (they said “moderate”) all day, and is predicted to increase to “strong” right about now. Then we’re supposed to have a thunderstorm, then everything should return to normal.
Speaking of normal, one thing which always happens here with acqua alta is that various people put out their bags of garbage for the garbagemen to collect, even though they must know that the men are not going to be collecting because they’re all supposed to be working like crazed beavers setting up and taking down the temporary walkways. So the bags sit there until the rising water lifts them from the pavement and eventually floats them away, out to sea.
Floating bags of garbage: Just one of many unsung aspects of acqua alta.
Floating bags of garbage are NOT acts of God, no matter what their owners may think. Oh wait — the bags don’t have owners. As soon as a bag is on public soil, it suddenly becomes mystically orphaned, anonymous, invisible. Except to me, the maniac foreigner, who watches these plastic spheroids bobbing around and sees a big neon sign above each one flashing
“BRAIN DEAD.”
The show -- the bread, the detergent, the whatever -- must go on. And someone must go with it.
The people out on the street were pretty much moving along with Monday morning as usual. Shops which are likely to be awash were indeed awash; their owners were pumping them out. Some others, like two different butchers, were letting nature to take its course while they got on with business. Evidently neither snow nor rain nor dead of night nor high water can stay these men from the swift completion of their appointed pork chops.
The floor is ankle-deep in brackish water and he is cleaning the plexiglass covering the case of meat. I didn't ask.
I ran into Paolo, the bank teller, out on via Garibaldi.
“No work today,” he told me. “Those idiots from Bergamo [owners of the bank] didn’t listen to us when they were designing the interior. We told them, ‘Put the electric outlets up high.’ They said, “What the hell do you guys know?’ So now all the electric outlets are under water and if we turn on the computers, everything will go poof. All they needed to do was put the outlets higher, but nooooooo…”
For the record, his plan for the day wasn’t altered all that much, because I went past a few hours later when the water had begun to subside and there he was at his teller’s window, working away. High water — unfortunately, if you really want the day off — does not last forever.
Like virtually all Venetians, he took it all in stride. If he has time to think about the street, he clearly isn't worried about his house.
Walking back to the house, I passed a man who was sweeping the water toward the canal. I paused. He was sweeping the pavement of a large street which was still very much under water — hence the water was not being removed, only shifted. This required investigation.
“Dogs,” he said briskly, smiling. “High water is really a good thing for Venice. It doesn’t hurt anybody. And it takes away the smell so dogs don’t go looking for someplace where another dog has ever pooped.”
I recalled having heard a similar comment from Arrigo Cipriani (of Harry’s Bar) when I interviewed him years ago. A native Venetian, he too wasn’t especially impressed by high water. “It’s a great way to get the streets clean,” he declared.
Back in the old days no mother would have carried any child who could walk. Here's a woman thanking God that she stopped at having two.
“High water was a delight for us when we were kids,” Lino has told me more than once. “But it never made any sense — we’d be in school and the teachers would say ‘There’s high water! Everybody go home!’ And so we’d walk home in the high water; you can imagine what kind of state we were in by the time we got there. Soaking wet right up to here.” (He indicates his collarbone.) “What sense did that make, sending us home because there was high water? In just another hour, the water went down anyway.”
No boots in the old days, either. “Boots? Who had boots? Boots are a newfangled thing that began to come in after 1966. We went home barefoot, carrying our shoes.”
Clearly a few people can still figure out how to get where they're going without boots.
I too, may I note, have walked home barefoot in high water. More than once. I can’t understand people who stand there at the water’s edge looking trapped and helpless like lemurs on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Just take your shoes off and get going! Besides, I can attest that the water is virtually always warm (if that helps to convince you.) The scirocco wind is warm, and we haven’t even had a real cold snap yet. How cold could the water be? Get a grip, people.
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We’re sitting here holding a sort of tense little domestic vigil awaiting the end of the world, which is predicted to reach Venice some time tonight.
Acqua alta doesn't necessarily have to come pouring over the battlements. As here in the Piazza San Marco, it often comes up through the drains.
Briefly, a huge weather system is moving across Italy and will be bringing high winds, torrential rain, and acqua alta, or high water, sometime tonight. I say “sometime” because Things Might Change (at least slightly — maybe the wind won’t settle into the southeast after all, for example) but we’re going to be getting wet. Just how wet is the question that is keeping the lights burning in our little hovel.
The tide is going to turn and begin to rise about 3:00 AM. Which means we can expect to hear the municipal high-water warning sirens begin to wail not very long after that.
The tide forecast is: Maximum at 9:30 PM tonight at 75 cm [29 inches above mean sea level] ; minimum at 2:25 AM at 45 cm [17 inches]; maximum at 8:35 AM at 130 cm [51 inches]; minimum at 3:40 PM at 20 cm [7 inches].
This is Lino on December 1 last year, watching the tide rising outside our front door. This is me, taking the picture, still hoping that the tide will stop here. It didn't. And the barrier didn't do anything useful to keep it out.
My only hope and prayer at this point is that the tide will only reach the three-tone level, because that means we’re still dry. We discovered last December 1 that when we hear four tones, we’re basically doomed.
We had water in our very own domicile; what was unnerving wasn’t so much its height (I guess it never exceeded an inch on the floor) as its inexorability. I can’t recall a sensation to compare it to: The realization that you can’t do one single thing to stop it. I suppose going into labor might be something similar.
I can tell you that the garbagemen are working an extra shift right now, setting up the temporary walkways in the parts of the city which will certainly be submerged to some extent, especially around the Piazza San Marco, the lowest point in the city.
There is also absolutely no doubt that Paolo Canestrelli and his band of hardy forecasters are working the lobster shift at the Tide Center, refining their predictions probably minute by minute. What they really, really hate is to turn out to have gotten the numbers wrong. People may snicker at them when the tide doesn’t rise as high as they thought it would, but people rage and snarl and shriek when they estimated too low. Not a job I’d be at all interested in having.
For the record, a normal tide (measured in height above mean sea level) is between -50 cm and +79 cm [minus 19 – plus 31 inches.] One siren tone.
Code Yellow (“sustained tide”) is between +80 and +109 cm [31 – 42 inches.] Two tones.
Code Orange (“very sustained tide”) is between 110 cm and 139 cm [43 – 54 inches.] Three tones.
Code Red (“exceptional high tide”) is over 140 cm [55 inches.]
Here I was last year, standing in our little street and contemplating the mysteries of the universe, still not convinced that the water was going to rise any further. Shortly after this, we stopped taking pictures and started bailing.
In case anyone has heard about the MOSE floodgate project (perhaps to be operational in 2012), intended to block high tide from reaching the city, I want to point out that it is intended to be used only in the case of Code Red. Which means that for 3/4 of the high-tide events, we’re still going to be pulling on our wellies.
Another point: The numbers don’t really tell you much because Venice is not uniformly level. So a number in one place isn’t going to signify the same experience in another — sometimes even just 50 yards down the street.
More tomorrow, at some point. Going back to doing laps around the rosary.
There was a story in the Gazzettino a few days ago of a very interesting, even if amazing, inconceivable, really embarrassing revelation:
Cheating the State: The Brunetta Report Shows that the Veneto is Worse than Naples
Renato Brunetta (Venetian, as it happens, and touted as a new contender for the next mayoral election) is currently toiling away in Rome as the Minister of Public Administration and Innovation, which also concerns itself with financial transparency. I sense the urge to make a disquisition on the ongoing bulletins from the Guardia di Finanza (the Finance Police) which, among other things, is always on the hunt for tax evaders. They are bulletins from a quest compared to which the search for the philosopher’s stone is as nothing. But I’ll just stick to this story; it’s enough for you to know that tax evasion is ubiquitous. Shocking, I know.
There may be nothing new under the sun, but as it continues to rise and set I wonder if there might not be some surprise, even a tiny one, somewhere on earth.
You should also know, if you haven’t intuited it, that any place south of Rome (Naples, Sicily, etc.) is generally scorned by those in the North as being a quagmire of corruption, where waste and crime cling to each other like doomed lovers on a cliff. At the same time, people in the North (especially those belonging to the political party, the Northern League, who have made a religion of decrying the South) are convinced that only Northerners embody the best traits of any Italian groupage — industrious, independent, no nonsense, no slacking, real workers with real results.
The fact that a northern Region could be worse than Naples is pretty hard to grasp. But the numbers don’t lie.
Here are some details of the research over the past five years:
Worst: Sicily. Better not to comment, I’ll merely observe that this did not come as a surprise to anyone.
Next worst: Veneto.
Next worst: Lombardia. (A second blow to the North, it being the Region next door to Veneto and home to Milan, a city which some people believe was stolen at birth from Germany or Switzerland, in terms of attitude.)
In descending order from there: Campania and Puglia (South), Piemonte (oops, North again), and Calabria (South).
The Veneto’s sins are of the private-entrepreneur type: 773 fraud, 32 corruption, 27 bribery, 264 abuse of authority, and 65 misappropriation of funds (I think that’s also called embezzlement). All transgressions which could be interpreted as “Well nobody actually got hurt.”
While we’re on the subject, here’s the rest of the rundown:
Puglia: Most cases of embezzlement.
Campania (Naples): Most cases of abuse of authority.
Lombardia (Milan): Most cases of corruption and bribery.
Grand totals over 5 years: More than 20,000 crimes scattered liberally across the Boot. Fraud: 6,000 cases. Embezzlement (of State as well as EU funds): 3,000, Abuse of authority: 5,700.
I don’t know if any of this strikes anyone but me as droll — I mean, that the North shares just about equal dishonors with everybody else here in the Cradle of the Renaissance. I suppose the ordinary Venetian on the street would have assumed that anyone who gets the chance is going to cut a corner, but would have thought Northerners were at least more clever in concealing it.
In any case, the thought of somewhere in the North outranking Naples is pretty startling. Now all I need to do is find out how the news has struck the Neapolitans. If I were them I’d be laughing like crazy.
I wanted to pass along this information because I think it’s useful to recalibrate one’s stereotypes every so often.
As a thank-you gift, the church of Santa Maria della Salute ranks as one of the greatest anywhere.
If I were to tell you (which I am) that another important holiday has just been upon us, you would be correct in asking me — before the history, the rituals, the weather — what we’re eating. As I write the house is full of an extraordinary aroma, which is only to be found during one or two days each year. If I were to try to describe it, you’d never want to eat it.
The feast-day (specifically November 21) is in honor of La Madonna della Salute, or Our Lady of Health. The nutriment is called castradina (kah-stra-DEE-nah) and it’s not for the faint of palate. Unlike frittelle at Carnival and bigoli in salsa at Redentore, this is not a dish that one finds made at home very much anymore — an American woman in the butcher shop who overheard me ordering the main ingredient told me that she wouldn’t have the “courage” to try making it. (Courage? It’s not like you have to club it to death. Besides, with something this strange, how would anybody know if it had gone wrong?)
Cabbage belongs with cured meat -- it's just one of those mystic marriages.
Most important, it’s a dish that would be impossible to make at any other time of year because the principal component appears at the meatmongers only in mid-November and disappears even before the bridge is taken down at midnight and it will not be obtainable anywhere for another year “not even for ready money,” as the butler put it to Lady Bracknell. So even if you hate it, there is something appealing about its rarity, like one of those small creatures that are born, live, and die in the course of a single day. I happen to love it, but you know me.
Castradina is leg of mutton which has been dried, salted, smoked, and smeared with every spice which is black and odoriferous, and left to fester for only God knows how long. Hanging in the butcher shops they look like small prosciuttos which have just dragged themselves out of some basement apartment in Haight-Ashbury.
Under the Venetian Republic this product came from the flocks grazing the rocky heights of Dalmatia; today, much of it comes from the area of Sauris, in northeastern Italy next-door to Slovenia. Traditionally this meat — which obviously was treated in this intense way to withstand everything from ocean voyages to long-range bombardment — needs long, slow cooking. More than skill (or even courage), it requires time. And cabbage. I forgot to mention the verze sofogae, the suffocated cabbage.
I will give the recipe below, but I feel the need to move on to describe the feast-day itself. I find it very comforting because as there is Thanksgiving in November (with meat) in America, here there is thanksgiving in November (also with meat). So I don’t feel I’m missing any important element of the late autumn in all its dank, grey glory.
To understand why a church of the magnitude of Baldassare Longhena’s baroque basilica was built, we need to grasp, even slightly, the magnitude of the disaster it commemorates.
In 1630, Venice was hit with one of the worst plagues in her plague-ridden history. A mere 50 years earlier (1575-76) the city had managed to survive the scourge which inspired the church of the Redentore and its yearly festival of gratitude. Now, before the city had really recovered, the plague was back and it was even worse than before.
In that year plague had already been roaming around northern Italy, brought by German and and French soldiers fighting the Thirty Years’ War. They infected some of the Venetian troops, who took it to Mantova, where soon the disease had eliminated almost the entire city.
A hearse -- at the moment without any casket -- passes Lazzaretto Vecchio, one of several plague quarantine islands.
Venice was understandably cautious about contagion and was a pioneer in the business of quarantine, sequestering arriving ships, their crews and even their cargo for 40 days. The islands of Lazzaretto Vecchio and Lazzaretto Nuovo were dedicated to dealing with these cases, as well as some islands which have disappeared. For those unable to resist the romanticism of the idea of Venice sinking, I offer for pure, unadulterated melancholy the vision of an island (actually two: San Marco in Boccalama and San Lorenzo in Ammiana) which sank beneath the lagoon waves still containing the skeletons of the hundreds of poor bastards who were sent there to die. If Thomas Mann had known — or cared — about this, his famous novel with the irresistible title would not have had anything to do with a doomed infatuation at an expensive hotel but something much harsher in every way.
The situation in Venice was under control until an ambassador arrived from Carlo Gonzaga-Nevers, duke of Mantova. As everybody knew Mantova was already hugely infected with plague, the ambassador and his family were promptly quarantined on the island of San Clemente (now the site of the San Clemente Palace Hotel). All would have been well except that somebody thought it would be a good idea to send a carpenter over to see about some renovations that needed to be made to the ambassador’s quarters. Nothing wrong with that, but they let him go home. He brought the plague to San Vio, his neighborhood, and thence to the entire city.
By the time the epidemic was finally over 18 months later, 46,490 deaths had been recorded (some estimates go as high as 80,000) in a population of 140,000. The catastrophe was made even worse by the disproportionate number of pregnant women who died, and the fact that an epidemic of smallpox was also raging. So many people were dying each day that it was impossible to remove them all quickly; dead bodies simply lay about the streets, spreading contagion and panic.
This magnificent composition by Flemish sculptor Giusto Le Court (1627-1679) tells the story: (Left) the city of Venice, as a beautiful noblewoman, begs the Virgin Mary for deliverance. (Center) The Virgin accepts her plea. (Right) The plague, as a hideous hag, is driven out.
Desperate, the Doge and Senate, the Patriarch of San Marco and the people of Venice gathered in San Marco to pray for deliverance; they performed a solemn procession throughout the entire city for 15 successive Saturdays, carrying the miraculous icon of the Madonna Nicopeia which the Byzantine Emperor used to carry into battle at the head of his army. And the Senate made a vow to build a church to the Virgin, swearing that the people would go there every year to give thanks till forever, if she would intercede to save the city.
In November, 1631 the plague was declared officially ended, and they kept their promise, though it took 50 years to fulfill. In November, 1687, Longhena’s masterpiece was complete.
So every November 21 since 1631, Venetians have honored the Senate’s vow to give thanks and have gone to offer their thanks to the Madonna della Salute, Our Lady of Health, and to ask for her protection or intercession. A friend of mine makes a point of telling his doctor that the two euros he spends on a votive candle that day is the best money he spends on his health all year. I think he’s joking but I’m not sure.
A temporary bridge is installed over the Grand Canal between S. Maria del Giglio and San Gregorio — roughly the path of the normal gondola traghetto. In the beginning it was set up on boats, big cargo-hauling peatas, which Lino remembers. Eventually, though, the demands of traffic outranked piety and now the bridge is a suitably high section of the one used in July for the feast of the Redentore.
Temporary stalls are set up around the area in front of the church’s steps where vendors sell candles from delicate to dangerous. You buy your candle, take it into the church, and wait amid the throng until you’ve inched close enough to the candle-offering stations to give your candle to the harried, wax-spattered boys who are lighting new candles and blowing out old ones at a pretty steady clip. Not many candles stay lit for very long, but try not to let that matter to you. It’s the thought that counts.
A fairly modest stall compared to some of the others, but still doing a steady business in votive candles.
Masses are being said at intervals in the various side chapels, and also at the high altar. We manage to shuffle past the altar to the choir behind, and sit in some of the heavy carved wooden stalls for a while to watch the people leaving through the sacristy. As Lino says, if you stay there long enough you’ll see everybody go by. This is one day nobody wants to miss.
Especially the ladies in their fur coats. For many and various reasons, Venice in winter is one place where mink still reigns supreme. One night on the vaporetto I counted eleven (I did not make that up). Shearling and wool are fine, and down parkas abound. But women of a certain age and ilk are going to be in fur. If it can’t be mink, it’s going to be as damn close to it as they can manage.
November 21 appears to be the unofficial opening day of the mink-coat season. I think it’s because — as mentioned above — everybody is going to be at the basilica, hence it’s the ideal moment and place to present yourself in all your furry splendor. I have seen women in mink coats on the big day when the sun was shining and the temperature in the mid-50s. Sweat? Sure. Take it off? Never! I have a friend who refers to this as the feast of Our Lady of the Fur Coat.
Before we leave the subject of this brief but glorious holy day, I need to stress that all is not candles and sacred vows. Yes, children are brought by their relatives, and they go through the drill. But it’s going to be quite a few years before the Salute connotes sanctity to them and not cotton candy. Because behind and beside the church, along the rio tera’ dei Catechumeni, a series of stalls are set up which you can smell long before you see them. It’s fat-and-sugar Elysium: deep-fried frisbees of dough (think flat funnel cakes) slathered with Nutella, candied peanuts, big fat doughnuts, long ropes of that weird pinkish soft stuff that looks like a thread of marshmallow DNA, and cotton candy sticking to everything. Noise! Lights! Sugar shock! And lots of balloons of cartoon characters, close to — and sometimes just past — bursting with helium. All day long the town is scattered with kids trudging home with floating Spongebob Squarepants or Nemo and Marlin or Dalmatian dogs tied to their wrists.
I have no idea what little Venetian kids in 1690 might have been given after they trudged out of church with their parents, but I would bet (I would hope) that it was something with absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever.
CASTRADINA Prepare two days in advance.
Part One: “Suffocated cabbage” or Verze sofogae (VER-zeh so-fo-GAH-eh)
Buy a medium-sized cabbage, preferably the kind that has crinkly purple leaves. Why? Because it looks better. Otherwise, any cabbage.
Slice it into really thin strips, not too long. Put it in an anti-stick pot along with a modest amount of extra-virgin olive oil, a few knobs of garlic, a sprig or two of rosemary, a little salt. Mix to coat well. Put it on low heat and cover. Stir occasionally. Eventually the cabbage will reduce itself to one-third of its previous volume, and have become soft and almost velvety. Don’t try to help it along by adding water. Be patient.
Remove the garlic. Set aside till tomorrow (in the refrigerator, or even leave it on the stovetop if the kitchen isn’t too warm.)
Part Two: The castradina itself.
Buy a piece of castradina — half a leg is plenty for three people. A pound, more or less.
Put it in a large stockpot filled with cold water. Bring to a boil. Simmer for half an hour. (Considering what’s been done to it, it’s not like you have to actually cook it.)
Put the pot on the windowsill, or somewhere else that is reliably cool and leave it to cool down completely. It will probably be overnight.
The next morning: Skim off the congealed grease which has formed a soft layer on top of the liquid.
Add the cabbage. Bring to a boil and simmer for an hour or so.
To serve: You can either serve the soup first, then a piece of the meat, or you can put them all together in the bowl. I haven’t heard of any myth, etiquette, or rule governing this. Just make sure it’s steaming hot. That’s part of its gestalt.
The reason why it has to be hot is because back in the centuries when castradina was a normal thing to eat, before it became a semi-exotic semi-relic, people ate it all winter long for the simple reason that it was one great way to warm up. You might like cocoa, or even mulled wine, but for a typical Venetian winter day/night you used to need to bring out the heavy culinary guns. Blastingly hot castradina was born for this.
A temporary bridge is installed over the Grand Canal between S. Maria del Giglio and San Gregorio — roughly the path of the normal gondola traghetto. In the beginning it was set up on boats, big cargo-hauling peatas, which Lino remembers. Eventually, though, the demands of traffic outranked piety and now the bridge is a suitably high section of the one used in July for the feast of the Redentore.