July, 2018 | Venice: I am not making this up

Just open wide….

July 10, 2018 5 Comments

Last Sunday the people of Malamocco celebrated the annual festa of the Madonna di Marina. Like a few other festivals — the one at Pellestrina on the first Sunday of August comes to mind — it is based on a legend involving a miraculous apparition of the Madonna. I’ll get to that in a moment.

What is reliably involved each year at Malamocco is a small sale of old and often eccentric stuff. I would say “antiques,” but that might be glamorizing them too much.

So forget the glamour, and while you’re waiting in line to pick up your plate of spaghetti alla malamocchina (with tiny clams called bevarasse), feast your eyes and your memory on this item. Anybody under the age of 50 probably has no recollection of it, but for the rest of us, I’m betting it still can bring on the shudders.

If Proust had ever sat in one of these, “Remembrance of Things Past” would have had a dramatically different beginning. Of course the column with the lamp and the small sink for endless spittings-out are not in their correct position, which I suppose means you could have bought them separately. But that would be crazy.

This sink was especially grotesquely huge when I was six, or however little I was when the dentist began his oral excavations. The sound of the water swirling around the inner edge only slightly masked the sound of the drill. End of reminiscences, you can go back to Proust now.

Speaking of Malamocco, you might want to know that the name is derived from Metamauco, by way of Medoacus, the Roman name of the Brenta River, which emptied into the Adriatic here. Could be useful on a crossword puzzle sometime?

It was originally a small settlement of families who cultivated vegetables, fished, and worked in the salt pans. The population grew in 452 A.D. with the fleeing dwellers from the lagoon shoreline seeking refuge from Attila’s Rome-bound hordes. It became the seat of the Venetian government between 742 and 811. In that year the new doge, Agnello Partecipazio, moved what was becoming Venice to the Rialto area and Malamocco returned to its earlier dimensions.

As for the Madonna di Marina herself, a legend springing from around the year 1300 tells of a certain Felice Dario, native of Malamocco, who found an enormous stump of wood lying on the beach and took it home to chop it up as firewood. (To give a more precise idea of this object, it’s called a ceppo [CHEH-po] in Italian, and while you certainly can burn it, it is more typically used as that heavy block on which you chop wood, or on which a butcher cuts meat, or on which a blacksmith places his anvil, or on which the public executioner places his customer’s head, etc.) In Venetian, the word is zoco (SOH-koh).

The ceppo disappeared three times, and three times Signor Dario found it back in its original place on the beach, at which point the Virgin appeared to him. The story ends there, though I suppose we could risk imagining miraculous cures and victories at sea and and platoons of male children and other beautiful things as a result. For the first years — no idea how many — the miracle was attributed to the “Madonna del zoco,” the “Madonna of the stump of wood used for chopping things on.” Somebody clearly thought that didn’t have the right ring to it, but I disagree.

I would tell you more about the festa, but the real point of this post isn’t the regata, or the procession, or the band, or even the (excuse me) Madonna and her chopping block. It’s the dentist’s chair. If I’d anywhere to put it, I’d have bought it and sat in it and rinsed my mouth and laughed triumphantly all day at the ghosts of all those dentists I’ve worn out.

Events

The flying arrows

July 6, 2018 4 Comments

You may already know this, but Italy boasts the largest aerial acrobatic team in the world: The “Frecce Tricolori,” or tricolor arrows.

The ten-plane squad was founded in 1961, but the first Italian school of aerobatics dates from 1930. The Frecce give exhibitions at air shows, and can also be scheduled for flyovers on special events and/or occasions (Luciano Pavarotti’s funeral on September 8, 2007, for example). The aforementioned three colors are the red, white and green of the Italian flag.

I am not a connoisseur of airplanes, but I’m a huge enthusiast of beauty and badassery, and the few times I’ve seen this group perform I’ve been thrilled to my follicles.

Two Saturdays ago the Arrows were booked to fly over Venice — something which is forbidden by law to normal mortals and planes — as part of a festive weekend marking the 50th anniversary of Ferretti, designers and builders of luxury yachts. The plan was fulfilled as advertised: Once from east to west, once from south to north. The whole thing took about five minutes, a tiny fragment of time which felt infinitely bigger, broader, longer, and braver.

And then they were gone.

The first pass was finished before my brain woke up to the fact that I could be making pictures. Hence the diaphanous though smudged contrails of the colors of the national flag.

Meanwhile, the squadron has circled round toward the south, ready to head for Venice once more. You can just barely make out the formation in the low center of this image.

There they are. These are Aermacchi MB-339 A/PAN MLU aircraft, whose maximum speed is 908 km/h (564 mph). I cannot say what the speed was in this case, but it can’t have been much slower than that. Any aeronautic experts reading this, please correct me, as I stand here with my mouth open. Yes, these are nine planes — the tenth one mentioned earlier gives solo exhibitions.

Several seconds later, they’re over the Bacino of San Marco.

And swoop. All this to the most terrifying shriek of the planes.

Over in five minutes. Or maybe fewer. My sense of time got lost somewhere.

And they’re gone, screaming their way back to their base at Rivolto airport near Codroipo in the province of Udine, 92 km/ 57 miles away to the northeast. So I guess they landed in about 15 seconds (made up). All I know is that they were home before I was.

Venetian Curiosities

Hidden well in plain sight

July 2, 2018 2 Comments

And before I leave the subject of water in Venice……

If one is compelled to cross the Piazza San Marco — and from Easter till the first hard frost one crosses only under compulsion — one doesn’t expect to see anything beyond the daily disarray. On a recent afternoon Lino and I (under compulsion) were crossing, and because the crowds were swarming momentarily in another part of the piazza, we discovered something new. Old, of course, but new to us.

Lines on the stones. Significant lines bearing a message to somebody somewhere in the future, if anybody were to notice. Or care. That would be me.

These two concentric circles don’t exactly leap out at you.

They’re not tremendously more obvious from this angle, either.

But whoever incised those lines left a clue. More than a clue, positive identification. I couldn’t fit the entire very helpful inscription into one frame and make it readable at the same time, so here’s the first panel. It says “POZZO INTERRATO NEL…” “Well filled with earth in…”

“XVII,” or “17th.” Note that here the “17th century” doesn’t mean the 1600s, but the 1700’s.

I haven’t succeeded in finding much more information than that, so kudos to Walter Fano on his blog L’altra Venezia for supplying at least the following bits (translated by me): “In the ancient Piazza San Marco there were wellheads, but how many isn’t very clear. In 1283 one was located at the entrance to the Mercerie (N.B., under the clock tower), while in 1494 the historian Marin Sanudo speaks of two wellheads. In successive epochs, anyway, all the histories speak of only one well located at the bottom of the piazza, near the church of San Geminiano (a church which Napoleon wanted demolished at the beginning of the 1800’s, who caused the so-called “Ala Napoleonica” (Napoleonic Wing) to be built in its place which today closes the piazza at the side opposite the basilica).”

Paintings by Giovanni Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Antonio Vicentini, all working in the late 1600’s/early 1700’s do not reveal anything resembling a wellhead in the Piazza San Marco, and considering their mania for accuracy, I’m going to accept that it was already gone when they began sketching. I had hopes of glimpsing a well in Gentile Bellini’s “Procession in Piazza San Marco” (1496), but he cleverly composed the scene to as to obscure the area in question. I give up.

This is the Piazza San Marco in 1500, delineated by Jacopo de’ Barbari with his customary insane attention to detail in the “View of Venice.” I don’t know what the numbers indicate, but I can’t say there’s a well there.

But there is this: An undated image of the uncovering of an earthed-in well in the Piazza San Marco, essentially where the concentric circles are now drawn. Why it would have been closed — and why in the 17th century — will have to remain in the “I’ll get to the bottom of this someday” file.