Venice: I am not making this up

Health returns to Venice, on schedule

November 22, 2011 8 Comments

IMG_2645 salute — A satisfyingly dim view of the panorama as we headed to church. This is the very least the weather should be doing for this holiday.

Yesterday one of the most important days in the Venetian (hence in my) calendar came around again: the annual feast of La Madonna della Salute, Our Lady of Health.

Health is one of those things, like air or the ability to speak your mother tongue, that you don’t give much thought to till it’s been impaired. Or removed.

In a city that has the highest median age of any city in Italy, health is a subject that’s right up there on the short list of things to really worry about, several places ahead of acqua alta and even a close second to tourism. Considering that the city government is currently debating (or not — I can’t keep track) whether to close the hospital here and send everybody who needs help to the big hospital on the mainland (pause for screams of rage and disbelief), health is clearly a big issue.

IMG_2646 salute — The sign is put up every year: "It is dangerous to lean out when passing under the votive bridge." Those who don't speak Italian probably discover this fact on their own.

But let us return to the health at hand. This feast was established in 1630 in thanksgiving for the Madonna’s response to the desperate plea of the city of Venice for deliverance from arguably the worst plague in its history, though the pestilence of 1574 was also noticeably catastrophic.

If anyone (such as me) has ever tried to imagine what an epidemic of plague might entail, a few passages from “The Betrothed” by Alessandro Manzoni might help. They certainly provide a way to grasp the magnitude of this festa (not to mention the votive church, which took 50 years to build).

IMG_2663 salute — The votive bridge, made of a few bits of the big bridge that's installed for the feast of the Redentore (another plague situation). Highly useful for pedestrians but a large pain for transport, which is one of many reasons why it isn't permanent.

The plague of 1630 exterminated much of northern Italy, and drawing on contemporary documents, Manzoni describes the plague in Milan. I presume that it was much the same in Venice, where 80,000 Venetians died, including the doge, though here the carts obviously were replaced by boats.

…sickness and deaths began rapidly to multiply…with the unusual accompaniments of spasms, palpitation, lethargy, delirium, and those fatal symptoms, livid spots and sores; and these deaths were, for the most part, rapid, violent, and not unfrequently sudden, without any previous tokens of illness….

All the doorways into the streets were kept shut from either suspicion or alarm, except those which were left open because deserted or invaded; others nailed up and sealed outside, on account of the sick or dead who lay within; others marked with a cross drawn with coal, as an intimation to the monatti [men who removed the bodies] that there were dead to be carried away….

Everywhere were rags and corrupted bandages, infected straw, or clothes, or sheets, thrown from the windows; sometimes bodies, which had suddenly fallen dead in the streets, and were left there till a cart happened to pass by and pick them up, or shaken from off the carts themselves, or even thrown from the windows….

And while corpses, scattered here and there, or lying in heaps…made the city like one immense sepulchre, a still more appalling symptom, a more intense deformity, was their mutual animosity, their licentiousness, and their extravagant suspicion…not only did they mistrust a friend, a guest; but those names which are the bonds of human affection, husband and wife, father and son, brother and brother, were words of terror, and dreadful and infamous to tell! the domestic board, the nuptial bed, were dreaded as lurking-places, as receptacles of poison…

Men of the highest rank might be seen without cape or cloak, at that time a most essential part of any gentleman’s dress; priests without cassocks, friars without cowls; in short, all kinds of dress were dispensed with which could contract anything by fluttering about…And besides this carefulness to go about as trussed up and confined as possible, their persons were neglected and disorderly; the beards of such as were accustomed to wear them grown much longer, and suffered to grow by those who had formerly kept them shaven; their hair, too, long and undressed, not only from the neglect which usually attends long depression but because suspicion had been attached to barbers…

The greater number carried in one hand a stick, some even a pistol, as a threatening warning to anyone who should attempt to approach them stealthily; and in the other, perfumed pastils, or little balls of metal or wood, perforated and filled with sponges steeped in aromatic vinegar, which they applied from time to time, as they went along, to their noses, or held there continually.

Some carried a small vial hung around their neck, containing a little quick-silver, persuaded that this possessed the virtue of absorbing and arresting every pestilential effluvia; this they were very careful to renew from time to time…

Even friends, when they met in the streets alive, saluted each other at a distance, with silent and hasty signs. Every one, as he walked along, had enough to do to avoid the filthy and deadly stumbling-blocks with which the ground was strewn, and in some places even encumbered. Every one tried to keep the middle of the road, for fear of some other obstacle, some other more fatal weight, which might fall from the windows…

…the sick… were wandering about as if stupefied; and not a few were absolutely beside themselves: one would eagerly be relating his fancies to a miserable creature laboring under the malady; another would be actually raving; while a third appeared with a smiling countenance, as if assisting at some gay spectacle.

…two horses, which, stretching their necks and pawing with their hooves, could with difficulty make their way; and drawn by these a cart full of dead bodies, and after that another, and another, and another; and on each hand monatti walking by the side of the horses hastening them on with whips, blows, and curses. These corpses were for the most part naked, while some were miserably enveloped in tattered sheets, and were heaped up and twined together, almost like a nest of snakes unfolding themselves….at every trifling obstacle, at every jolt, these fatal groups were seen quivering and falling into horrible confusion, heads dangling down, women’s long tresses disheveled…

IMG_2724 salute — The entire story contained in one extravagant altarpiece by Giusto Le Court: On the left, the city of Venice (as usual, represented as a beautiful and wealthy woman) kneels to implore mercy and deliverance from the plague. In the center, the Virgin Mary, holding Jesus, makes a gracious gesture of assent. On the right, a cherub uses a torch to drive away the Plague, shown as a hideous hag, fleeing. Below is an icon of the Mesopanditissa, or Madonna of Health, brought from Crete by Francesco Morosini in 1670.

IMG_2671 salute — A few stalls are set up for selling candles; it's inconceivable to me that someone could come and not offer a candle, though I suppose there's no rule against it. The cheapest candle costs 2 euros (($2.69). The ones with the red base are often taken home, to be lighted in times of peril (usually storms). Burning a few leaves of the olive branch you brought home from Palm Sunday was (is still?) believed to ward off the danger.

Not wishing to spoil the party, I think it’s not a bad idea to acknowledge at least briefly that the day was fixed to express gratitude (or desire) for heavenly intervention in matters of life and death, and not primarily so we could buy balloons of Nemo and Spiderman and eat cotton candy and slabs of deep-fried dough slathered with chocolate.

The weather was perfect, by which I mean cold, raw, damp, foggy, and breezy. I’ve been to the basilica of the Salute to offer my candle on days when it was sunny and the temperature in the sixties, and I can tell you that it just feels wrong. This isn’t a happy holiday, it’s a solemn, penitential, I-really-mean-this kind of day, even though there are plenty of balloons and highly sugared and fat-laden treats being sold from stalls behind the church. It’s probably years before Venetian kids grasp the fact that the day isn’t dedicated to Our Lady of Fat and Sugar. Amazing, now that I think of it, that she should be honored as the guardian of health with this payload of calories. They ought to depict her — no disrespect intended — holding an insulin syringe.

Back to the weather: The worse it is, the happier are the Ladies who Mink. I’ve remarked before that this city is an unrepentant recidivist on the animal-skin subject. (I don’t count shearling in this category.) One winter evening I counted 11 mink coats on the vaporetto going home. Someone I know told me about a little old lady on the Lido who was packing her steamer trunks for a holiday in the Dolomites with four peltish coats. This was the minimum a woman could rationally consider bringing; no telling what your friends would think if they should see you in the same old fur, day after day.

Therefore Lino refers to this legendary day as the feast of Our Lady of the Fur Coat. And laughs on the rare days when it turns out to be, as I mentioned, sunny and warm, because wearing their fur coat to the basilica is more important to these ladies than offering a candle for their husband, or maybe even for themselves. We enjoy imagining them hanging tough in the heat, wrapped in mink, wearing terrycloth headbands, like sweating tennis players.

Yesterday, though, I only saw one fur-like garment, and I am dead certain it was fake. This does not bode well, but I’m not sure for what.

IMG_2714 salute — You bring your candle into the basilica and eventually decide to join the crowd that clusters near the few points where volunteers are feverishly lighting and installing them in the racks.

IMG_2681 salute — It's rare to see someone with this many candles, this big. I can only hope she was offering them in thanksgiving, and not with pleas for intervention.

IMG_2697 salute — Sometimes the children get to hold the candles.

IMG_2705 salute — It's hard work to take people's candles, light them and install them. Because you also have to remove somebody else's flaming candle first. These young men spend the day covered with wax drippings.

IMG_2731 salute — A few of the classic thank-offerings for answered prayers are displayed on the wall near the high altar. When I came to Venice, the walls were covered with these tokens of gratitude, representing true healings, something much bigger than even a very big candle. I wonder where they went, and why.

IMG_2757 salute — The street behind the church is just as crowded, but a lot more cheerful. Finally the kids get to gorge.

IMG_2766 salute — This is just one small part of the panoply. Lino remembers when only Venetian frittelle were sold, at stalls in front of the church. Now, with a minor exception, it's all sweets from Sicily.

IMG_2765 salute — The balloons have all gone Hollywood and evidently Geppetto is moonlighting.

IMG_2772 salute — Kids with candles, grown-ups with cotton candy. It's great.

Venetian-ness

Another side of waterworld

November 8, 2011 4 Comments

This minuscule bulletin is for anyone who might think that the most troublesome water in Venice is in the canals.

Actually, it’s in the air.

After about ten days of rain and mist, in varying proportions, with random interludes of damp, persistent wind, my sinuses feel like the average compressed-air can. Just think — if I could breathe, I could blast the dust out of my computer all by myself.

Who — I hear you ask — cares?

I mention it because it leads us to an infinitesimal aspect of life in the most-beautiful-city-in-the-world. Laundry. The fate of wet laundry in what amounts to a World Heritage Site aquarium.

Two nights ago, I slipped between clean sheets which I had wishfully thought were dry, but discovered had retained the subtlest possible essence of humidity, just enough to make me feel like a very old loggerhead sea turtle lying on the wet sand waiting to lay my eggs. I snapped. It was time to launch the death rays.

So I washed several hundred pounds of garments and towels and other heavy stuff, jammed it into the rolling suitcase, and hauled it to the laundromat on the Lido, where four big dryers were waiting for me.

Actually, only three were waiting, because someone had gotten there before me. I sorted my raiment into them, dropped in the coins and hit the highest temperature possible. I think it was close to “incinerate.” At one euro ($1.37) for ten minutes, it wasn’t exactly a deal, but this was no time to haggle.

In the hour I was there, three other people came in, lugging various huge containers of damp laundry.

Apparently everybody had had the same idea.

IMG_7942 laundry — Only in winter does the absurdity strike you of photographing laundry drying in the middle of water.

After three sessions, I took out the heaviest item, a waffle-weave cotton blanket. It was hot and totally dry, exquisitely dry, irresistibly dry. I could barely resist the temptation to put it back for another ten minutes just to imagine myself becoming one with the transcendent dryness of it. If you had offered me a box of Teuscher truffles — or even white truffles from Alba — at that moment, or maybe six 0.03-carat rubies, I couldn’t have concentrated long enough to decide.

It was like an oasis in the desert, only backwards.

When I left, it had started to rain again.

Acqua Alta, Flooding

Reflections on water

November 7, 2011 1 Comment

There seems to be something wrong with the date November 4. And I’m not referring to the Unknown Soldier. I’m referring to water.

On November 4, 1966, the famous acqua extra-alta flowed over Venice. It was also the day on which the catastrophic flood of the Arno struck Florence. (Trivia alert: A similar flood hit Florence on November 4, 1333.)

And now November 4, 2011 has entered the annals of suffering in Genova, flooded by at least two of their rivers which were overwhelmed by torrential rains. http://youtu.be/0IUOI_xg62M

I mention this for several reasons, and not primarily to make you wonder what it is about November 4 that seems to make the firmament go feral.

One reason I mention it is because Venice usually gets the headlines, whether there is a real problem or not. The foreign press loves to dramatize us splashing around in the Piazza San Marco, but I’m not sure that it has drawn appropriate attention to the cataclysm which has driven Genova to its knees, so I am making a point of telling you here.

Another reason I bring it up is to repeat one of my essential points about water in Venice compared to water in other places, which is that you can’t compare them.

So I will summarize it here and — I hope — won’t drone on about it any more this year.

Acqua alta is not “flooding.” Flooding is what happened in Florence, and in Genova, and other places I won’t list, and it often involves destruction and death.

We get wet. They get killed. On November 4 in Genova, there were at least seven victims. One woman was crushed between two cars being swept away down what used to be a street. Another woman and her two small children were drowned when the crest of the flood caught them in the entryway of their apartment building before they could make it to the staircase. And so on.

These are utterly tragic stories which are — thank God — impossible to replicate with acqua alta.

IMG_5028 alta — Some "water on the ground" in the Piazza San Marco. The tide is coming in, as you can tell by the fact that the pavement to the left is dry. And then it will be going out again. It's hard to think of calling this "flooding."

Therefore I trust that any drama you may encounter in the upcoming months in the press, on TV, on tourists’ blogs, concerning water in Venice will not impress you. In fact, I hope you won’t even notice it.

To review: Acqua alta is tide. It comes in, it goes out. It does not destroy bridges, rip up trees, or make floating trucks smash into buildings. Or humans.

So please spare a thought for the people in Genova (and elsewhere) who are suffering hideously from this avalanche of water. Do not expend any thought whatever on whether people in Venice have to put their boots on for two hours.

Though if you think we ought to start a group to advocate the abolition of November 4 from the calendar, I’ll be ready to sign up.

9563c2c57f3912f32a41954425c20a7d genova 4 nov — Genova, beginning to dig out.

IMG_4968 alta — Venice, November 30, 2009. Not the same thing.

History

November 4, The Unknown Soldier

November 4, 2011 1 Comment

The solemnity (more and/or less) of the past three days — All Saints Day and All Souls Day — dissolves today into the genuine solemnity of the annual commemoration of the end of World War I. November 4 (1918) is the date on which war against the Austro-Hungarian empire and its allies ceased.

It sounds so tidy: Victory. Peace. Ninety years have gone by. Let’s move on.

But every year the moving-on stops, to observe what is now called the Festa of the Armed Forces. Many civic monuments, and not a few of the parish memorials listing the fallen sheep of the local flock, are decorated with shiny fresh laurel wreaths given by the City of Venice. And a ceremony performed by veterans’ groups and other military elements is held every year on this day in the Piazza San Marco.

In Rome, the President of the Republic made the traditional visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which soldiers guard night and day.

France had established the first tomb of the Unknown Soldier in 1920, and the Italians wanted to do likewise. They had lost some 1,240,000 men, almost entirely on the northern front which had stretched some 400 miles, almost one-third of the entire Alpine arc. In what some have called history’s greatest mountain battlefield, the gathering and burial of unidentified soldiers had been going on for two years.

world-war-i-in-19150 — The map shows how far into northeast Italy the Central Powers’ forces penetrated. The Italian line held at the Piave River, now universally known as the “river sacred to the fatherland.” Lino’s father was taken prisoner on the Asiago Plateau and spent the rest of the war in a camp in Germany. From “World War I.” *The* *World Book Encyclopedia.* © World Book, Inc. By permission of the publisher. www.worldbookonline.com All rights reserved. This image may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without prior written permission from the publisher.

A commission was formed to choose one soldier from each of the eleven sectors of the front (Rovereto, Dolomiti, Altipiani, Grappa, Montello, Basso Piave, Cadore, Gorizia, Basso Isonzo, San Michele, and Castagnevizza). No identifying marks of any kind were to be permitted — no name, or rank, or serial number.

The eleven caskets were taken to the basilica of Aquileia, not far from Trieste. Here they were arranged in a line, and on October 26, 1921, a woman named Maria Bergamas from Gradisca d’Isonzo stepped forward to choose one.

Her son, Antonio, had been killed but his body had never been found. No one imagined, I’m sure, that one of the eleven victims could have been her son. She was there to represent all of the mothers, wives and women of Italy.

One eyewitness reported that she walked toward the row of eleven coffins, “with her eyes staring, fixed on the caskets, trembling…in front of the next to last one, she let out a sharp cry, calling her son by name, and fell on the casket, clasping it.” Strangely, there are less fervid accounts, also by eyewitnesses: “In front of the first coffin she seemed to become faint, and was supported by her escort of four veterans, all decorated with the Gold Medal for Valor. In front of the second, she stopped, held out her arms and placed her mourning veil upon it.”

As a journalist, I can’t grasp how there could be more than one version of the event, but I assume everyone was extremely keyed up.

bergamas1 — Here is the scene as depicted by “La Domenica del Corriere.” Meaning no disrespect, it clearly would have made an excellent third act to a tragic opera.

In any case, one was chosen, placed on a gun carriage, lashed onto an open-sided train carriage,and covered with the Italian battle flag. Four other open carriages were attached, to contain the flowers which undoubtedly were going to be offered by the people along the way.

The train stopped at Udine, Treviso, Venice, Padova, Rovigo, Ferrara, Bologna, Pistoia, Prato, Firenze, Arezzo, Chiusi, Orvieto, and finally Rome. But in fact it stopped — was stopped, actually, by the throngs which had waited for hours to see it — at all the stations, even the tiniest. Some threw flowers, others clasped their hands and knelt.

The train arrived in Rome on the evening of November 3, and the casket was taken to the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri near the station. Mourners passed all night to pay their respects.

The next day, November 4, 1921, the war would formally end at 3:00 PM. The cortege proceeded slowly down the Via Nazionale toward Piazza Venezia and the massive monument known as the Vittoriano, where the body would be entombed.

800px-Il_Vittoriano_(2)_14_11 Alessio Nastro Siniscalchi — The monument known as Il Vittoriano, in Rome. The “Altar of the Fatherland,” where the casket was placed is in the center, beneath the statue of the goddess Roma in the golden niche. (Photo: Alessio Nastro Siniscalchi)

Total silence reigned. King Vittorio Emmanuele III walked behind the gun carriage bearing the casket. At the monument, the casket was lifted and carried by six veterans, all of whom had been decorated with the Gold Medal for Valor. Finally, it was placed in the space beneath the statue of the ancient goddess Roma. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrOMk91vCfo

You might be surprised, as I have been, to discover how many poems (at least in Italian) have been written about the Unknown Soldier. Some are even composed as accusations, reflections, admonitions, rebukes, spoken directly to the reader by the Soldier. There is also a number of songs about him and/or war, in the mold of the protest songs of the Sixties and early Seventies. They seem dated and futile.

Well, of course they’re futile. Just look around. Still, some respect for the fallen is the least we can do. Or apparently the most we can do.