Venice: I am not making this up

The paving news

October 20, 2011 6 Comments

It’s been raining since last night and will continue at least past lunchtime, and a spectacular bora has kept the blinds rattling all day. Gusts up to 30 mph (50 k/h). In pipe-replacement-street-tearing-up-crew language this translates as “Day off.”

The silence is eerie. It’s like the silence of the songbirds. I can’t say I miss their racket, in the sense that I wish I were hearing it right now, but it is strangely unsettling.

Yesterday the concert was especially intense. To the usual hammering and clunking and yelling they added sneezing, hawking, spitting, and belching. One of them occasionally even sang a little.

Lino says they must have been feeling the impending drastic change in the weather, like horses before an earthquake.

As if that weren’t good enough, some kind of supervisor came to review their work — I think that’s what he was doing — which provided a bellowing voice louder than theirs. He wasn’t happy about something. I couldn’t understand what, but I gathered that their performance evaluation was being summarized in one particularly ugly phrase which he repeated at least 723 times.

Or maybe he was commenting on the way they had concluded their work on the little street stretching from our front door to the main thoroughfare. It now lists, like a clumsily loaded boat. In fact, the first thing Lino said when we walked down it was: “They could at least have made it level.”

IMG_2059 street — You may think I'm the one who's listing to port, but I intentially included the door at the end of the tunnel to give some notion of relative horizonality.

So now when we leave the house, we list to starboard, and coming home, we list to port. What is unfortunate is that it slopes toward our hovel, meaning the rainwater will slide toward our foundations, if we have any. There are two drains, which is good, and after all, I realize that rainwater shouldn’t be sliding away from them. So all I have to do is keep them unclogged. Since nobody else does.

Does the quality of life in every city come down to drains?

Venetian Curiosities

Dig we must

October 12, 2011 5 Comments

After a certain amount of time, one gets the feeling (“one” means me) that nothing ever gets done around here. But lately, one would be wrong.

Invigorating confusion has been literally surrounding our little hovel, spreading into some side streets, for the past two weeks or so. And it’s impossible for a civilian to guess how long it will continue.

IMG_1999 work — The Biennale is all over the city, but here on our street we've got a real "work in progress" underway. (Our front door is on the right.) I'm beginning to wonder if this is really performance art sponsored by the People's Republic of Erewhon.

The gas and water lines need to be fixed, replaced, spayed, embalmed — something important, anyway. I glimpsed the hole in one wet degraded portion of a water pipe just unearthed — no telling how many gallons of the precious liquid had been lost forever (or on whose monthly bill the loss was charged).

This means, as everywhere in the world, they tear up everything and then have to put it all back when they’re done. Each phase is loud and dirty. Here, the work is all at the artisan level — no big fancy machines that make lots of noise. But that’s fine, because the men laboring on this task make enough noise all by themselves.

IMG_1991 work — This is what today's work looks like right outside the window on the left, behind which I am attempting to think.

I don’t mean the assorted incessant clinkings and clunkings of heavy iron objects copied from tools excavated in Etruscan mining settlements. Chisels on stone, hammers on nails. This goes on all day but you can get used to it. At least it’s not drills. I’ve been through that too.

No, it’s the euphonious tones of the workmen themselves. They are louder and more insistent than the noise of their implements. You can hear them as they arrive for work, getting closer and closer, walking down the street and over the bridge already shouting at each other. And you can really hear them right outside your window as you try to think of other things, like what to have for lunch or why, if God is good, there is evil in the world.

They may be deaf. Even if they are, that doesn’t stop them. The comments are truncated, and inane, but almost always loud, and enlivened by unimaginative swearing and boring blasphemy. I can understand enough of it by now to be annoyed. I hate the blasphemy but I hate the inanity even more. I want to ask them why this is desirable, or (God forbid) necessary, but then I remember they’re making 40,000 times more money while talking than I am while listening.

Besides, I already know the answer. Instead of the missing motors, it’s their mouths that provide the energy necessary for their work. No shouting and blaspheming? The worksite suddenly freezes, men standing with half-raised utensils, staring at nothing.

IMG_1990 work — And this portion of work is just outside our two bedroom windows. The whole street is helpfully covered up with wooden planks when the men go home at night, which means that I can lie in bed till after midnight listening to people going by. They sound like horses going over a covered bridge.

If we were to put duct tape over their mouths, the world would stop. Or the repairs to the gas and water lines would stop, thereby prolonging the already prolonged project.

So if we have to endure bellowing and blathering in order to enable replacing that leaky pipe and re-cement those snaggled paving stones, I guess that’s the tradeoff. It would be nice if they’d work faster, but then again, it could be centuries since those pipes got a checkup.

I mean the submerged ones, not the ones in their throats.

Tourism

Finding Venice everywhere

October 11, 2011 No Comments

I recently remarked on the extraordinary eagerness of people at every compass point to name some local enterprise for Venice (I exclude the Venetian Casino Resort Hotel in Las Vegas and/or Macao as being too screamingly obvious to be interesting). And I offered the Trattoria Citta’ di Venezia in Conegliano as an example.

A reader e-mailed me a brief note in response: “Just to prove your theory,” she said, and as evidence presented the photo below, taken in Krakow, Poland.

If any other hardy readers want to join the scavenger hunt, I’d be very glad to get a photo of whatever Venicely-named establishment or undertaking you come across. For possible, even probable, publication here.

Note: No fair doing any searches and uprooting photos from websites. The only rule is that it has to be a place you’ve seen with your own eyes. If you can’t take a photo of it, for some reason, I’ll accept a postcard.

securedownload krakow — This business earns one extra point for throwing in an extra non-Krakovian placename.

Nature

There goes summer

October 9, 2011 6 Comments

We knew it couldn’t last, all that sun and warmth and autumnal glow.

And it didn’t.

Friday morning we woke up early to the insistent clattering of the Venetian blinds against the window. The message they were tapping out was “Let us in, it’s cold out here.”

IMG_1880 wind — As you see, the wind hasn't stopped everybody from working. You should know, however, that when Lino was a lad -- before motors made everybody feel invincible -- everybody would still have gone to work on a day like this, rowing. Not made up. There were farmers on the mainland who rowed to Venice every morning -- extremely early in the morning, too. No snow days, no parental slips, as in "Please excuse my son from rowing to Venice this morning with the milk, there's too much wind." People didn't think that way.

Did I say wind? We got to the vaporetto in record time, rushed along by a powerful southwest wind known officially as the libeccio but here is called garbin (gar-BEEN). What was happening was a highly invigorating “garbinata.”

The lagoon was having a seizure. Between the waves caused by the wind and those created by boats with motors, the water didn’t know which way it was supposed to go, so it pretty much went everywhere.

IMG_1899 wind — This is a man who has tremendous confidence in his boat, and himself. An obstreperous wave or gust could easily change all that.

But we knew it wasn’t going to go on for long, because when the tide turned the wind was going to turn too, leaving the stage for the next performer, its opposite number, a northeast wind officially known as the grecale but here is called borin (bore-EEN).

This has been ordained by the Great Ordainer and is so dependable a phenomenon that there’s a phrase that goes with it: “Garbin ciama borin” (gar-BEEN chama bor-EEN): the southwest wind “calls” the northeast wind.

It also rained for several hours in a sort of “Get it all out, you’ll feel better” kind of way.

I certainly felt better. I loved hearing the rain, it was visit from a long-lost friend. And I’d say that even if I had had to be out in it. You know me.

IMG_1913 wind — It didn't matter which way you were heading -- everybody was in the same fix.

IMG_1905 wind — And spare a thought for the working stiffs ashore. This poor bastard had been sent out by himself to tie down the big banner announcing something important. The top edge is supposed to be lashed to the supports at his feet. I didn't watch for long because it seemed rude, and I might have offered to help except that I seriously doubted I'd be able to. It would have been like offering to help somebody furl the mainsail in a gale.