The first day of autumn came and went as decreed by the cosmos, but around here summer didn’t get the memo. The heat wave that began some two months ago is still enjoying itself thoroughly, lolling on the beach, gleaming on the Alpine peaks, bringing joy to the daring hoteliers who risked staying open and not unconsiderable damage to the farmers.
It was the hottest September on record; on average, nearly 3 degrees above the norm. In Piemonte, Torino registered 30 degrees C (86 degrees F), a September temperature it hasn’t felt since 1753. Rainfall has become a distant memory.
The farmers are not amused. Not only are the crops lollygagging along for lack of rain and excess of heat, but the harvest, whenever they manage to make it, is going to be puny. Ten percent fewer grapes, and they’re already fermenting — unheard of. Tomatoes and olives and rice are down 20 percent.
No matter where you go, there will be some business named for Venice. In Conegliano Lino paused in front of the Trattoria "Citta' di Venezia," but I discovered a Cafe Venezia in Casablanca. Anyway, there isn't a Trattoria Citta' di Conegliano in Venice, which I think is narrow-minded.
But one crop is still going strong: The Adriatic beaches continue to pullulate with tourists even though the kiosks are closed and the lifeguards have all gone home. Some wag had his picture taken under his big umbrella holding a batch of chestnuts, two seasonal icons which have never met and probably never even heard of each other.
But let’s make the proverbial hay while the proverbial sun is still proverbially glowing. Even though school started two weeks ago, Gianni Stival, vice-mayor of Caorle (a beach town) is dreaming of a bumper crop of late vacationers and has proposed — not for the first time — that the Veneto postpone the first day of school for two whole weeks.
“It would be good for tourism,” he explains, “because now when the first school bell rings at the middle of September, families are compelled to go home.” And take all their money with them. Never mind if little Bepi never learns the names of the European capitals or the definition of plankton or that when a girl says “no” she’s pretty likely to have meant “no” (oh wait — they don’t teach that). Whatever is good for tourism is, by definition, good for everybody, assuming that little Bepi has somehow learned to count past 20. Or maybe that doesn’t matter either, now that cash registers calculate the correct change.
Last Saturday we decided to become tourists, in our own small way, so we took the train to Conegliano, a small but prosperous provincial town just 58 km (36 miles) from Venice. Conegliano is famous for Prosecco and a painter named Giovanni Battista Cima (1460-1518), nicknamed “da Conegliano,” or “from Conegliano,” so we don’t confuse him with all those other Giovanni Battista Cimas.
I ate cappellacci di zucca, or "big straw hats stuffed with pumpkin," which were bestrewn with smoked ricotta and drenched with butter. This is a typical autumn dish -- note the pumpkin -- of the area around Ferrara, but it tasted fine here too. Three of these will give you the strength to harvest another five acres, if you can manage to stay awake.
It was a heavenly day — sorry for the farmers, but we loved it, even though we were thwarted in our intention to browse the weekly market, which spreads along the main street and its tributaries offering everything from socks to handmade baskets. Don’t assume that Saturday has been ordained by God, or the mayor, as the perfect day for a big market. Turns out they hold it on Friday. In case you ever need to know.
Members of a local mycology club were setting up an exhibition of just-collected local mushroms ranging from delectable to fatal. The drought made a serious dent in this harvest, as well; there ought to have been several times more than these.
But we didn’t care. We wandered around enjoying the sun, sat outside the duomo watching the guests arriving for a big wedding, we ate too much, we sprawled in the garden of the ruined hilltop castle. If it sounds like we did nothing, I want to tell you that nothing was exactly what we needed and we did plenty of it.
As far as I’m concerned, if this is autumn, it can stay like this forever.
The backdrop of tiny wild apples and unshelled chestnuts (the green spiky ball) made a very attractive arrangement
The chestnut squad at work: One man roasting them, two others sitting by bags of chestnuts from Cuneo, slitting their shells, one by one, to prevent their exploding in the heat.
A classic autumn assortment (though no pumpkins). Clockwise from bottom left are walnuts, plums, chestnuts, giuggiole (jujubes), persimmons and grapes.
Mirtilli, or wild blueberries, at only 12 euros a kilo ($8 a pound). Pretty cheap, considering these are all picked by hand in the woods.
These mushrooms, on the other hand, are absolutely for eating: "Galletti" and "finferli," also uncultivated. Delectable.
He emerged from oblivion a few days ago wrapped in the shadows of a bygone regata which is being resuscitated this weekend, and I think he deserves more space than the regata and I want you to know about him not only for his own sake, but to demonstrate that Erla’s Venice does not consist exclusively of moldy leftovers and mismatched socks and intelligent people who believe crazy things and not-so-intelligent people who believe those things are brilliant.
His name was Luigi Graziottin (GRA-tsee-aw-TEEN): Born in Castello in 1852, died in Castello in 1926, and forgotten in Castello ever since.
Via Garibaldi, the spinal cord, nervous system and lymph nodes of Castello, where Graziottin was known by everybody, especially the storekeepers he asked for donations.
The regata he was involved in organizing and promoting was inspired by the city-wide desire to celebrate September 20, a crucial date in the amalgamation process of the newly united Italy. The festivities in Castello were a huge neighborhood event.
The race was first known as the Regata di Castello, then the Regata of XX September. It was held ten times between 1887 and 1913, skipping some years for various, ever-more-political reasons, with assorted modifications. Then people stopped commemorating the date and the race had no reason to exist.
I know all this thanks to an excellent book, “La Regata di Castello o del XX settembre,” by Giorgio Crovato. Too bad it’s only in Italian, it’s crammed with fascinating stuff.
Back to Graziottin. He was a carpenter by trade, who worked in the Arsenal, and was also an ex-NCO of the Italian Navy. He furthermore devised a cure for cholera which saved a couple of hundred lives in the national epidemic of 1886, no small feat when you consider how many cholera epidemics decimated Venice and/or Italy in the nineteenth century (1835-36, 1849, 1854, 1886). He told a Roman reporter that he was known in Venice as the “king of cholera” — sounds funny unless you’ve been through a cholera epidemic, which I haven’t, thank God.
Campo Ruga, where I hope Graziottin would still feel at home, though in his day few people here looked this good.
Most important — and this is where the heroic element comes in — he was Castello’s guiding light, a one-man social services agency who, without any particular qualifications, became the paladin of the poor, of which Venice at the turn of the century had an enormous supply. More than once, the regata’s festivities, apart from fireworks and the regata, included the distribution, organized by Graziottin, of “bread, yellow flour (polenta), and…wine to the poor of Castello.” Which means he had first managed to inspire donations from local merchants, which also impresses me.
Crovato describes him this way (translation by me):
“He is short and swarthy, with an unkempt beard, long hair….without much income and often in need himself, who runs where he sees the need of some social or civic intervention, without any direct political authority, but as defender of the weakest….”
He wrote so many letters to the Gazzettino to publicize his abundant concerns that the paper summed him up as “…a sort of local Garibaldi, who runs wherever there is need, engaged on diverse fronts, especially in the social realm. Honest and ingenuous, and loyal to his country, as a Venetian and an Italian.”
It's wonderful to realize there are people like this; anyone who would hang out the laundry with this degree of attention to detail is far beyond my level.
A man, in short, to whom the phrase “What’s in it for me?” would be incomprehensible, even if spoken in his native language.
In 1888 he wrote a letter to the mayor requesting new clothes for a poor shoemaker who had saved the life of a little girl who had fallen into the canal of Sant’Anna (as it happens, the canal that comes ashore at high tide just outside our door).
On the same day, he alerted the city that the shipyard workers at Sant’ Elena were in imminent danger of losing their jobs.
He got a meeting with the mayor to discuss the dire situation of 70 out-of-work boatmen, suggesting that the schedule for excavating the canals be modified in order to start, say, immediately.
He took four women to Padova to ask the wife of an important politician to intervene on behalf of the women’s husbands, imprisoned for their supposed participation in a sort of rebellion of the porters at the bridge of the Veneta Marina.
The next day he wrote a letter to the newspaper to solicit donations to help a 38-year-old woman with four children whose husband was in jail for homicide. I notice that he didn’t take on the husband’s case, focusing instead on the plight of his destitute family.
He also personally saved more than a hundred people from one life-threatening incident or another.
And on, and on, and on.
Eccentric as he may have been, with his proto-hippie persona buttressed by a blue-collar pragmatism — I picture him as looking something like a cross between Frank Zappa and Rasputin — Graziottin must have gleamed with sincerity and confidence, because people at every level responded. His personal motto, if he’d had time to bother with one, must have been “Get it done.”
The reason I have made room for him in my personal pantheon of heroes (in fact, he made room for himself) is not primarily his energy, or even his successes. It’s his altruism. I can’t express how startling and radiant that is in a city which seems unable to recognize any motive other than “ulterior.” I don’t doubt that the people to whom he appealed may have had many of their own reasons for responding, but I don’t perceive that he had any ambition other than to help people who had nowhere to turn.
I also can’t imagine him answering the numberless cries for help with the by-now ritual responses to problems of any sort or size: “I’ll think about it,” “We don’t have any money,” “I don’t know,” “Probably not,” “I wish I could,” “Maybe next year,” or merely “No.”
If you're out on the street, you know people will be looking at you.
Now we have unions and Facebook and special-interest groups and talk shows and all sorts of ways to make our voices heard, even if they are ignored. But there seems to have been something in Graziottin’s voice that was more effective than your average riot, march, or hunger strike. And compassion fatigue seems never to have set in.
Not to idolize the man, I’m just observing the chasm that separates his view of the world and the orientation of large numbers of people here. Of course there are many who labor to help the needy. I even know some of them. But in general, those who have the power to improve things, even little things, don’t. And those who don’t have the power, they also don’t. There’s always time to complain, though.
Graziottin! Thou should’st be living at this hour:/Venice hath need of thee: she is a fen of stagnant/Waters…..
But there the similarity between Wordsworth’s Milton and our own little Luigi ends. Because while Poet A apotheosizes Poet B on the basis of B’s innate grandeur and magnificence, I would skip the sonnet and send a crate of compliments to Graziottin for his simplicity, integrity, and tenacity.
He could probably also have used a gift certificate to a day spa, which I’d happily include, but I doubt he’d waste his time getting his nails buffed and his beard trimmed. He’d probably give it to somebody who really needed it.
Dawn is one of the few times you can actually see the street.
Sunday afternoon I managed to make a few snaps of the Great Gathering of those Bossi people (I block the scores of puns that surge into my mind), so here they are.
It appears that, in the end, there were more police than potential police patrons.
The organizers claimed that there were 50,000 of the faithful; the police estimated 6-7,000. The difference makes me think of those construction estimates which start on earth but when the job is finished the total cost is lost somewhere in Multiple-Zeroes Land. It’s been like this every year of the past 15 that this event has been staged: the participants want to make it sound as if there are more of them than Attila’s Huns.
The anticipated thunderstorms politely waited till evening.
The floating platform, with the speakers facing inland. It being Sunday, most of the neighborhood was somewhere else. But Bossi was intending mainly to preach to the choir anyway. It was a good day for making money, too: all those tour boats that brought his flock undoubtedly made plenty of crisp crackling euros.
From a distance, this mega-poster looks like it could be just another advertisement, not unlike the billboards around the Piazza San Marco. But instead, it is an image of a cult object (as a perplexed archaeologist might call it): A picture of Monviso, the highest mountain of the Cottian Alps and, more to the point, the source of the Po River. It stirs all sorts of emotions which do not submit to logic.
A few blithe spirits wanting to show their fidelity to the united Italy, which the Northern League wishes to cleave asunder, came out to wave the national flag. Some of the many policemen zooming around came to keep them company -- not to arrest them, but to make sure nobody got close enough to annoy them.Anyone who's ever visited the gift shop of, say, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center and seen the "I Have a Dream" ashtrays knows that there is no idea or emotion so exalted that it can't be turned into tourist trinkets. Here, the stands were selling T-shirts, cigarette lighters, keychains, and potholders, bearing various motifs but concentrating on the symbol of Padania (the Promised Land yet to be found/created).
The emblem of Padania is a mystic symbol which the League calls the "Sun of the Alps" but which is also recognized around the world as the "Flower of Life." Not quite the same thing. I don't know if anybody has commented on its startling resemblance to Cannibis sativa. They must have.
A view of the riva dei Sette Martiri. You must imagine a floating platform where the innocent little sailboat is tied up, and hordes of people ashore. The storm was last year -- so far the sun is still shining.
One of the things I love most about Venice is its voluptuous, velvety silence. Many writers over the past few centuries have commented on this, though they have also commented (as do I) on the noise that is generated during the day by working people, their vehicles, and their voices. But hey, it’s daytime; people are supposed to be working, or at least doing things. “Get out of the house” is always good advice for physical and mental health, except where the mental health of your neighbors might be concerned.
In any case, people used to go home at night and things eventually got quiet.
The novelty in the past few decades is the noise by night. Summer, and now early autumn, is especially prone to nocturnal racket, what with kids zooming around the lagoon, and the city’s canals, in boats with motors of 40, 90, and even more horsepower.
Lino can’t figure it out: “It used to be that the only people who were out at night were fishermen,” he said this morning. “Now it’s everybody.”
Last night the situation took a turn for the worse.
We had already endured the usual nightly yelling and running (and yelling and standing still) of families going up and down the street outside our bedroom window. I’m not saying they ought to be home at 9:00 with the shutters bolted (though it would be nice if they’d do it by midnight). I’m merely saying that stopping to talk with loud voices about things ranging from what they’re going to do tomorrow up to and including their upcoming operation to remove their ovaries (not made up) is tiring and obnoxious. To say nothing of the man somewhere upstairs who, when the lights go off around the neighborhood, takes a handkerchief that must be the size of a tablecloth and begins giving two long honking blows of his nose, separated by a silence of about 18 seconds, followed by two long blows, etc., for way too long. It’s like the foghorn code, except he’s not warning anybody away. We’re stuck here.
I’m not saying he should be forbidden to blow his nose. I’m saying he might consider closing the window. Of course, we could close our window, but that would mean suffocating to death. So maybe closing his window means he would suffocate? Let’s just stop right here. I’m saying he could get some treatment for whatever this condition is, because it can’t be all that enjoyable for him in any case, after the first forty minutes or so.
So what does a certain Umberto Bossi have to do with all this cacophony?
He is the leader of a political party known as the Northern League, whose mission in life is to slag anything and anybody south of the Po River, and to promote the secession of said northern area (the regions of Veneto, Lombardy, and environs) from the rest of Italy. He and his cohorts want to establish a new entity known as Padania, an independent, financially and politically self-sufficient entity, in order to be rid of all of the injustices which a national government inflicts on the productive, honest, disciplined, hard-working, right-thinking northerners.
Unable, so far, to accomplish this goal, he and his cohorts spend most of their time in parliament blocking other parties’ initiatives.
So what do he and his followers have to do with the most-beautiful-city-in-the-world, and Erla’s nightly efforts to slumber?
Because every September he stages a huge rally here. Why here? Because the Po River, the aforementioned geographical and emotional frontier between Us and Them, flows into the sea not far away, and because Venice is the greatest stage set imaginable, perfect for publicity. You can’t imagine a serious rally being put on in, say, Rovigo, though they do have a very nice stadium.
This rally draws the faithful from all over, who come to hear his incendiary speechifying, and to witness his emptying of a flask of Po River water into the Lagoon. Great theatre, though I still don’t quite grasp its meaning. From 1600 to 1604, the Venetians cut the Po in half to send it southward; if it had continued to debouch into the Lagoon, by now Venice would be sitting in the middle of cornfields. But this is a detail. The Po belongs to Bossi and he wants to bring it to Venice.
So yesterday, in the build-up to today’s Big Event, there were clashes between groups demonstrating against Mr. Bossi and his League and the police who were trying to contain their destructive enthusiasm.
And last night, at about 3:30 (when silence was, in fact, reigning over our streets and canals), we were all blasted awake by a new and appalling noise.
A motorboat was going down the canal with an amplifying system brought from some exploded star. And it was playing music: “Faccetta Nera,” a marching song adopted by the Fascists (though it predates them), full of racist and colonialist overtones. Everybody over the age of two — even I, by now — know that it is hugely incorrect politically to play “Faccetta Nera” or any of its companions such as “Giovinezza” (Youth).
But there it was, ripping the night asunder a mere five steps from our front door. It faded away as the boat proceeded, presumably in a tour around most, if not all, of the city. But I wasn’t sure. I lay there awake for a while expecting it — them — to come back, thinking about how glad I am that whoever these people might be have the right to make so many people miserable. Democracy is indeed a great thing.
This morning, a sunny Sunday, the streets around here are full of police and carabinieri in riot gear, waiting to form up and get to work. Lino begged me not to make photographs, so I didn’t.
The enormous floating platform with its banners and podium, is tied up, as usual, at the riva dei Sette Martiri, between Arsenal and the Giardini. Police helicopters are rumbling around overhead. But I know at least some people are happy. Two bakeries are open — something unheard-of on a normal Sunday — because they also sell snacks and cold drinks, and the faithful are going to really need these items, especially if they do a lot of shouting.
“Non tutti i mali vengono per nuocere,” as the saying goes: It’s an ill wind that blows no good.
Perhaps the promised thunderstorms will indeed strike this afternoon. They would ruin the regata at Burano, true, but it could be worth it, to wash away all this detritus.
