I have been very lax in updating our assorted adventures in assorted boats, and I apologize, but adventuring does take so much time and energy.
But I promise to give you a full account sometime next week — not long after our return from our next adventure.
Hint: Both adventures involve going to Turkey with two gondolas. And rowing them there, obviously. With four Turkish men (not so obviously, but the world is an amazing place and anyway, the Turks had just as many galleys as Venice did, in the old days, which by itself means they also had rowers, even if a lot of them were Christian slaves. Sorry, but there it is).
Both adventures require a huge shout-out to His Excellency Gianpaolo Scarante, the Italian Ambassador to Turkey, and his wife, Barbara, who raises the concept of “indefatigable” beyond any known scale of measurement. They are the reason we’re there, so I want to do my very best.
In late May, we went to a city named Eskesehir, which I discovered is a very important place indeed, not least for its being the homeland of meerschaum. (I’d never given much thought to meerschaum mines, but they’re all around that part of Turkey.) We rowed our two gondolas on the Porsuk river in a pair of races with the Turkish rowers.
In Eskesehir, the first race mixed the crews, as you can immediately detect here. The second race pitted a Venetian crew against a Turkish crew. A good time was had by all.
Now we’re headed to Istanbul, to row our gondolas across the Bosphorus. (I love saying that — it’s like saying “I’ll walk across the parking lot to the dry cleaner.”) We’ll be gone till the 19th; the event itself is on July 17, and is part of a very large and important amateur open-water swimming race called the “Bosphorus Cross-Continental Competition.” The swimmers start from the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus and finish on the European side. So will we, but an hour earlier.
We’re due to form up, as we did in May, with two Turks and two Venetians per boat (I’m operating under a Venetian alias, as you know), and race 2000 meters across the mythical strait between Kuleli and Kurucesme. I’m acting as if I know what that means; even though I’ve located them on the map, the scope of all this still hasn’t really reached me.
I do know that the fact that this is the first year of gondola participation, with Turkish rowers, has created no little enthusiasm — they are planning to install GPS’s on the gondolas so the race can be broadcast live on national Turkish television.
So there will be silence in BlogWorld here until I get back. Probably followed by a tremendous racket.
It wasn’t the newspaper, it was the “I see you but I do not respond” glance that cried “New York” to me. Then he asked/told me not to take any more pictures, which is pure Venice. Not because people are rude, but because in a small town which millions of people visit every year primarily — it seems — to take pictures, sometimes a line has to be drawn.
Whenever I find myself with some Venetian for the first time, and for whatever reason I mention that I used to live in New York, the person almost always seems slightly startled, then makes some remark along the lines of “Boy, Venice must seem really small/different/strange/minuscule/quarklike” to you.
At first glance, it might in fact seem that the fabled Large Malus domestica (pop. 8,175,133 and growing) would have nothing at all in common with the equally fabled Most Serene Republic (at the moment down to 60,052 and shrinking).
On the other hand, this glance, from the doorkeeper at the Porta della Carta of the Doge’s Palace, says “I see you, but you look just like everybody else until you say or do something that requires me to react.” This would be Venetian, where one of the major energy-saving tactics is not merely turning off the lights in empty rooms, but not responding until you actually have to. Otherwise you’ll never make it to closing time.
But I have always felt right at home here, because — as I tell the person, startling her or him even more — there is an amazing number of ways in which Venice and New York appear to be like those twins that get separated five minutes after birth and years later turn up to have both married women named Clotilde on the same day and have vacation cabins on Lake Muskoka.
Speaking of twins, I’ve never quite understood that whole business of twinning cities. Not because I don’t grasp that both partners desire thereby to undertake commercial adventures together, but because the partnerships often seem so odd.
The other places are frequently the same grade of innocuous as the one you’re entering, which makes sense, I suppose. I mean, you’d never see “Toad Suck/Beijing.” Naturally there are exceptions to what seems like an obvious rule; Rome/Paris makes sense, but Rome/Multan, Pakistan is a bit more obscure. Or there are less glamorous but equally curious combinations (Seattle/Tashkent), on down to the level of Torviscosa/Champ-sur-Drac. Well, as long as they’re happy.
Venice has formally twinned itself with 15 cities; the link is fairly clear with St. Petersburg (seaport cities with canals), though the link with Islamabad is a bit harder to discern. It might have been clever (only to me, of course) to have twinned Venice with every town named Venice, or which bills itself as “the Venice of” wherever it is.
There are 19 “Venice of the North”s, and a remarkable amount of so-called “Venice of the such-and-such” strewn around the world at other compass points: South (Johannesburg; Tawi-Tawi island), East (Alappuzha, India; Bangkok; Melaka River, Malaysia), China (Wuzhen), and so on. There are four American towns named Venice, one each in Florida, California, Illinois, Utah. (Venetia, Pennsylvania, doesn’t count, though I give it special points for historical interest.) Surprisingly, there are many more towns in the US named Verona.
These are not the Sharks or the Jets, though there may well be a girl named Maria in the group. They’re just teenagers on their way to school and as such could basically fit in anywhere.
Back to the Ur-Venice and its resemblance to New York. I’ve made a little hobby of collecting points of similarity, as I come across them, and in no particular order, here are some of the most obvious examples:
* They are both seaport cities.
* They are (or have been) economic colossi. The wealth of Venice was something inconceivable today, unless we’re thinking of that tiny top percentage of people who own everything. Not long ago an Indian tycoon staged his daughter’s wedding here; it went on for three days and cost, it was reported, something like 10 million euros ($14 million). He would have fit right in with the Pisanis and Corners (and Rockefellers and Carnegies.)
* They both have a long history of many coexisting (more or less happily) ethnic communities.
* Housing/real estate is a major issue, both regarding cost (exorbitant) and space (cramped). In either city you can as safely launch a conversation with a stranger on the problems of housing as you can on the weather.
* They are both populated by complainers; not the ordinary type, but those special inhabitants who belong to the category in which, according to the famous quip about New Yorkers, “Everybody mutinies but nobody deserts.”
“Dez (heart) Ruez I love you for all of my life.” The sentiment is universal and, regrettably, so is the urge to express it in a form that’s really, really hard to remove. I have no doubt that they have long since broken up, married other people, and gotten divorced by now. But it is a sign of normal life in cities large and small, watery or not.
* Everybody notices each other and plenty of things about each other, though it may not seem so. The minute you step into the subway train, everybody will have evaluated you in a hundred instant ways, starting with your potential for being dangerous and ending (perhaps) with your choice of shoes. I thought I was invisible here in the early days, which Lino thought was hilarious. I’d only been here a week when he said, “Everybody already knows everything about you.” I let that slide, till one day I ran into one of the few people I knew, who lived far away on the Giudecca. “I saw you rowing in the caorlina last Saturday afternoon,” he told me. It seemed like a friendly remark, except that having been seen by somebody I hadn’t seen at all gave me a tiny shudder. And made me realize that nobody is invisible here, and never has been.
* Pride: New Yorkers refer to themselves as living in “The City”; no need for further identification. With many more centuries of experience at this, Venetians by now don’t even do that. It’s so obvious that being Venetian is the best that there is no need to mention it.
I realized this the day I struck up a conversation in Rimini with a couple who said they were from Venice. I asked the normal follow-up question: “Oh? Where do you live?” (As in: Cannaregio, Campo Ruga, near the Accademia, etc.) A split second of hesitation, and the wife answered, “We live in Castelfranco Veneto.” Castelfranco Veneto is a small town (pop. 33,707) 40 miles/64 km from Venice.
Here’s the thing: I knew they didn’t live in Venice by the faintly self-satisfied way in which they had said it. People in Venice don’t say it that way, just as New Yorkers don’t brag about living in New York. If you live there, you already know you’re in the best place in the world; there’s no need to rivet exclamation points all around it.
* They’re not for everybody. This is the strongest link of all between the two cities. Living in either city is a vocation, a calling, a challenge, a Zen conundrum. Living here, as in New York, requires a complex combination of skills (physical, emotional, intellectual) and predilections (history, humor, remembering the names of people’s children) that frankly don’t suit everybody.
Guys like Queequeg here are one of the main forces that keep Venice going. I’m sure he has a brother or a cousin in New York, with or without tattoos and tank top. Attitude is the tie that binds.
“It’s great to visit, but I could never live here,” almost everybody says about New York. I’ve almost never heard it said of Venice, though it’s not unusual to hear someone say “It must be so wonderful to live here.” Tourists have been so brainwashed by publicity and postcards that they don’t believe it’s real and don’t even want it to be. And they’re here for so short a time, they don’t usually have the chance to be disillusioned, unless something bad happens.
That, probably, is one of the main mileposts at which Venice and New York diverge. Things go wrong in New York (barring homicide, etc.) and visitors regard it as either inevitable or picturesque, the stuff of stories forever. If something goes wrong here, people get mad, as if they’d been baited-and-switched.
No bait here.
These friends could easily be standing on a corner in New York, except that here they’re probably not talking about the point spread, but what to have for lunch.
I hope nobody has told him people are expecting to spend an intimate evening with him. He'd be in for a shock.
There’s not much I can say about the poster on the trash can near the “Giardini” vaporetto stop.
Of course that’s not true. I could say all sorts of things, but there are two main observations that it inspires, which is why I’m mentioning it.
First: Once again, as at the festa the other night, it’s written in English. I guess they don’t believe any non-English-speaking Italians/Venetians/miscellaneous foreigners are going to be interested. Or they don’t want non-English-speaking I/V/mfs coming to this event, even if they did happen to be interested.
Or maybe it’s in English because there’s not enough space on the poster for “nan yon aswe entim ak ekselans nan” or “ng isang kilalang-kilala na gabi na may ang quintessential” or even “একটি বিশুদ্ধ সঙ্গে অন্তরঙ্গ সন্ধ্যায়.”
Second: It’s not that it promotes a mere concert.
It’s going to be “an intimate evening” with James Taylor in the Piazza San Marco, a event which, on the intimacy scale, certainly beats the stuffing out of Bobby Short at the Carlyle, Sally Bowles at the Kit Kat Klub, or Noel Coward anywhere.
The Piazza San Marco cannot in any way be made to look, sound, or feel intimate, any more than can Beaver Stadium in State College, Pennsylvania, which it resembles more than you might think. Go Nittany Lions.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the next time you want to savor an intimate evening with your personal heartthrob, you should plan a candlelight dinner in the Piazza San Marco. If the racetrack at Belmont isn’t available, I mean.
Sweet Baby James is going to have to work some kind of magic to keep this intimate. Or even quintessential.
When the sunlight looks like this, it's time for the party to start.
The dust has now settled on the festa of San Piero de Casteo and everyone is recovering (or not) from the toil, excitement, racket, and nearly suffocating odors of frying fish and charring ribs.
Fine as all this may be, it used to be, in many ways, even better. Lino Penzo, president of the Remiera Casteo (our very local rowing club), was born in the next campo over, an open space named Campo Ruga. And he remembers it the old way.
“There wasn’t anything here,” he said, looking at the stretch of grass in front of the church. The party was in Campo Ruga where, to hear him tell it, as many people lived as in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Families everywhere. Kids everywhere. Drama without any pause for station identification. “We used to put cushions on the windowsill,” Lino said, “and just watch what was going on outside. It was like the theatre, it never stopped.”
There was the day a certain man went across to the osteria to drink some wine. Evidently his wife expressed the opinion that he was doing this far too often, so he locked her in the house and went anyway. So she fixed up a bedsheet and let herself down through the window. I don’t know if she chased him around the campo brandishing a rolling pin, but I can imagine it.
And there was a woman whose nerves would give out whenever there was a fight in the family (evidently she preferred the “flight” option of the famous pair of possibilities), and she’d suddenly go into a swoon. Everybody knew this, so when anybody heard the sound of nearby strife the men in the cafe would put out a chair for her. They knew she’d be needing it to fall onto, sooner or later, so they got ready.
And there were shops everywhere. The series of doors we see today, many of them shut forever, belonged to a collection of every enterprise necessary for human life. Two (two!) bakeries, fruit and vegetable vendors, a butcher, a cheese and milk shop, a cobbler, probably also an undertaker, though he didn’t mention it. I don’t remember the rest, but they were all there. You didn’t have to go more than 20 steps from home to buy everything you needed. As in most Venetian neighborhoods, going to San Marco was unknown, mainly because it was pointless. This was the world.
This is Campo Ruga on a typical morning. True, there are usually people traversing it on their way to hither and to yon, but the lone trattoria is now the only reason to stop. We just have to imagine this with a few thousand people in it, night and day, like every other campo used to be.
As for the festa, it was celebrated in the campo, and involved mostly eating. Long tables were set up, where everyone sat and ate tons — “tons” — of bovoleti, and sarde in saor, and other traditional Venetian food.
Eventually one day somebody suggested moving over to the big empty grassy area in front of the church, and put up a little stand with some food. From there, the festa just got bigger and bigger, and ultimately never went back to Campo Ruga.
So now we have live music and big balloons and grilled animals and gondola rides, and a big mass with the patriarch, and even a cake competition. It’s like the county fair, without quilts.
I wish I could know what she was telling him. Whatever it was, he was paying attention. Obviously he hadn't yet been crazed by sugar, fat, and all the stuff the other kids had.Greta was creating with the concentration of an icon-painter. Evidently knowing her creation was going to be gone tomorrow had no importance whatever. She's obviously destined for greatness.
There was a lot of this going on. It was great.
One man was producing these tumuli of french fries, but it took four people to study the numbered bits of paper to figure out which desperate customer got the next boxful.
This lone woman stood over vats of boiling spaghetti like the Delphic oracle, and after five nights of this she could probably have made a few prophecies herself.The last ray of light in a dying universe will be the gleam of the cell phone of a teenage girl.
This useful sign may look completely at home here, except for one thing. Why isn't it in Italian? If they'd wanted to look really cool, they ought to have written it in Latvian. DARBINIEKIEM TIKAI. That certainly would have gotten people's attention..
