My personal account of living real life in real Venice, and more
A few days ago I was expatiating on the nature of trash/biological refuse disposal here. Or lack thereof.
One reader who shares my outlook on many things was moved to send me the following photo she made of one means of poop-disposal left by a Neanderthal somewhere in her ambit. Not her back yard, I’m pretty sure.
We mustn’t begin to smile at these things. But then again.
I see that Punxsutawney Phil has spoken, and the utterance (you have to imagine it) comes out as “Early spring.”
Here, on this Very Same Day, we also have prognostications. But we don’t consult just any old random mammal — we go for the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Seeing as February 2 is the Feast of the Purification of the aforementioned BVM (meaning no disrespect), and seeing that candles have somehow become involved in this observance over the centuries (I’d tell you why but I don’t have time to check right now), the day is also called Candlemas. Here, specifically, it’s called Candelora. It sounds like a detergent of some sort, but it’s not.
The Venetian doggerel of the day goes:
De la Madonna Candelora
del inverno semo fora
se xe piova o xe vento
del inverno semo dentro.
(It’s the Madonna Candelora and we’re out of winter; if there’s rain or wind, we’re still in winter. Hey, it rhymes.)
In other words, we’d be getting six more weeks of winter if the BVM doesn’t see her shadow.
Today, the sun is blazing down as if to say “Take that!” to everybody who has spent the last two months whingeing about fog, rain, and freezing cold.
I’ll take it! I’ll take it!
As you know from many situations which I have described ( even if I cannot explain them), the indigenous people inhabiting our little lobe of Venice have their own way of doing things. The most mundane things, I mean — not things which are exceptionally demanding intellectually or morally. Not things which require Deep Thought, or Serious Reflection, or even sneaking a peek at the answers at the end of the chapter. Things which I, in my own small way, consider obvious, seem to present impossible complications to a certain sort of person here.
I never see these people, of course, but they leave their unavoidable traces. Or their dogs leave the traces for them. All over.
Here are a few brief examples of the cultural development of some individuals here — either whole clans of them, or only a few who are at it 20 hours a day.
Consider (briefly) dog poop. There are responsible owners who responsibly retrieve it and place it in a little plastic bag and tie a very tight knot, just the way they’re supposed to.
Then they drop the bag on the ground and walk away. These abandoned little bags can sit around for days, waiting for some garbageman to consider them garbage. But hey. You’re supposed to clean up after your canine? Done and done.
Some dog-owners defend this practice by pointing out that there are no containers in which to deposit these daily objects. I’m not defending them, but this is true. So it means that the municipal garbage-and-trash-collecting system is to blame for unpleasant trash?
Not at all! There’s a reason why you can’t find a single trash bin between the vaporetto stop at San Pietro di Castello and the Ponte de la Veneta Marina all the way at the end of via Garibaldi, a distance of 3,031 feet (924 meters), or more than half a mile.
The reason is that the trash bins were removed because the specimens of citizens we’re examining here were using the bins for their bags of kitchen/domestic/ personal garbage here, which is totally against the law. And also kind of crazy.
Why this is crazy is because residents pay a tax for trash removal based on the dimensions of their dwelling and the number of people living there. They have to pay it whether or not they ever put out so much as a beer can to be taken away. So what could possibly be the point of carrying your garbage somewhere outside, probably under cover of darkness, maybe even in the rain or snow flurries or blasts of the simoom, to leave it somewhere else?
Forget the bins, whether they exist or not. This species of person leaves their bag of garbage (this is important, but you can skip ahead if you want) anywhere and everywhere the spirit moves them. Like on a step halfway (halfway!) up a bridge on a Saturday afternoon, where they know it will rest until Monday morning. Or putting it outside their door at night (also forbidden) when acqua alta is due to come ashore and float the bag around the neighborhood for a while.
The knowing, the seeing, the caring about it, all this shorts out their mental circuits faster than you can blow a fusebox.
Up until a few decades ago, many Venetians tended to throw their trash into the canals and let the tide deal with it. That was the simplest method of all, because all you had to remember was gravity. Every so often you can still hear an anonymous, furtive splash.
But sometimes they make me laugh.
This morning we went to pick up a batch of the free paper bags the city provides to contain paper to be recycled (pickup Tuesday and Friday). Paper bags to contain paper. Retain this thought, tricky as it may be.
The same little distribution point also gives out labels to stick onto the plastic bag into which you have stuffed items made of glass, metal, or plastic (pickup Wednesday and Saturday).
The labels say (in Italian, obviously): GLASS PLASTIC CANS. Not heroic hexameters, not any sentence by William Faulkner. Just that.
“But there are people who take the paper bags,” the man giving out the bags and labels this morning told me, “and put the labels on them.”
When we, and a few others waiting their turn, stopped laughing, I thought it over.
Italy, at 98.9 percent, ranks as 47th on the literacy scale of 180 countries, so I’m assuming that reading isn’t an obstacle. So that’s out.
It’s true that you could easily put glass, plastic and cans into a paper bag for disposal. But that’s like the people who throw out their paper to be recycled by stuffing it into a plastic bag.
It’s two ideas that are mismatched socks: Each one fine by itself, but they don’t belong together. And while you can close your eyes and pretend you’re not wearing socks of different colors, there’s no way you can pretend that plastic in a paper bag makes any kind of recycling sense.
But as an example of an overwhelming sense of inertia, it’s excellent.
Days — and I suppose nights — can become as routine (fancy way of saying “monotonous”) here in the most-beautiful-city-in-the-world as they can in Tick Bite, North Carolina, or wherever the daily round has worn a groove into your Day Planner, however gorgeous the surroundings may be.
I love January here for many reasons, and one of the big ones is that nobody else seems to. Which is to say that almost all the tourists are dormant somewhere, with the kids in school and the budget busted by Christmas and Crisis, and dark coming on early and so on.
Exhibit A: The #1 vaporetto on the Grand Canal last Friday morning. In a month or so, Carnival will be here, and if you can find a way to force yourself into the crush on every vehicle in the city then I admire your spinal cord, or your love of your fellow man, or your skill with a flooring chisel or Irish shovel, or whatever. I would gladly supply a photograph of this inescapable fact of life here, but I never use the vaporettos during Carnival, except maybe at dawn.
And not long after that, the Tourist Season will be declared open, and the vaporettos will become troop transports loaded with brigades of touristic infantry loaded with all their battle gear — suitcases, duffel bags, backpacks, strollers, children and dogs. If there were a way for them to bring their pet guppy to Venice, people would do that too.
So this scene, which may look to you like just a lot of plastic seats, is a Thing of Beauty because those seats are empty. This vision is so rare and wonderful that it’s almost worth getting on the #1 to go nowhere for no reason just so you can savor it, like a 1997 Brunello di Montalcino, but for a lot less money.
This time of year doesn’t call to mind mere metaphors involving food and drink. The real thing is at hand.
Last Saturday I was in a big supermarket on the Lido and came upon this heavenly vision of something wonderful about Carnival, the quintessential Carnival pastry. You can get the same items in pastry shops, naturally, for more money, naturally, but the important thing is, they’re here. The galani have returned, like the migrating monarch butterflies landing in Milwaukee.
As you see, there is freedom of expression in naming this delicacy, whether baked or fried. “Galani,” “crostoli,” (CROSS-toh-lee) and “chiacchiere” (KYAK-er-eh) all translate as “irresistible and addictive slices of fat and sugar.” Historically, you are allowed to begin eating these any time after Epiphany, right up to Ash Wednesday. Some culturally degraded but economically advanced vendors continue to sell them during Lent, but they must be related to the C.D. but E.A. vendors who sell Carnival masks and hats all year long. There is something odd about seeing teenagers wearing big plush multi-colored harlequin hats in August, but hey. It’s no odder than seeing people selling them. Venice must be the city where selling was invented.
As for the galani, I resist buying them. But it’s entirely possible that I will give in at some point and spend an afternoon making a batch of these crunchy morsels. I did it last year for the first time and boy, was that a mistake. We ate them all in two days. True, I could make just half a batch, but that seems unpleasantly intelligent. Why eat only three pieces of something that’s bad for you?
Don’t answer that. It was a rhetorical question.
