We’ve been having fog of various densities and persistence over the past – I’d have to check, it seems like a month or so. Or year. A long time, anyway. And the predictions are for more.
“How romantic,” I hear you thinking. And I agree. Fog can be hauntingly lovely here, all drifting shapes and softening colors and the complete evaporation of the horizon.
What you can't make out in this picture, along with most of via Garibaldi, are two special fog components: A tenacious southwest wind to sharpen the vapor's edge on your skin, and the many different sizes of drops which fall against your face as you walk.
But if you need to move beyond the visual and into the practical, fog can be a pain in the gizzard. Acqua alta may get all the emotional publicity, but I can tell you that acqua from above, in the form of atmospheric condensation, can be just as inconvenient. I suppose nobody makes the same sort of fuss about it because fog doesn’t come into your house. Or shop.
The vaporetto stop. Not a very promising panorama.
Example: Yesterday morning I was forced to abandon my plan to go to Torcello to meet somebody for an interview (assuming I do, or do not, succeed in re-scheduling said meeting, I will explain who, what and why in another post).
Like many plans — Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, say, or New Coke — it looked perfect on paper. Take the #52 vaporetto at 8:10 to the Fondamente Nove, change to the LN line at 8:40, change to the Torcello line at 9:35, and faster than you can recite the Gettysburg Address, I’d be there. Actually, you’d have to recite it 36 times; door to door requires an hour and a half, but I don’t mind. It’s a beautiful trip, assuming you can see where you’re going.
There's a church over there with a big bell tower. Trust me.
But once again, I discovered — standing there without a Plan B — that the real problem isn’t the fog itself, but the way the ACTV, the transport company, deals with it. The ACTV seems to have wandered beyond a reasonable concern for public safety and into the realm of phobia: “An irrational, intense, and persistent fear of certain situations, activities, things, animals, or people.” I don’t think the ACTV has a fear of animals. Otherwise, fog fits the phobic bill. The solution? According to the dictionary, “The main symptom of this disorder is the excessive and unreasonable desire to avoid the feared stimulus.” In this case, fog.
But the ACTV exists to be outdoors. Much as it might wish the case to be otherwise, it can’t function anywhere else. And more to the point, by now almost all the boats have radar. Yet it seems that the the more radar the company installs, the less willing the company is to trust it.
May I note that there were a good number of people out rowing in the fog yesterday morning, on their way to a boating event at Rialto. I myself have been out rowing in the lagoon with a compass, as has Lino, as have plenty of people. Lino rowed home one time in a fog so thick he couldn’t see the bow of his boat. Just to give you some idea of what is, in fact, feasible.
The board continued to display the vaporetto numbers and their expected arrival times. I stood there and watched the times change as no vehicles passed. When Venice finally sinks beneath the waves, all that will be visible above the surface will be the angel atop the belltower of San Marco, and a board on which the vaporetto departure times will continue to advance.
In yesterday’s case, all the vaporettos were, as usual, re-routed up and down the Grand Canal, even those — like the one I wanted — which normally circumnavigate the city’s perimeter. If I’d known in time that the fog was that thick out in the lagoon (as it wasn’t, outside our hovel), I wouldn’t have walked all the way over to the vaporetto stop at San Pietro di Castello. Because once I realized that the boat wasn’t coming, it was too late to activate the most reasonable solution: Walking to the Fondamente Nove to get the boat to Burano. Although there again, even if service were maintained to the outer reaches of the lagoon, it would almost certainly have been on a limited schedule. Like, say, once an hour.
Pause for the sound of the perfect plan drifting out to sea, and the first stifled shriek of the day.
Fog does show the spiderwebs to their best advantage. There is that.
I can’t understand several things. If the boats have radar, why does it not inspire confidence in its operators? And more to the point, if the vaporetto captains can manage to navigate along the shoreline and up the Grand Canal, with or without radar, why could they not, by the same token, circumnavigate the city? The route outside takes them just as close to the shoreline as it does inside — in other words, whichever route they take, they’re not exactly out on the high seas, but within eyeshot of any palaces or pilings or any other landmark that they need to keep track of.
Once again, my sense of logic has run aground in a falling tide on the mudbanks of municipal management.
But one last question: If the city (and by extension, its transport company) is so willing to confront a temporary meteorological situation (fog) with the attitude, “Suck it up, people,” why has it not been willing to confront another temporary meteorological situation (acqua alta) with the same panache?
Answers do suggest themselves, but they are cynical answers, composed of bitter little thoughts about human nature. Best to leave them unexpressed.
If you've ever wondered what "It is what it is" might look like, this is an excellent illustration. All those women have long since accepted the fact that their laundry is going to be wetter by noon than it was when they hung it out.
Note to people flying, not floating, yesterday. I’m sorry if your flight was delayed. I realize that flying in fog is stupid and dangerous. But slowly driving a boat in fog, hugging the shoreline, isn’t.
But as I say, if you don't have to drive or fly in it, the fog does have a certain fascination.
To be fair, it’s not just Venice: It’s all of Italy.
Brace yourselves, because I’ve got some news. At the post office today I noticed a sign giving the new postage rates.
To mail a postcard — not your novel, not the story of your life — a measly little postcard, from Italy to the U S and A now costs 1 euro and 60 cents.
Not only is that double the previous rate (already high, in my opinion), it is the equivalent of $2.08.
Two dollars and eight cents for one (1) stamp to mail one (1) postcard.
The woman at the window told me that it wasn’t Italy that shot the rates into outer space, it was My Country, ‘Tis of Thee. I have no idea how these things work, but I do know what it feels like to knock your elbow against the edge of the door, and this is like that.
What I hear now is the sound of text messages and e-mails flying around the stratosphere bringing greetings from your Italian vacation to Aunt Bertha, your twin sister, your niece, your dog. What I also hear is the sound of postcards not being sold, and stamps not being sold, at least to Americans.
You had to know, and better now than later. Now you can plan to spend the money you would have paid for stamps and postcards on something else. Like buying a house. Or a horse.
So we have all somehow managed to hack our way out of the calorie-entangled canebrake of the holidays, and you might suppose that now we would all return to our lairs for three months of hibernation before thinking about going out and rowing around.
Maybe some people hibernate, but for the past 33 years, the rowing club “Voga Veneta Mestre” has rousted everyone who is roustable to come out on the earliest possible Sunday in January to form a boat procession, or corteo, in the Grand Canal. This undertaking is known by the homespun title of the Prima Vogada dell’Anno, or the first row of the year.
A snippet of rainbow as we all wait to get going: Blue and white of the Settemari club, blue and gold of the Voga Veneta Lido, red and white of the Club Ponte dei Sartori.
Of course people already have been rowing this year, your correspondent included. But the motivation for this event isn’t merely rowing, but rowing with the purpose of Doing a Good Deed. The corteo ends at the nursing home at San Lorenzo, behind the church of San Giorgio dei Greci, where the Mestre club prepares a festive sort of party/lunch/scrum, cooking a vat of pasta e fagioli, bringing useful gifts, and providing plenty of loud and cheerful talking and singing to entertain the inmates — sorry, I meant residents.
Quadruple parking as the early-arrivers wait for everybody else: purple and white of the club San Polo dei Nomboli, blue and orange of Voga Veneta Mestre, and a random blue-garbed man from the Querini.
I have only gone once to this climactic phase of the morning. We usually just keep rowing in order to make it home at a decent hour, so I can’t tell you much about the denouement.
But I can tell you that I think the Prima Vogada dell’Anno is one of the best little boating exploits in the whole year because it has absolutely no public relations value whatever, no touristic or fancy-poster or let’s-find-a-sponsor or we-have-no-money or who-shot-John or any other of the aspects that often begrime waterborne events here. There are just too dang many situations in which floating Venetians are used as decoration to provide some kind of folkloristic color to somebody else’s hoedown. And God forbid that the event should be televised — then they tell you where you have to go and how long to stay there, even if you had come with the quaint notion of being a participant and not merely some kind of anonymous oar-carrier.
So the great thing here is that it’s Just Us Folks, and if the weather is raw and foggy, which it was on Sunday and still is today (the foghorns are blowing as I write), all the better. There are fewer people out to snap pictures, and the fog makes all the colors of the boats and their rowers’ track suits really come alive.
A simple sandolo from San Polo dei Nomboli standing by, hanging onto us. As you see, the Christmas Forcola has finally gotten out of the house and back to work.
So the boats gather, in the usual disorderly way, between the train station and Piazzale Roma. Rowers wave to each other, call out mildly rude comments, check their cell phones for messages, and so on till the caravan moves out at 10:00.
There is relatively little traffic at that time on a fuzzy winter Sunday morning, so we have the Grand Canal pretty much to ourselves.
Wherever we are at the beginning is not usually where we are at the end. Lino likes to be near the front of any corteo, and rarely resists the temptation to perform all kinds of tiny, deft and seemingly impossible maneuvers to sneak past the other boats one by one and get ahead.
Gianni Bullo in the bow of his caorlina before the start. Perhaps he's rethinking his repertoire. ("Should I start with 'Un Bel Di?' Nah, let's just see what happens.")
I’ll never forget how vastly he entertained himself one night a few years ago in a corteo for Carnival. The boats were all kind of mashed together in the semi-dark and we found ourselves wedged in behind a gondola of the Francescana club, rowed by four men. Giorgio Fasan was standing on the stern; he, like Lino on our 8-oar gondola, was the captain and steersman of the boat. At that time he was already very old but he was still as irrepressible as, I gather, he had always been, and still just as capable.
And we're off. Generally speaking. No rush.
Lino, as always, was so perfectly in control of our boat, and so alert to everything and everyone around him (it’s long since become instinctive), that he decided to break the monotony by annoying Giorgio. So we inched up behind Giorgio’s gondola, and with an imperceptible push on his oar Lino gave his gondola a little nudge against the stern.
Normally everybody tries to avoid touching, knocking against, running into, or otherwise coming into contact with other boats. Which means Giorgio wasn’t expecting his boat to move for any reason other than whatever he or his crew were doing. Lino’s little push, however, made his gondola unexpectedly begin to veer off-course, to the right.
"Mestrina," the 14-oar gondola and flagship of the Voga Veneta Mestre fleet, moves to the head of the corteo, as is only right and proper.
Therefore Giorgio’s natural reaction was to start yelling at the man rowing in the prow, who he assumed was to blame for this deviation by having given a stroke that was just a little too hard.
“Why are you rowing?” he shouted. “Can’t you see we don’t want to go right? Tira acqua!” (A counter-stroke that would have corrected the situation.)
I bet Lino nudged that gondola at least five times, just to watch Giorgio get more flustered and more mad — and of course, to listen to the exchanges between Giorgio and his supposedly incompetent but completely innocent crew member, which became increasingly warm.
Lino thought it was hilarious and I did too, I have to admit. Childish? Sure. But I also thought it was pretty cool that he was able to pull it off, and it was so much the sort of thing I could imagine them all doing when they were all canal-rats together that I knew it wasn’t malicious. Giorgio never did figure out what had happened. He’s been rowing angels around the heavenly canals for several years now, but I bet he’s still blaming that guy in the bow.
Nothing like that happened on Sunday, though. People stuck to the business at hand, Lino included, though after we passed under the Rialto Bridge, Gianni Bullo, in the bow of a caorlina from the Canottieri Mestre, suffered some sort of attack of euphoria (“rapture of the Rialto”?), and began singing snatches of a song, or maybe several. Maybe he thought other people would join in — it happens sometimes, which is really nice. He was happy, though, and that’s something that always sounds good, though in his case it sounded better from a distance.
Me, I was savoring the boat-music, the sound of us swooshing along, and the boats around us also swooshing, each producing its own special swoosh-notes according to the size and shape and weight of the boat, not to mention the size, shape and weight of its rowers. For once the main sound in the Grand Canal was not the snarling of taxi and barge and vaporetto motors, but just the water and the oars and the air combining in their own rhythmic, convivial, completely unorchestrated a cappella chorus.
I don’t think these guys, including Gianni Bullo, could possibly sing any song at the nursing home that would be more wonderful than that.
Coming out of the Grand Canal into the Bacino of San Marco, the boats tend to wander away from each other, becoming less of a procession and more of a small herd.
Virtually every day of every year, the news here will include some mention of how deeply disappointing the municipal government is, and the many ways in which its decisions (bear in mind that not deciding also qualifies as a decision) fall short of the minimum necessary for decent human life.
I’m not here to defend anybody, but history shows that Venice has always presented an exceptional challenge to its rulers.
Beautiful? Often. Byzantine? Always.
Giving some consideration, as I do every day, as to how run a city and/or empire in the most efficient and beneficial way — principles that can easily be applied to other activities, such as running a house, or a large corporation, or a work-release program or whatever — I thought I’d give a sample of some of the laws which the Venetian government passed and also, I think, enforced.
In 1348 Venice, with more than 100,000 inhabitants, was the most populous city in Europe. Even before it grew that big, managing it, body and soul, was something like playing three-dimensional chess — its governing bodies had to keep track of everything (wars, famines, earthquakes, attempted coups, plague prevention, counterfeiting, ostentatious clothing, civil servants with sticky fingers) all at the same time.
Naturally they passed metric tons of useful laws governing business and commerce, goods and services, civil engineering projects, weights and measures, and the rights, duties and privileges of virtually everybody. These are not comic material, they’re the reason, among many, why Venice survived for close to 1,500 years.
But as anyone who has ever been two years old knows, it’s one thing to establish a rule, it’s another to enforce it, most especially where behavior is concerned. Passing a law makes everybody happy; enforcing it, not so much.
So as you read the following, cast your minds back, ever so briefly, to imagine the situation which had reached the point at which a law was required to control, or even stop it, we hope. As you’ll see, all those squillions of different snowflake-patterns are nothing compared to the myriad misdemeanors that people are apt to get up to when living in a small area with thousands of other people, many of whom may not have your best interests at heart. Or you theirs.
But also bear in mind that most, if not all, other European governments between 421 and 1797 A.D. were some variation on monarchy or despotry. Venice was governed, not by an individual, but by groups of people, groups which had been formed over time not merely to do a particular job but to ensure that other groups didn’t get the upper hand. This checks-and-balances system, which seems so obvious to us today, was one which many intelligent people devoted time and energy to devising, improving, and maintaining. So no snickering from the cheap seats.
This is nothing — you should see the Mercerie during Carnival. Not what appears to be the ideal path for someone on horseback, even though the horse would obviously have the right of way.
1224: It is forbidden to ride horses along the Mercerie (the street between Rialto and San Marco) due to the great increase in pedestrians. This seems so obvious as not to require a law, but as you see, it did.
1229: It is forbidden to spend more than half a ducat per person for food when giving a dinner. Something had to be done to combat the phenomenally luxurious banquets which had already become common — common, that is, among the classes not known as common. The relentless ingenuity of the wealthy patricians to find ways to out-spend each other sometimes verged on the potlatch mentality, and required a steady supply of ever-more-specific laws to control. One of many reasons why the government considered display worth controlling was because it was apt to stir up envy and other unpleasant emotions which could lead to even more unpleasant situations such as attempted coups, or the assassination of the doge. I’m not sure how they enforced this half-ducat limit but it sounds like the right idea.
1258: Pharmacists are forbidden to sell medicine without a prescription. Furthermore, doctors, even the most illustrious, are required to treat poor patients for free. One of many examples of how innovative, not to say revolutionary, Venetian thinking often was.
1274, February 29: It is prohibited to pass along the Mercerie on horseback because of all the people on foot. (Wait — didn’t we already have a law about that?)
I intuit that the column now in Campo San Salvador is where the fig tree used to be. Not stadium parking in any case.
1287, February 29: It is forbidden to go through the Mercerie on horseback (Are you people not listening?) except for foreigners who have just arrived. Couldn’t find a parking place for their horse? Furthermore, anyone wanting to go to San Marco has to tie his horse to the fig tree in the Campo San Salvador. Voila’! Parking.
1315: It is forbidden to commit impure acts in sacred places — finally something the church and state can agree on. This law was intended to stop the “dishonest and disgraceful” behavior running riot not only in the porticoes of the basilica of San Marco — to say nothing of the many convents — but inside the churches themselves. How effective this law proved to be is shown, for example, by Marco Grimani, who was fined for “having attempted to fornicate with a young lady under the arches of the basilica.” This occurred in 1363. Venetian laws seem to have had a limited shelf life, more or less 50 years, or roughly two generations. Time enough for people to quit listening. Or caring.
1322: The government decrees the construction of 50 public wells, to be completed within two years. In 1424 another 30 were added. Wells, whether cisterns for rain or installed over an artesian source, or brought on barges from the mainland, were the city’s only means of obtaining fresh water. The price of water was set by the government, and each year the waterboatmen were required to donate the contents of 100 waterboats to the public wells (4,506,000 liters, or 1,190,359 gallons, presumably not all on the same day). It went on like this until the aqueduct from the mainland was built in 1884. Excellent planning, and execution, you old Venetians.
1350, April 11: Some six months earlier — on September 25, 1349 — a certain nobleman, Stefano Manolesso, was riding his horse in the Piazza San Marco (doing WHAT?) and unfortunately ran over and killed a little boy. Therefore The Great Council passes a decree which requires that horses wear rattles to warn people of their approach. So you don’t risk getting trampled by the horses that aren’t supposed to be there.
1354: November 11. It is prohibited to carry grimaldelli (picklocks), because they have become the favorite toy of young bloods, perfect for breaking into houses, especially where beautiful and wealthy girls are residing.
1392: August 29. It is debated whether on festive days it should be forbidden to ride your horse at a fast pace in the Piazza San Marco. Now we’re just quibbling over speed?
Not exactly the Circus Maximus, with or without acqua alta, but I suppose if you had a horse the urge to gallop eventually became irresistible.
1397: It is decreed to place new lamps or candles for street lighting. The problem of dark streets here has been obvious for centuries; in 1128 the first lights were placed, at government expense, on votive shrines around the city, in the hope of discouraging the nocturnal mayhem — mugging, homicide — that had become the norm. Venetians would wake up in the morning to find murdered people lying in the streets. So they started installing faint but well-intentioned illumination at many corners and intersections. Which clearly was insufficient three centuries later. Was there more crime? More streets? Nobody replacing the candles or refilling the lamps?
1407, September 11: It is severely forbidden to throw garbage or trash into the canals. A few years ago we were rowing along behind the Giudecca, and as we turned into a certain canal I saw a hand-lettered sign thoughtfully placed near the entrance. It said (in Italian, of course): “WARNING. GO SLOW. WASHING MACHINES IN THE WATER.” What was so funny (it’s not funny) was the use of the plural. In any case, the sign is gone now. I have no idea if the washing machines themselves are also gone. Maybe not. Human nature is tougher and more resistent than I don’t know what. 15-5PH stainless steel. Which is also not to be thrown into the water.
1409, September 26: Speaking of throwing things, Members of the Great Council are not to throw the cloth balls used for voting at each other. And they’re making our laws?
1411, January 27: Servants and slaves are not to create a racket at night in the Palazzo Ducale. Throwing balls of bread dough at each other?
1414, April 18: New, more severe rules — more severe? There already were some? — against people blowing bugles at night.
1415, July 25: Every year the names of those who have stolen state property will be announced in the Great Council, and this will be done for the entire life of the guilty parties. Public shame is supposed to be a deterrent, and maybe it was. But I’d be willing to bet that everyone who heard those names only thought some variation of “Better him than me.”
1423, March 26: The desks of the Chancellery are to be raised so that curious passersby can’t read the secret documents. There. Mind your own beeswax.
1425, February 7: The government responds to the protest of many Venetians and decrees that church bells shall not be rung at night except in case of fire. It had reached the point where bells were being rung far into the night to celebrate all kinds of events. What with bells, bugles, and I don’t know what all, night in Venice must have been like noon in Shanghai.
1430, March 2: The Great Council limits the height of the heels of women’s shoes. I can’t say what height they had reached, but it was fairly ridiculous. Some noblewomen steadied themselves by holding onto, not canes, but the heads of their small, cane-height servants. Not that most of the lower classes had been wishing they could have shoes that made them walk like flamingoes, but it’s just better to keep the footwear under control.
There is a fair number of similar plaques around the city — yes, literally carved in stone — which remind Venetians of how to behave. This is one of the simpler versions, written in an interesting mix of Venetian and Italian and Latin. Full translation at right.1443, June 29: The Republic guarantees the services of a lawyer to poor defendants who can’t pay. This was the first time such a law was made anywhere in Europe, and furthermore, the said attorney was to be chosen by the judge from among the best (no sneaking in raw beginners) and was required to follow the case with the maximum care or risk a major fine. As in the case of doctors, the government was unusually alert to the advantages of maintaining some semblance of fairness. The idea that the law could be equal for all was not something the French invented as they were hurling paving stones at the Bastille; there were even several cases in which the doge refused to intervene to save his own son from his deserved punishment, even when it was banishment. Impressive.
MDCXXXIII [1633] 20 June
All games are forbidden, of whatever sort they may be (note: these “games” were not hopscotch, but gambling) and also to sell things, set up a shop or corbe (large wicker baskets for carrying coal), to utter blasphemies or other indecencies around this church or any nearby sacred places and this is by deliberation of the Most Excellent and Serene Executors against Blasphemy with the penalty for transgressors of prison, the galleys, banishment, and also (a fine of) 200 small lire (to be divided) between the accuser (who will be kept secret) and the captors. D. Francesco Morosini, Procurator, D. Nicolo Contarini, D. Marco Antonio di Priuli, D. Alvise Mocenigo, Executors against Blasphemy.
Forbidding blasphemy does not indicate that Venice was in the grip of religious fanatics, but that it was included with other common forms of public behavior which were revolting. The Executors against Blasphemy were responsible not only for punishing blasphemy — priests were also often guilty — but also the profanation of sacred places, the defloration of virgins promised in marriage (remember the picklocks?), pimping, the publication of forbidden books, and most other activities, of which there were many, that degraded the quality of life. It was a losing battle but they had to try. In 1512 Lorenzo Priuli, later doge, wrote in his diary: “In Venice there were two things that were very difficult to overcome: the blasphemy used by every grade of person and clothes in the French fashion.”
1455, March 20: It is decreed that it is illegal to deprive a condemned person of his clothes before the execution. Good grief. They’d been sending the poor bastards to the block in their skivvies?
1461, October 20: It is illegal for a creditor to deprive a debtor of his cows or agricultural tools, even if he owes money to the State.
1570: It is decreed that it is illegal for a creditor to deprive a debtor of his bed.
1469, December 27: It is decreed that the lawyers pleading cases in the Council or the College may not speak for more than an hour and a half. Lawyers without “Off” buttons have always been with us.
1474: Once again in the vanguard, the Republic issues the first laws which protect patents on inventions and the rights of the inventors.
1476. November 17: The Republic creates a new office, the Supervisors of Pomp. It can issue laws — oh good, we need more of those — concerning the display of wealth (it just doesn’t stop), including but not limited to elaborate clothes and decorations, ostentatious display of jewels, excessive fancying-up of your servants or boats, over-the-top banquets, and anything else that is, as they put it, contrary to the spirit of the Republic, seeing that extravagant consumption, even if the money is all yours, is not only wasteful and teaches the wrong lessons, but also conduces to scandal. Spending bags of money on stuff might weaken your grasp on the idea of boundaries, yours and everybody else’s, and thus is to be avoided. Clear as a 25-carat diamond.
1498, June 11: At the request of the people living on the Giudecca, it is forbidden to “roast” cinnabar. The government was vigilant to relegate hazardous or extremely obnoxious industries, dyeing and tanning among them, to outlying areas of the city, but in this case they neglected to make it an uninhabited part. I can well believe that the residents objected; the idea of a furnace roasting mercury ore anywhere near groups of vertebrates is so ghastly that it’s hard to believe it was ever permitted to exist. I’m sure the councilors didn’t allow this furnace to be built because they were distracted by deciding how much silk you would be allowed to use to make your underwear (I made that up). They must have been thinking about how important it was to produce mercury for hatmakers, and for pharmacists concocting treatments for syphilis.
1563: At an unspecified date, a momentous decision is finally made. It is forbidden to ride horses anywhere in the city. Sometimes tourists marvel that there are no cars in Venice, before they notice the inconvenience of all those bridges. However, if anybody had ever wondered why there are no horses, now we know. It was forbidden. Seriously forbidden. And this time we mean it, totally prohibited. With this majestic edict all those rattles and rules could be thrown out and I suppose collected by the itinerant rag, bone, and scrap iron merchant to be turned into soap or paper. Certainly they weren’t thrown into the canals. That’s illegal.
![There is a fair number of similar plaques around the city -- yes, literally carved in stone -- which remind Venetians of how to behave. This is one of the simpler versions, written in an interesting mix of Venetian and Italian and Latin. "1633 22 June. All games are forbidden, of whatever sort they may be, and also to sell things, set up a shop or corbe [large wicker baskets for carrying coal], to utter blasphemy or other indecencies around this church or any nearby sacred places, and this is by deliberation of the Most Excellent and Serene Executors against Blasphemy with the penalty for transgressors of prison, the galleys, banishment, and also [a fine of] 200 small lire [paid] to the accuser and the captors.](https://iamnotmakingthisup.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/IMG_1021-lapide-225x300.jpg "IMG_1021 lapide")