Venice: I am not making this up

Cruising: where the music ends

July 21, 2010 10 Comments

The departure board at Venice's Marco Polo Airport. The first flight left at TKTK — The departure board at Venice's Marco Polo Airport. The first flight left at 6:35. followed by 20 others before this list came up at 10:07.

I went to the airport one morning two weeks ago, and there I discovered that there is a dark side to cruising. The only thing surprising about that is that I was surprised.

Going home from vacation is never very much fun, but it would seem that Marco Polo airport was designed to get you accustomed really fast to the fact that the fun is seriously over.

As I have often mentioned — sorry if I’m becoming repetitive, maybe I should set some of this material to music and we could all join in on the chorus — Venice has become a mega-major passenger port.

The wall on the right is where the line of check-in counters is placed. The left edge of this photograph is where the check-in line at each counter ends. — The wall on the right is where the line of check-in counters is placed. The left edge of this photograph is where the line at each counter ends.

Cruise traffic in the last ten years has quadrupled. Expressed in bodies, that comes to 1,420,980 in 2009, which represented a 16.9 per cent increase over the previous year. Venice is now the fourth busiest port in Europe, and the first in the Mediterranean.

The first ship on the dance card this year was the Costa “Deliziosa,” which arrived on January 30 (I don’t know from where — maybe there’s a cruise-ship launching platform somewhere around Queen Maud Land). The last one scheduled this year is the MSC “Magnifica,” which will depart on December 27. The word “season” has taken on new meaning: It’s every month of the year except January.

But until last Sunday, I hadn’t really given any thought to what these numbers might portend, not so much to the ships as to the airport.

The space from the man in the yellow shirt on the right and the red suitcase on the left is the space allotted to walking to your check-in counter, or wandering aimlessly.

After all, passengers mostly arrive by air. I’ve often seen the young women who serve as cruise-passenger wranglers waiting in the Arrivals area at Marco Polo airport, holding up their signs for Princess or Costa or whatever the cruise line might be, to help them gather their arriving clients, each of whom appears to bring about ten metric tons of luggage. The common idea about cruises is that people go on them in order to eat constantly, like blue whales (daily requirement: about 1.5 million calories). But when I look at their bags, I think their main plan must be to pass the time changing clothes.

Anyway, it’s obvious that extraordinary machinery has been developed to keep these ships and their passengers and their supplies coming in and going out, doing a turnaround in the space of a day, for 11 months a year.

It doesn’t appear, however, that the same efficiency has been devoted to the airport phase of the experience. Because when six or seven cruise ships come into Venice on a Sunday morning to finish their dreamy voyages, most of those people head for the airport. Where the party is definitively over.

Venice airport is the third busiest in Italy, preceded only by Rome and Milan. This makes the airport people very proud, as well it should. But while their annual numbers might be impressive on the page, they’re not nearly as impressive as the struggle all those thousands of people have to make in order to leave Venice in something like a four-hour window of time. Certainly there are early flights where the density of humans is less — the first departs at 6:35 AM. But no cruise company in the world would put its passengers on the airport bus at 4:30 AM, unless it were docking in Murmansk.

Another glimpse of the space for walking around, or staring at the Departures board, or trying to figure out what to do next. This width is theoretically compensated for by the fact that it extends for 60 check-in counters. Doesn't look like quite enough, though. — Another glimpse of the space for walking around, or staring at the Departures board, or trying to figure out what to do next. The width of the area is theoretically compensated for by the fact that it extends for 60 check-in counters. Doesn't feel like quite enough, though.

So as I say, I went to the airport on a Sunday morning to meet some friends who had disembarked from their cruise and were flying out that night. When I slid off the escalator on the Departures level, what greeted me was an appalling combination of the last day at summer camp (when all the kids are milling around being picked up by parents) and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West featuring Annie Oakley.

That morning there were 20 flights scheduled between 9:50 AM and 12:15 PM; that’s one every six minutes. And three of those flights were to major US destinations, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and New York. I mention that only because I presume that one flight to Atlanta involves more passengers than three flights to Palermo.

When I think back on the previous facility 15 years ago (a nostalgic reminder of the Oneida County airport at Utica, New York in 1968), the shiny new version is something of an improvement. But one has to ask oneself (I’ll stand in for “one,” in this scene), what they were thinking when they designed an airport that has more space for the planes than for the people.

Take the check-in area on the Departures level. It is beautifully long, but ludicrously narrow. There are 60 check-in counters, and the designer(s) evidently assumed that each check-in counter would serve a line of no more than 25 calm, lucid, well-organized passengers with no luggage or children. Then they left just a smidge of space at the end of the line so that people could get through who needed to go somewhere else — another counter, or the newsstand or the bar.

But wait. It turns out there are more than 25 people who need to line up at each counter, so they begin to clump together. And hold on — we actually need lots and lots of space for the people who are walking from here to there because many of them got here the necessary two (or more) hours before departure but whose flight isn’t open for check-in yet. So they wander (mill around, actually) or they sit, if they can find a place among the very designy but not very numerous seats.

Let’s talk about other things people need besides enough space to stand in a check-in line, or to sit and check their tickets and yell at their kids and or maybe take a snooze.

People need to go the bathroom. There are two obvious bathrooms on the Departures level and one hidden away down a hallway. I don’t know about the men’s room (men don’t care, anyway), but each ladies’ room has two (2) toilets. That makes four stalls for women on a floor that is pullulating with hundreds and hundreds of people. There are two ladies’ rooms on the Arrivals floor, too, so make that another four stalls on the ground level. Eight stalls — I mean ten, if you count the hidden facility — for women in an airport that operates an average of 80 flights a day, or an average of one every 12 minutes. (There must be a handicapped-accessible bathroom somewhere, it just doesn’t come to mind.)

Lest you think I am unreasonably obsessed with physiological needs (like, say, space to move around in and yes, to relieve oneself), I have some data from Robert Davis, an architect friend of mine. He writes: “We have a rule of thumb for theaters which is ’30 seats per seat.’ … So a 600-seat facility should have 20 fixtures, evenly divided male/female.”

Assuming that airport design is not radically different from theater design (some people spend more time in airports than they do in theaters, after all), if you have 600 people in the airport you would need ten stalls for the women. So we see that the Venice airport is already in a bathroom deficit situation. Because let’s assume there are more than 600 people in the airport at a given time, a pretty safe assumption based on the evidence of the other morning. The people keep swarming in, but there are still only eight stalls. Just deal with it.

At the other end of the alimentary canal, there are two (2) bar/sandwich counters (one upstairs with no seating and one downstairs with some tables), and one multi-station buffet with very little space to move around in with your tray, and a batch of cramped tables and extremely little space for your luggage, assuming you’re snacking before checking in, or you feel like doing something other than wander and look for a place to sit. The line for this facility stretches out to collide with the lines of people checking in at counters 59 and 60.

Then there's the way people come up the one escalator and then just stop -- to think, to look around, to consider the Departures board which is facing them on the other wall. Perhaps an up escalator and a Departures board shouldn't be right together like that? — Then there's the way people come up the one escalator and then just stop -- to think, to look around, to consider the Departures board which is facing them on the other wall. Perhaps an up escalator and a Departures board shouldn't be in front of each other.

I have to say, pretty slim pickings for passengers at an airport which claims to be ready to handle 15 million passengers a year. Especially considering that it is currently handling only about 8 million.

I’m not saying Venice’s aerodrome has to be like Frankfurt or Amsterdam airports, though I wouldn’t mind. All I’m saying is that while everyone has been working night and day to increase cruise traffic, it doesn’t appear that anyone has been attending to how they will be accommodated (I mean wrangled) on the day they leave. So far, Skytrax has not awarded any stars at all to Venice airport. I wonder what that means.

So what advice could I give someone leaving their dream cruise and flying out of Venice airport in the summer? Bring a book. Your own food. A folding chair. A portable toilet. Think of it as camping, in the middle of Times Square. You’ll be fine.

The joy of cruising ends right about here. No looking back, no going forward, either.

Events, Food, History, Venetian-ness

The Redentore returns

July 20, 2010 2 Comments

This past weekend we reached the summer’s festive culmination, the Feast of the Redeemer. But this year the routine was slightly different: No boat, no fireworks. Sounds like heresy, I know. It is heresy. I might as well just call it a club cookout and forget all the historical/traditional frippery.

Things have changed because now we’re in a different rowing club, and in a different place altogether in our minds and spirits. And while we could certainly take a boat and load it up with the usual bovoleti, watermelon, sarde in saor, pasta e fagioli, and all the other traditional noshes to get you from sundown to the fireworks, we just don’t feel like it.

One main reason we — and several other old Venetians I asked at random — don’t feel like going in a boat anymore is because of all the other boats. It’s one thing to be crushed amid swarming hordes of people ashore, it’s quite another to find yourself in the dark with thousands of large motorboats operated by people who are drunk and who don’t know how to drive. Obviously, this was not a problem when Lino and his cohort were growing up. It’s pretty hard to hurt anybody with a wooden rowing boat, at least not to the degree a big boat powered by 90 or 140 or more horses.

In fact — not to cast a pall over what I intend to be a jaunty little post — two young women who were aboard a motorboat zooming back to Chioggia after the fireworks have not yet made it home. Because the boat ran into a piling at high speed — just about every motorboat leaving Venice was going from fast to pretty fast to crazy fast — and one woman hit her head against the other woman’s head. The first woman lingered about a day, and is now in heaven. The other woman, who had snagged a ride home with them just on an impulse, is in the hospital recovering from various fractures. As for the driver/owner/ friends who were aboard, I don’t know what state they’re in, but two of the boys/men/whatever have fled. I tell you this only to indicate that I am not inventing notions about how dangerous it is out there. What surprises me is that disaster struck so few. Not much comfort to the families of all involved.

My first look at the morning's harvest made me wonder if there were any mussels actually to be found in the middle of this wreckage.

So Friday morning (Saturday night being the high point), Lino and I went to the club to help clean the mussels. A vast feast — probably more Rabelaisian than Lucullan — was planned, and our contribution was to do some of the prep work. Little did I know what ten tons of extremely wild mussels will do to your hands.

The set-up is simple. Take mussel or clump from the big tub; remove the material covering it; throw mussel into medium-size bucket, and the nameless material into the small bucket. — The set-up is simple. Take a mussel or clump of same from the big tub; remove the material covering it; throw the mussel into medium-size bucket, and the nameless material into the small bucket.

Forget how they look, in their just-scraped-off-the-pilings dishabille. They’re ghastly, I agree. Even I gave some serious thought to striking mussels off my must-eat list for, like, forever. But the ones we took home, all clean and shiny, were absolutely delectable. So you know, don’t judge a mussel by its encrustations.

But as you see, real mussels emerge from the rugby scrum in the big tum. These look almost edible. Rinsed and stirred around with a big wooden stick, they come out looking just like something you can't wait to eat. — But as you see, real mussels emerge from the rugby scrum in the big tub. These look almost edible. Rinsed and stirred around with a big wooden stick, they come out looking just like something you can't wait to eat.

After spending hours pulling and scraping off plant and all sorts of other matter, not to mention rending them from each other one by one, my hands felt as if I’d been pulling nettles. Three days later, a few fingers were still a little red and swollen. Now I understand why one of the men put on rubber gloves. I live, I learn.

A certain number of men got to cooking. There were great things to eat but there was also fifty times more than anyone could ever consume. Fried shrimp and deep-fried fresh zucchini and sarde in saor, the aforementioned mussels, grilled pork ribs and sausage and lamb chops and fresh tomatoes out of the garden in the back, and — I begin to lose the thread here — there was also something I’d never even heard of, much less tasted: deep-fried sage leaves. You can have your fried zucchini blossoms, I’m going to take the sage any chance I get.

The blackboard at the club says, and I translate: (L) "Menu: What there is." (R) On the occasion of the Redentore, Saturday we close at 12:00."

The table is set, the vases of basil are in place, ready (they say) to repel mosquitoes, and the view over the canal of San Marco toward the Lido cannot be surpassed.

After that the sheer quantity began to press down on my brain — I know I ate many more things, but I can’t remember what. At a certain point one of the wives pulled out a homemade frozen dessert called zuccotto. The recipe I looked up here makes it sound elegant, but what we ate were pieces that seemed to have been hacked off the Ur-zuccotto with a dull cleaver. And of course there was watermelon, which is utterly non-negotiable. You can skip a whole batch of things, but yes, there will be watermelon.

Crossing the votive bridge from the Zattere to the Giudecca, to the very feet of the church of the Most Holy Redeemer, always touches me.

We watched the fireworks from afar, enjoying the highest ones and intuiting the lower ones by the shimmering glow through the treetops. It was more comfortable than sitting in a boat right under them, but much less exciting. I don’t see the point in fireworks if the’re not going to be exciting. You might as well watch them on TV, or through the wrong end of a telescope, and wear earmuffs.

After the fireworks – or as they put it, “pyrotechnic display” — the countless motorboats began to stream homeward. The paper estimated that some 110,000 people came to party, but didn’t hazard a guess as to how many boats. There were so many they were tying up to public lighting stanchions, not at all a good idea.

We all sat there, sticky with watermelon juice, watching the migration. It was like the wildebeest at high speed, with big roaring mechanical voices, each with a little red light gleaming from its left flank.

Next day: The races. Now they were exciting. Lots of wind, lots of tension, lots of — unfortunately — waves. Something is going to have to be done, the racers can hardly row anymore. But that’s a subject for another day.

For those who are interested in a few more statistics, the spectacle (fireworks, etc.) cost about 100,000 euros. Doesn’t sound like much, I know — actually, I had the impression that the show was shorter than some other years.

The poppieri, or stern rowers, gather with the judge to draw lots for their positions on the starting line. They may look relaxed, but there are men whose hands are visibly shaking when they reach into the bag for their number.

Three of the nine gondolas begin to warm up, and head for the starting line.

The men and the boat can take it, but the wind and waves were something to contend with.

It was hard going for the pupparinos too.

The "cavata," or blast out of the starting gate (so to speak) can make a huge difference. Here, the "Vignottini" on the white gondola have shot to the front. In the last minute of the race, pink pulled past them.

The phenomenal Franco Dei Rossi, known as "Strigheta," finished fourth in the 34th year he's rowed this race. You cannot tell me that that is the arm of a 56-year-old man. And yet, it is. — The phenomenal Franco Dei Rossi, known as "Strigheta," finished fourth (he takes home a blue pennant) in the 34th year he's rowed this race. You cannot tell me that that is the arm of a 56-year-old man. And yet, it is.

Food, Nature, Water

Something fishy

July 17, 2010 No Comments

Last night we had an especially delectable dinner, focusing (as often happens) on fish.

Sometimes we buy them, sometimes we catch them, and sometimes they thrust themselves upon us.

Two gilthead sea bream (orate) on the left and center, and the very strong, daring, not very clever gray mullet on the right. It was an impressive jump, but our plate was not his original destination.

As in this case: “Orate” (gilthead sea bream) are highly prized around Venetian restaurants, and are vigorously cultivated in the various lagoon fish-farms. We bought these two specimens from our neighborhood fisherman a few hours after he snagged them.

The other little guy, the slender one at the right edge of the plate, is a cefalo (“siegolo” — SYEH-go-yo — in Venetian), or gray mullet. Very delicious, but very snobbed these days by restaurants who prefer to offer the very trendy orata, at preposterous prices.

Your basic gray mullet, or cefalo. They come in various sizes and variaties, and we catch them with a simple gillnet when they're not practicing for the high-jump event in the fish olympics.

A few hours before the picture above was taken, our little siegolo had been swimming blithely along, zipping through the water thinking whatever busy ichtheous thoughts oppress teenagers of the Mugilidae family.

Suddenly, he felt like leaping. This happens to mullet of all sizes, I don’t know why, but it strikes usually in the morning, sometimes in the dead of night. You can be rowing along and they’ll just bounce out of the water as if there were a trampoline down there somewhere. And it is not at all unusual for them to land, not with a splash, but a thud, as they hit the bottom of our boat.

The first time this ever happened to me, we were rowing in a four-oar sandolo at midnight back from Sant’ Erasmo all the way to the Lido. Summer nights are luminous in the lagoon and back then there weren’t quite so many motorboats tearing around all night, or at least not enough to drown out the pensive voice of a nightingale that came out of the dark woods as we rowed along the canal between the two islands called the Vignole, or the lovely, solitary note — just one — of the owl they call a soeta. It was magical.

Suddenly there was a thump in the bottom of the boat, and it kept thumping. In the dark I thought it was a bottle or something similar that had fallen over in the midst of our various voyaging detritus. But no — it was a fish. A big, strong mullet, who evidently had rejoiced as a strong man to run a race to see just how high out of the water he could hurl himself. He found out how high, but he hadn’t calculated on the landing. Fish don’t get to go home again any more than people do, at least not those who launch themselves anywhere near us. His future was pretty simple at this point: The skillet and a slather of extravirgin olive oil.

Anyway, sorry as I am to see a mullet’s morning, or evening, ruined by being taken prisoner and then executed, I know we appreciate him more than a lot of people do. Maybe more than his friends and family do. (Do fish have friends?)

Boatworld, Nature, Water

Afa: get to know it

July 15, 2010 2 Comments

I was going to write about something else but it’s just too hot. Every summer we get a heatwave around about now, but I’m not sure I remember one quite this heavy. Or long-lasting.

We’ve been having temperatures up around 100 degrees F. (39 degrees C) during the day, slightly less at night, for at least a week. Yesterday the weather report indicated that it was hotter here than in New York. I can tell you without consulting anybody but myself that it’s hotter than the hinges of hell.

Looking toward Murano at 8:30 this morning.

In addition to simple heat, there is the element called “afa,” which means sweltering, sultry, breathless heat, the kind of mugginess that makes you feel like an old sponge that has been left in a dark damp corner next to things that smell.

There are only two places I can think of where this weather would be even more intolerable. One would be anywhere along the Po River plain, where the fields stretch for long, desperate distances with no shade. Where there is shade, among the poplar plantations lining the river, there is no oxygen. Whatever is taking the place of oxygen does not move, because the world has stopped.

Looking toward the Lido at the lagoon inlet of San Nicolo'. The heron is happy, but herons don't sweat. — Looking toward the Lido at the lagoon inlet of San Nicolo'. The egret is happy, but egrets don't sweat.

The other place where the heat is torment is the mountains. Mountains are made to be cool, at least at night. If I had to endure this kind of heat at 4,000 feet, I’d have to think long and carefully about my revenge.

Clamming takes your mind off the fact that you're suffocating.

We’ve gotten through it so far by going out in the lagoon in a small mascareta, to a place where there is virtually always a breeze. And enough water to immerse myself for ten hours or so. Other people go to the beach on the Lido. Other people go shopping at the small supermarket off Campo Ruga, where the air-conditioning is set to cryogenic depths. We go clamming. More fun, for us. Probably not so much for the clams.

I’m off to bed now, planning to dream of the freezers at the Tyson chicken-processing plant. Do not wake me.