This fabulous mass of clouds billowed up the other afternoon behind the Arsenal (just to set the general scene). The Arsenal was considered the most secure place in the city for this event, a decision that wouldn’t have much surprised the Venetians of the long-ago Republic. In Venice’s greatest ship-building days the area was surveilled by boats patrolling the perimeter night and day, aided by men watching from 15 guard towers along the walls. They didn’t put up the current signs — “Military Zone, Access Forbidden, Armed Surveillance” — but it was implied.
The G20 are coming for dinner. And breakfast, and fancy fetes, and big meetings from July 7-11, and for days we’ve been given periodic updates on what this will entail for daily life.
For those who may not feel like knowing more than necessary, here are the basics (thank you, Wikipedia): The G20 is composed of most of the world’s largest economies, including both industrialized and developing nations. The group collectively accounts for around 90 percent of gross world product (GWP),[4] 75-80 percent of international trade,[A 1] two-thirds of the world’s population,[2] and roughly half the world’s land area.
Think: Economic Ministers and governors of central banks. Also think: Organized demonstrations protesting the many defects of the global economy, with protestors coming from far and also wide, at least some of whom are known to prefer violence. Each group will be assigned a specific area from which to express their views. They won’t be near the Arsenal, I think I can promise that.
This year it was Italy’s turn to play host, and considering that by the late 13th century Venice was the richest country in Europe, it seems pleasantly appropriate for the money masters to meet here. I doubt that was the organizers’ motivation, but it does fit. Although the decision was made in Rome, and not here, Venice may well have been seen as a city uniquely adapted to the control of movement by land or by water.
The city began planning all this last January (probably much earlier, actually), by means of at least ten separate committees. The basic idea was to keep the city in as normal a condition as possible with the help of 1500 extra police (Carabinieri, Guardia di Finanza, Polizia di Stato, etc.), including police divers ready for canal duty. The prefect made a big point of saying he could have just shut the city completely down, but wanted to show it as open and even welcoming. I hope that turns out to be true.
Some statistics: The eleven canals nearest the Arsenal were emptied of the boats that normally are moored there. These 450 vessels were temporarily transferred to the marinas at the Certosa island (“Vento di Venezia”) and Sant’ Elena Marina. I believe there is no cost for this to the owners, but there will certainly be some inconvenience in going to either place to get your boat.
This is what I call extreme house-cleaning — the rio de la Tana completely empty of the boats usually moored there. I don’t know who owns the blue barge, but I bet it’s not going to be there two days from now.
The 62 delegations (size of each unknown) will be lodging in eight luxury hotels in the city. The extra police that have been brought in as reinforcements will be bunking on the mainland, if that interests you.
Covid swabs every 48 hours are guaranteed to everyone at the meeting, at points in the Arsenal and in the delegation hotels. Ambulances are on standby.
The yellow area is the “Security Zone,” accessible only to residents and shopowners who show their pass. At “D” you find the taxi station between San Zaccaria and the Arsenal is suspended, and at E and F the fuel station and boatyard by the church of San Pietro di Castello are suspended, seeing that they are within a few feet of the second water entrance to the Arsenal. No yachts will be permitted to tie up along the Riva degli Schiavoni.
This gate and others like it at any entrance to the Yellow Zone will be closed and overseen by someone in uniform who will check your credentials before letting you enter. All the streets leading into the Arsenal area are now seriously gated. (Gazzettino)The organizers are totally not joking about protecting the Arsenal area. The caption refers to the gates “disciplining foot traffic,” a very polite way of basically saying “Keep Out.”The Francescana rowing club is based inside the Arsenal in a large shed accessible by water and by land. The boats are now all inside the shed and the door locked tight, and the land entrance, as you see, will be blocked as of Sunday night by these supplemental hinged bars.
The vaporetto stops closest to the meeting site (Arsenale, Bacini and Celestia) will be suspended. The Fondamente Nove are partially unavailable to traffic; one helpful notice explained to residents of the Lido that if they needed to go to the hospital, they would have to go to Murano, then proceed to the hospital by way of the Fondamente Nove stop.
Baffled by how this would work, I studied the vaporetto options and discovered Line #18 that runs from the Lido to the Murano stops, where you change for the 4.1. As if normal life here weren’t already sufficiently inconvenient, this line operates once an hour from 9:18 AM to 7:50 PM, with a break between 12:18-4:50 PM. I don’t know that I’d undertake the voyage except in case of direst need.
Navigation will be controlled according to this color-coded scheme, and that means everybody, up to and including you and your aging uncle who wants to take the motorboat out to go fishing.
The green areas are for normal usage at any time; they term it “pleasure” use. “Anyone boating outside Venice must use the green areas. The yellow stretch is for pleasure boating only by residents and only in order to reach a green patch. The rest of the Giudecca Canal (red, though they call it orange) is forbidden to pleasure boats, as is all the rest of the orange zone (Grand Canal from the Bacino of San Marco to the Accademia Bridge. and the Bacino of San Marco to the Canale delle Navi at the end of Sant’ Elena). Navigation of every type of boat, including taxis and barges, is forbidden from 8-10 AM and 4-6 PM; the only exceptions are vaporettos and Alilaguna boats. The blue stretch (they call it purple, but never mind) is forbidden to everybody. This is the Arsenal wall facing the lagoon, so it’s unquestionably a potential hot zone. Work out your own alternatives.
Transport of merchandise will be forbidden between 8:00-10:00 AM and 4:00-6:00 PM. (See the red-orange zone on the map.) Restaurant owners have been advised to stock up early, in case there are any glitches.
Don’t imagine that you can somehow manage to cleverly do things your own way; there will be some 60 boats of the Guardia di Finanza out patrolling, as well as four helicopters. I appreciate the prefect’s assurances that normal life will continue, but I’m starting to wonder how many people are just going to decide to take a long weekend and go to the mountains.
The irrepressible wits at Nevodi Pizzalab are offering three new specials in honor of this important event, as always written in Venetian: Mancava, Anca, and El G20. “We were also missing the G20,” the broader translation being “All we needed, on top of everything else, was the G20.”
At dawn the city may seem to be standing still, but just as the tide is almost certainly in motion even if you can’t see it, so are the stores, shops, and other commercial entities. But while for some enterprises the tide may be rising, for others it may already have gone out. When money is to be made, Venice stops for no one.
The pandemic is slowly retreating here and normal life has taken a few big summer-weekend bounces that give the city the sensation that the old days have returned. On June 2, a national holiday, there were 50,000 tourists in the city (21,000 from the Veneto, 19,000 from other Regions, 10,000 foreigners, half of which were German). However, it’s becoming clear that the old days could have used a lot of improvement.
All those months during lockdown, etc., when so many people hoped that the city could somehow benefit from the forced suspension of so many activities in order to reassess and resolve the problems of the mass tourism monoculture, was time blown away like so many soap bubbles. We’re pretty much right back to where we were in February, 2019.
For example, outdoor tables and chairs were permitted to occupy more space than strictly allowed during the Old Regime in order to accommodate the necessary social distancing; now they might just stay that way, filling up streets and campos, because now we’re used to it (though the owners won’t feel like paying an adjusted tax for occupying more public space). The aforementioned bars and restaurants and other touristic enterprises have been discovering, to their surprise, that manpower is missing. Bluntly, one out of five former employees isn’t coming back. A year and a half has passed, and waiters and chambermaids and many other toilers in the touristic fields have found other jobs. So let’s nab all the foreign workers we can for temporary (low-paid) summer work, even though they haven’t been vaccinated.
As for daily life, naturally I’m glad that people are working again, but this means we’re picking back up with motondoso and sometimes overcrowded vaporettos and cloddish tourists and pickpockets and seagulls ripping the food out of people’s hands in the Piazza San Marco and so forth, with more of the same coming up, no doubt, as restrictions continue to ease. The great forerunner is the Biennale of Architecture; it opened on May 22 and will run until November 21, B.T.U. (Barring The Unforeseen, not British thermal units.) The unforeseen has become a major player now in any undertaking, psychologically if not logistically.
So now that Venice Inc. is trying to get back underway, I paraphrase the famous remark of American President Calvin Coolidge and say that obviously the business of Venice is business. Or, as I put it, thisisvenicewheremoneyisking. And now that we can talk about business in the present tense again, I see the economic landscape, as illustrated by the shops, as divided into two basic categories. And both show the ways in which the Venetian economy has changed over the past two generations or so.
Category 1: Shops that have changed over the years. Category 2: Shops that have closed forever.
Category 1: Walking around the city, I can add my own version of what I call the Venetian litany: “I remember when that was…..”. When Lino would walk along Calle Larga San Barnaba and tell me, door by door, who used to be there, the coal seller or the fish fryer, it seemed exotic, as if change was so long ago. But now I too have seen it as it is happening.
It used to be, some 25 years ago, that when useful shops succumbed they were most often replaced by ones selling “Murano glass” or Carnival masks. Lately, though, when you see yet another useful shop disappear you can assume it will be replaced — well, certainly by supermarkets, they’re everywhere now — by bars/cafes/restaurants, or by hotels. Evidently people come to Venice to eat and sleep, as if it were a convalescent hospital.
Examples are everywhere. The best nursing home in the city is being converted to a hotel (and the worst nursing home appears to be on the same trajectory).
This was the “Ca’ di Dio” nursing home, not only a beautiful facility but a fantastic location on the Riva degli Schiavoni. Too bad those are the very aspects that exert a fatal fascination on hotel developers. It’s been several long and laggy years since the old people were evicted, and the restoration work has only recently picked up again with some seriousness. So yes, another hotel is on the way. There’s always room for one more.
When the skeletons of the two former gas holders near San Francesco de la Vigna were up for renovation not too long ago, scores of families formed a committee to implore the city to convert them to an urgently needed multi-purpose sports center for the students of the nearby high schools. For a while it seemed as if the city had yet to decide, and then the surprise. Renovation has continued, but the citizens are out of luck because this treasure of industrial archaeology is going to be a hotel. Those are only two examples of how a facility useful to Venetians is removed to make room for something that makes money.
In 1969 it seemed perfectly fine that two gas holders had been built next to a 16th-century church designed by Jacopo Sansovino with a facade by Andrea Palladio. I can imagine that the Franciscan monks in their cloisters added the gas works to their daily prayers. (bonificagasometri.com)Work began in January to stabilize the site. Much concrete was seen passing from barges to land.Here is the architect’s rendering of the glorious new incarnation of the old structures. The kids will just have to keep on making do with whatever sports areas have been cobbled together for them around the city because we absolutely need another hotel. I make the futile observation that there are laws that prohibit any construction or alteration that is not in tune with its surroundings. To be fair, these weren’t in tune with their surroundings 50 years ago, either. (Il Gazzettino)
So much for hotels. Let there be restaurants!
This used to be a great family shoe store on via Garibaldi.
I don’t want to bore you to oblivion, but here’s a quick review of the transformation of via Garibaldi, still proudly promoted (not by us) as one of the few places where you can still find real Venetians. Yet many shops that were used every day by the aforementioned Venetians have gradually been removed, one by one. The excellent clothing store has undergone really ambitious renovation to become a restaurant (work appears to be stalled, but there are cartons of wine on the floor); the small deli/supermarket where Claudio reigned behind the case of cheese and butter is now a restaurant; a pork butcher shop dedicated to salame and other such products is a restaurant; the furniture and upholstery store became a bar and gaming salon (closed since the acqua alta of November 11, 2019); the fresh pasta and exotic ingredients shop is now Nevodi Pizzalab for takeaway pizza; a fruit and vegetable stand is now a restaurant.
On the non-comestible side, other stores have also been through various reincarnations that moved successively farther away from ordinary life. The bank became a hardware store (could have been useful except that somehow whatever you needed on Friday was expected to be delivered next Wednesday. This went on for at least two years until it folded) and now it’s a real estate agency. We miss the bank.
The name “Salumeria” (salame and similar pork products) is so wonderfully generic, like shops that still have “Latteria” (milk) carved on their lintels from long ago. Now it’s a bar/cafe’.Another salumeria just down the street from the one above is currently selling cheap clothing. The meat display case is still inside, loaded now with T-shirts and sweaters and shoes. At least these are everyday items, nothing fancy or touristic.This was a scene that stabbed my heart with an icicle. In late December 2019 the dry-goods store had to move out because the landlord raised the rent. This is the classic scenario. Stores keep closing, not because they have no customers, but because the landlord wakes up and thinks he or she would like to have more money. Up goes the rent, out go the tenants, and eight out of ten times (seems like) what comes in is a restaurant or bar. It’s obvious that you can’t sell enough pajamas and tablecloths to make thousands of euros a month more for rent.The shop went back quite a way and contained so many things you need if you lead a normal life: Pajamas. underwear, ribbon, zippers, socks, dishtowels, ordinary towels, sheets, bandanas… Naturally I expected to see a restaurant or bar take its place, because God knows we need more of those. But a year and a half later the shop is still closed, so whatever master plan the owner had devised that required throwing out the socks and underwear isn’t going quite as he or she expected, and meanwhile that’s a year and a half of rent that he/she didn’t receive. Sometimes you just roll snake eyes.Another stab was delivered to my heart when I discovered that the little deli by the church of San Martino had closed in October. In Venetian, the person owning this sort of all-purpose little grocery (prosciutto, cheese, bread, wine, oil, etc.) is called a “biavarol” (bee-yah-vah-ROL). The name comes from “biade” (bee-YAH-deh), meaning fodder. Centuries ago that was where you bought your horse feed because yes, there were horses in Venice; then the products increased to grain and seeds, and gradually other provisions. Like many such small shops, it was often run by a family — in this case, since 1985, although the shop itself was already active in 1907. But as is also often the case, the children took other paths, the parents retired, and so here we are. There was a biavarol, Lino recalls, at the Ponte Trevisan by San Trovaso, and the word “BIADE” was visible above the door until not many years ago. Then, when the biavarol retired, the new owners sold trendy clothes and the word “biade” disappeared. “That’s really a shame,” Lino says. “It was a wonderful relic.”“Seeking a biavarol to continue a century-long story.” As this article recounts, everybody in the neighborhood frequented the shop — there isn’t anything like it nearby — but after 35 years at work Elisabetta and Francesco wanted to retire and spend time with the grandchildren. They’re ready to rent it, though, to anyone who will pick up where they left off. No trendy clothes, thanks.
Actually, there are plenty of places that change that don’t turn into restaurants.
This used to be a huge store selling glass. Now it’s a huge store selling pet supplies. Supply follows demand, as Adam Smith probably said. This is one case where the dog- and cat-mad locals got the benefit of a change, as nobody here needs “Murano glass.”Butcher shops just can’t seem to keep going. The kids want to do something else in life and anyway, with the population shrinking by the month, jewelry clearly has a better chance at survival than pork chops. I’m glad the new people left that marvelous relief carving of the beef.Further along the street near the Rialto Market is yet another defunct butcher shop. Fun fact: Venice was the home of one of Europe’s largest slaughterhouses in the mid-1800’s, just after Padova, Vienna and Rome. If you think the streets are unpleasant when jammed with people, try to imagine the calle de la Beccaria near San Giobbe when it was time to drive the cows, horses, sheep, and pigs to their doom. In the summer. Not made up.I don’t know what this shop originally sold, but at least it’s not a restaurant. As you see, some bright sparks have made it into a social-message emporium. Half-hidden by the condensation is a large tote bag proclaiming that “Plants are better than people.” This is original, if a bit antisocial, but I assume they’re thinking of popcorn and peonies and not kudzu, Venus flytraps, killer algae, purple loosestrife, water hyacinth, castor beans, deadly nightshade, wolfsbane, poison hemlock, rosary pea, or your neighborhood oleander tree.
Apartments for rent: Of course this is a business too, and by now a very big one. The pandemic across Europe pretty much obliterated last year’s crop of tourists, but they are coming back. Collectively calumniated in the popular mind as “Airbnb,” apartments for tourists are offered by scores of other companies.
The continuing depopulation of Venice has left ever-more apartments empty, so of course they’ve become another commodity. Venice is far from unique in this, as we all know, but the sheer quantity has distorted (or is the result of the distortion) of Venetian life. Now that the apartments are being registered and regulated, virtually all of Venice’s some 3,000 streets (calle, calesela, ruga, salizada, ramo, etc.) has at least one door with an official tag indicating a touristic apartment within. We knew there were lots, but now that we can see them it’s a bit unnerving. Still, all those people who rail against Airbnb as the destroyer of Venetian life need to recognize that nobody has forced the apartment owner to do this, and otherwise the apartment would most likely sit empty, which isn’t a positive thing at all.
“Touristic location” and license number.
I could add a thousand more of these images, but you get the idea.
So much for Category 1, shops (and apartments) changing. Before I go to Category 2 (shops disappearing), here are some thoughts on the economics of bread.
Every morning at 6:30 a ponderous barge briskly backs up along the rio de Sant’Ana, with huge roaring, till it reaches an open space to park. One of the two men aboard jumps ashore, loads a few plastic boxes containing variously shaped bread onto his handtruck, and rolls it rapidly toward the Coop supermarket on via Garibaldi.
Exactly five minutes later he has returned with the empty boxes and the barge is roaring its way forward (there is no space to turn around) out of the canal.
This phenomenon interests me because the barge is enormous, yet by the time it gets to us it is carrying a load that would qualify as almost nothing. Seems like a heck of a boat to use for that small a cargo, but let’s say that this is the last stop, and that the run started at 4:00 AM with ten stops and eight tons of bread. That’s not exactly my point. It seems like a huge expenditure for a small return, but clearly the formula is working fine.
My point, however clumsily expressed, is that this is a proverbial coal-to-Newcastle situation. Within the area of about two city blocks, there are three full-time bakeries turning out bread every morning as the handtruck from who knows where rolls by. So in my primitive lizard brain, anybody who’s in favor of keeping local businesses alive ought to consider the possibility of the local bakeries supplying the supermarket, though I realize that’s slightly nuts because people could just go buy the bread straight from the baker.
So why do people buy bread at the Coop when they could buy it up the street at Crosara? Because it’s cheaper, of course. But it isn’t as good. So at the intersection of price, quality and convenience (bakeries close in the middle of the day), we see the bread on the truck at dawn a mere half hour before the first bakery opens.
Hence the eternal decision is ever-present on via Garibaldi: Save 5 cents per kilo on my daily bread even though it tastes like styrofoam, or spend the 5 cents more on something divine just out of the oven. Venice will be making money somehow in any case, because that’s the way it is.
Speaking of little shops, we come to Category 2, the most poignant witness to how Venice has changed: Shops that have closed forever. In your wanderings around the city you may have seen, but not observed, them. They are everywhere, mute witnesses to crafts and businesses and livelihoods and families that made Venice a place where life was vivid and intimate and dense.
Campo Ruga was bound together by shops; almost all the doors at street level led to some sort of business. A friend of mine who was born here could tell me, door by door, what used to be there. “The milk shop…the shoe repair…the fish seller…” Now they are apartments, or storerooms, or small offices, or nothing.This small corner shop at #128 brings new meaning to the word “closed.”
Adjacent streets were one shop after another, on both sides of the street, as you see.
One of the best hardware stores in the city, in my opinion. Gone.Campo Do Pozzi is a monument to the way almost every campo was when Lino was a boy. Literally every door and window around the campo belonged to a shop of some sort. This is the north side.Campo Do Pozzi looking east. Gaze at this and populate it with everybody who lived here and did the shopping here every day, throw 20 or 30 kids outside to play, and you might get a faint sense of how, as the saying goes, “Stavamo meglio quando stavamo peggio” (We were better off when we were worse off).South. This was a butcher shop. The street on the right, Calle del Forno, was obviously the location of a bakery.West side.
Whatever this shop was, it closed before the last Ice Age.
Take your pick, you’ve got a whole street of defunct shops. These are long since deceased, but the lockdown of March-June 2020 and the few tourists who came during the summer forced many businesses to close.“Do you have a shop?? You have to die!!” So begins this cri de coeur from one merchant, reminding us of the crushing expenses even your little enterprise has to face. “Income: 500 euros per day, 120,000 euros per year. Annual expenses: IVA on sales (value-added tax, since 1968) 20,000; buying stock 60,000; rent 12,000; INPS-INAIL (Social Security) 4,000; accountant 1,500; electricity 2,000; store sign and cash register 2,000; trash collection 1,200; telephone 500; IRAP Regional impost for productive activity and local taxes 2,000; 5% perishability of merchandise 3,000. Total expenses 108,200. Gross income 11,800. IRPEF income tax 4,000. Annual net profit 7,800. Work 12 hours per day for six days of the week to earn, if things go well, 650 euros a month. And you hope you don’t get sick.”
So whenever you see a dead store, remember that it, and all the others, kept Venice alive until basically yesterday. Lino says it repeatedly: “Every time you go over a bridge you’re going from one island to another, and every island had everything it needed, right there.”This dry-goods store near Sant’ Aponal was the only place in Venice where I could find the socks that Lino likes. It was obviously a neighborhood fixture, but it couldn’t last forever. I don’t know which factors determined their decision (rent? grandchildren?). At least the owners left a farewell note that might have applied just as well to every closed shop in Venice, if the owners had the heart to write anything. I translate: “The shop’s voyage has now reached its end. Here, at the end of the line, we want first of all to thank our clients who believed in us, who appreciated the work and the products, who have chosen at the shop items for special days of their lives, but also for the daily routine which has offered us friendships, esteem, gave us smiles and satisfaction, company, laughs, the grapevine, gossip, coffee, words of comfort and compliments. Have a good life and smiles and joy always to all of you! Angela, Raffaella, and Flavia.”
The triangular red notice-boards of the Biennale have returned to their ancestral homes in the neighborhood. Here’s an important one, front and center in via Garibaldi.
If there’s one term (among many) that has become fashionable around here this year it’s ripresa — recovery. (Not to be confused with “Recovery Plan,” which is exactly what Italians call the mega-component financial scheme that will somehow reassemble our dismembered economy. Does saying it in English give it some occult power? Wish I knew somebody I could ask.) I would have suggested “comeback,” like for some devastated boxer staggering back into the ring, but whatever you want to call it, everybody’s trying to get back to normal.
Over the past two weeks or so, there have been tiny but unmistakeable signs of life such as gradual lessening of curfew, gradual increase of shops and restaurants opening, etc. We still have to wear masks, though not everybody does, but the only thing missing from a cartoon version of life here right now is birds swooping around with little hearts floating upward.
So I’ve been enjoying the tiny signs — more every day — that belong to life as we used to know it. And many of them are connected to the imminent reopening of the Biennale on May 22 (canceled last year, along with its millions of euros from the municipal budget).
Being that our neighborhood is the epicenter of Biennale activity, of course I’d be seeing things such as enormous crates on barges with cranes being unloaded in the exhibition zone, unknown people wearing unusual clothes just standing on bridges looking around, a person here or there with lots of video or camera equipment, or the ticket booth for the vaporettos about to start selling tickets again, ever more individuals dressed in black with a lanyard and plastic-sleeved document around his/her neck. Press, I presume. More water taxis. Gondolas with people in them. I saw a woman today walking around with a big paper map of the city. Boy, that takes me back.
Let’s also notice the soundtrack: The scrapey clatter of rolling suitcases outside the window, the constant low rumble of motors everywhere. All you need is a barge with three cement mixers aboard trying to get somewhere against the tide and you’ll hear what I mean, but the noise from even smaller motors gets to be big, when there are enough of them. This is one part of the Sound of Venice I did NOT miss during quarantine. But here we are.
So generally speaking non-Venetians are returning to their Venice, and we are sliding back into ours, invisible again. We are all side by side, but we are not in the same city. I’ve commented elsewhere on these parallel tracks of life here that never meet, and so that’s a part of normal that is ineluctable.
Not only is the day after tomorrow Opening Day for the Biennale; the following Saturday will be the opening of the week-long Salone Nautico, or Boat Show, in the Arsenal. So bring on the people. I guess we’re ready.
I’ve really missed the yachts; I look them up online to see what they’re like inside. Monsters such as this are moored here, not for their voyagers (this babe costs 238,000 euros per week) but as the perfect venues for really important Opening Weekend parties. It — or perhaps Plan A? — will probably be back for the same reason at the end of August for the film festival.This restaurant was created a year ago February in what was the only shoe store in via Garibaldi. As soon as lockdown hit, it closed up and has never opened since then until this week. Getting all spiffed up and ready for hungry art-lovers. I think basil plants instead of flowers is an outstanding idea. Also, they say green is the color of hope.This Eastern European man is a staple at the entrance to the Giardini, playing the old favorites (including “My Way,” my oldest unfavorite, but also the tango music from “Scent of a Woman”) to a modest recorded accompaniment. He had disappeared for a year, because who was around to give him money? The fact that he’s back is a huge sign of better things on the way.Shapeless whimsy is seeking fame and fortune — the Biennale’s back and boy, is Venice glad.You start with a plinth of some sort and work up. No way of guessing what might be due to be put here, we’ll just have to wait and be surprised.The meaning of this will be revealed in due course, though perhaps not by me. At the moment, it’s sitting there in its perfect shape, though its relevance to “How will we live together?” is not immediately evident.I have no way of knowing whether bags of mulch are a work of art — it’s a little hard to know where to look in these areas or what to appreciate. So I’ll appreciate the mulch.
One entirely unexpected discovery, beyond the fields of the Biennale, was a collateral effect of the city’s revival: The opening of the church of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti to the public. I have only ever seen this church open for funerals, not infrequently because it was built in 1634 as part of the city hospital. (Hospitals and funerals are unfortunate companions.) We came upon this on a random afternoon wander, and seized the chance to see the church without mourners and memorial wreaths.
The church of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti is inserted into the city hospital, and is usually shut up tight, as you see here. (Foto: Abxbay on Wikipedia).
Enter the church and this is what you discover is filling the space over the front door. Meet Alvise Mocenigo (known in Italian as Luigi Leonardo Mocenigo), Admiral of the Venetian navy in the 25-year War of Candia during 1648-51 and 1653-4.You already have grasped that he was a Capitano da Mar because of his very particular hat, and his baton of command. He defeated the perennial Turkish foe at Paros and Naxos, but his qualities as a commander and as a man were evidently so remarkable that when he died even the Turks bedecked their ships with tokens of mourning for their worthy adversary.The Battle of Paros (1651).The Battle of Naxos. That rearing horse must have been the sculptor’s absolutely favorite part of the whole thing. The obelisks bear medallions representing the four medals struck in Crete to commemorate Mocenigo’s victories (Civica, Rostrale, Murale, Graminea. This will not be on the final exam.)
So modern art brings tourists, which leads to opening some spaces to lovers of old art. I might like this new normal.
Mothers are beyond comprehension. If this woman had had three other kids, I have absolutely no doubt she’d have found a way to carry them as well. Plus the groceries and a sheaf of gladioli.
Happy Mother’s Day. We pluck this day out of the calendar to slather mothers with excessive adoration, usually ignoring the reason why we feel we have to exaggerate (the reason is simply those 364 preceding days of incessant but unthanked lion-taming that mothers perform every waking and often non-waking hour.) Looking past the holiday to the reality of your average Mom’s year, you’ll have to admit that it’s not made of flowers and chocolate and lace-trimmed cards laden with poetry. Lion taming (the lion being life, not merely the children) can become un-poetic very fast, no matter how tough your mother is.
I especially want to recognize mothers’ uncanny ability to say so much using so few words. And the truly amazing thing is that mothers say the exact same things in each of the 7,139 languages in the world. The universal language is not Esperanto. It’s Momspeak.
Any Venetian of any age will recognize the common expressions listed below — as will you — either from having said them or, as a child, having heard them. And if some of these apothegms seem unreasonably violent, just remember that she was almost always driven to it. By you. If we’re being honest.
So as you read, send a silent salute to your mother, wherever she is. And I’d love to hear from anyone who was, in fact, born in a barn.
It all starts out so well. When you’ve just been born, even ladies walking out of the supermarket want to stop to admire you.Momspeak at this stage isn’t necessary yet, but the classic retorts are already prepared for whenever you might decide to start being clever.
Threats:
Vardime co te parlo. “Look at me when I’m speaking to you!”
Col vien casa to pare ghelo digo. “I’m telling your father about this when he comes home.”
Come che te go fato, te desfo! “Just like I made you, I can unmake you.” (My favorite, a sort of global, all-encompassing threat coming from the elemental source. This was one of Lino’s mother’s major standbys.)
Verzo la scatola de le tangare. “I’m opening the box that’s full of smacks upside the head.” (A tangara is a smack. This is sometimes said as a very early warning using a delicately menacing tone. Sometimes it’s enough just to say “Verzo?”)
Dai, disi calcossa! Prova parlar se ti ga coragio!!! “Come on, say something! Try to speak if you’ve got the courage!”
Baby steps. Momspeak isn’t much use at this stage, but it soon will be.
Ti pol pianzer in grego, tanto no te lo compro. “You can even cry in Greek, I’m still not buying it for you.”
Vara che te cambio i conotati! “Watch out, I’m going to change your face” (“conotati” are the features of your face, thus “beat you up”).
Mothers are the source of everything: costumes, food, hugs, Carnival confetti…
Vara che quela xè la porta. “Look, that over there is the door.” (Meaning you’re invited to depart by it.)
No sta far che vegna là to pare! “Don’t do it or your father will be coming over there.”
Vara che te meto in colegio! “Watch out, I’m going to put you in the reformatory.”
Happy in a world of their own, but their mothers’ legs aren’t far away.Will there be repercussions? Mothers know that no child has yet been born who can resist a puddle, however small. But mothers are allergic to mud…
Domestic remarks:
I to amissi no ga minga na famega? “Your friends haven’t got families?”
Ti ga sentio quelo che te go dito! “Did you hear what I just said?”
Ma ti credi che mi fassa i schei de note? “You think I print money at night?”
Mi a la to età gero zà stufo de lavorar. “At your age I was already fed up with working.” (This sounds more like something a man would say to a slightly spoiled or slothful child, but I wouldn’t doubt that a mother might say the same thing.)
In Venice, if you see kids you’ll almost certainly see moms. They may be engrossed in their own conversations with other mothers, but they’re using that mother radar to monitor the entire campo.
No sta strassinar i pìe. Also: No sta savatàr. “Don’t drag your feet.” “Savatar” is a verb created from zavata (ciabatta), or house slipper. Thus “Don’t scuff around as if you were wearing slippers.”
Te par che xe ora de rivar? “You think this is the right time to arrive?” (that is, come home). Said sarcastically when the obvious answer is “No, it’s screamingly late and I have no excuse.”
Ti vedara co noghe sarà più la serva. “You’ll see (how things are) when you don’t have the servant (female gender) anymore.”
Cò moro mì ti mor da la fame. “When I die, you’ll die of hunger.”
Magna e tasi! “Eat and be quiet.”
This bar/cafe/bacaro near San Zaccaria reinforces the classic sentiment by adding an extra word from the bartender. Now it reads “Eat Drink Be Quiet.” Not “quiet” as in the serenity of the cloister, but more along the lines of “Zip it! Stuff a sock in it!”
Questa xè la casa de la lasagna…. Chi che no lavora no magna! “This is the house of lasagna — who doesn’t work doesn’t eat.” The point is the rhyme as much as the statement.
Ti ga proprio ciapa’ esempio dai piu’ sempi. “You’ve really taken the dumbest people as your example” (that is, of all the people you could have copied, you picked the dumbest ones).
On the first day of elementary school, the clothes and aprons are clean, as are the new backpacks. Parents’ phones flash, commemorating the event. Mothers hover. Small lumps of advice and encouragement are being tossed around by assorted relatives and friends.It’s odd to see a child out on his own, but mother radar must be tracking him.
General insults:
Bon da gnente come el pantan! “Good for nothing, like mud.”
Varda el trio paloma: dò inseminii e uno in coma! “Look at the paloma trio: two idiots and one in coma.” The point is obviously the rhyme, but hitting three victims with one invective is motherly target practice at its best. “Inseminio” (in-sem-eh-NEE-oh) is a very common, usually friendly, insult. Nothing to do with insemination, it comes by way of scimunito, meaning fool. It’s a low-voltage jibe, which one source says is used “when a person near you does something irrational based on ignorance, little knowledge or inexperience.”
Te vorìa un poca de Russia a ti. “What you need is a little bit of Russia.” This is heavy artillery. The inference is from the Second World War, meaning that you need to be seriously squared away, perhaps by intense discipline, suffering, defeat — any aspect of the appalling experience the Italian Army suffered during Operation Barbarossa (the doomed German attempt to conquer the Soviet Union that ended hideously in the depths of winter, naturally). This expression may be losing some of its power by now, as the generations pass, though its significance is still clear enough. Father Gastone Barecchia, who was priest of the church of San Sebastiano and passed away in 2016 at the age of 102, served as military chaplain in Russia from July 1941 to March 1943.
Vergognite che xè ora e tempo! “It’s about time you were ashamed.”
No ti te vergogni minga! “You’re not the least bit embarrassed.”
Varda che te tendo. “Look out, I’m watching you.”
Gò un fio solo e anca ebete! “I’ve got just one son and he’s even dimwitted.” (Pronounced EH-beh-teh.) The implication is “Not only did I have only one child” (bad), “he had to be dimwitted too” (even worse). In other words, she’s saying she got screwed twice.
Somebody please explain to me why we so often take them for granted. Mothers are incredible.
