Sensing Venice: Sound

That tenor with the Kevlar lungs  has no trouble getting your attention.   But what may be a little harder to imagine is how beautiful Venice sounds when left to her own devices.

Nothing against sight;  of all the senses, sight comes first, at least for us humans.   But sight can make  you lazy, especially in Venice.   All you have to do is open just one eye, even squinting, and you’d still see enough beauty to keep you going for months.   Which led me to believe, for quite a long time,  that being blind in Venice would be the worst thing in the world.   I mean, if you had to be blind, you might as well go live somewhere else.    Bland, Missouri.   Oil Trough, Arkansas.   Anywhere but here.

Venice in fact is doomed to be stared at,  posing for a million of the same photos every day, a life as predictable and monotonous as the typical gondolier’s.   So it’s easy to assume that it’s your eyes that you need most.

I don’t think so anymore.    Here  is how Venice sounds to me.  

IMG_7167 sounds compSilence.    There is plenty of noise all day long here, normal third-millennium racket ranging from  pneumatic drills to 40-hp motors to deafening boom-boxes in passing boats  blasting that  car-crash-torture-dungeon music.   And on summer nights, when people tend to stay out till dawn, along about 2:00 or 3:00 there is the boisterous chorus of their inane “Good-night-it-was-great-see-you-tomorrow-I’ll-call-you-okay-I’ll-text-you” comments from right outside our bedroom window, which naturally has to be open because of the heat.   You’d think somebody in the group was going off to  walk across Antarctica, the way some of them carry on.

I sometimes wonder whether anybody out on the street bothers to consider that there might be people — us, for example — behind our Venetian blinds.   But even if they did, I don’t think they’d care.   The street by our window is like Andorra, a zone free of duty — any sort of duty, like not shouting after midnight.   Public space here isn’t understood to belong to all of us.   It’s understood to belong to none of us, nobody at all.   Do whatever you want.

But there comes a mystic moment somewhere in the night when a silence suffuses the city that is almost more beautiful than Bach.   Deep.   Intricate.   Voluptuous.   It’s  not merely  the absence of noise, this silence is an element entirely its own, made of everything alive but inaudible,  the tide turning and the breeze that begins to waft from the sea and the luminous darkness itself.   The proto-morning is filled with  a silence that  could be  the distillation of every sound in the world that we can’t hear.

Blackbirds.   Just as I wait for certain flavors to appear in season, I wait for certain sounds, and  beginning in March and going on till around now, the blackbirds announce the dawn with an accuracy a chronometer could only dream of.   In fact,  I  know it’s 4:00 AM as I lie there in the dark because one blackbird will begin to sing.   One.    A single voice that’s like a flute that wants to be a crystal bell.   It’s almost more beautiful than laughter.   It is so beautiful that I challenge you to  suggest a song that could even come close.    It hasn’t been written.   And as long as there are blackbirds on earth, I really don’t care.   Too bad they got such a boring name, but I suppose calling them the “voice of angels” bird would sound worse.

A shutter opening   (or closing).    

These are working shutters -- nothing decorative or ogival about them.  Strange to say, while leaving a shutter open at night will kill you, you must open them in the morning, even if it's below freezing outside.
These are working shutters -- nothing decorative or ogival about them. Strange to say, while leaving a shutter open at night will kill you, you must open them in the morning, even if it's below freezing outside.

For me, this is one of the quintessential sounds of Venice, even more than foghorns or the bells of San Marco, God forgive me.    It is one of the elemental sounds of dawn, an intimate, homely  scraping noise ( it depends on how  old and how plumb the shutters are) followed by two  clunks as the shutters reach the outer wall.   It’s the domestic equivalent of the trumpet at Churchill Downs.  

Shutters are no mere decoration; Venetians  believe — sorry, they know — that drafts are the thin end of the health wedge.   Anything from a head cold to pleurisy, hiccups, the blind staggers,  whatever you’ve got will almost certainly have been caused by a draft that was carelessly permitted to enter.   “Colpo di finestra, colpo di balestra,” they darkly say:   “A blow (as in punch) via the window is a blow from the crossbow.”   No doubts, no discussions.   If you don’t close your shutters, you’re just asking for it.

Rolling suitcases, all sizes, from carry-ons to steamer trunks.   This is a fairly new sound which — unlike the birds and the shutters and all — the Venetians of yore might have trouble identifying.   Considering  how tourist apartment rentals have proliferated all over the  city, the suitcase-sound has become as irrevocable as the sunrise.   I will hear it  as early as 3:00 AM, if the hardy travelers are trying to make the first flight at 6:35 sharp.   (Unlikely, as that plane is going to Lyon, but they’ll almost certainly want one of the following flock of early flights to Rome, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and all those other big connection points for intercontinental flights).  

Your average rolling suitcase isn’t any happier to be up at this hour than its people are, because it makes a heavy low  grumbling noise   as it is dragged along the granite streets.   Then it goes  bumpbumpbump twelve times, up the steps of the bridge.   And twelve bumps down the other side.  

Until a few years ago, the only hotel in this precinct was a modest if overpriced  former palazzo with guests who traveled at decent hours.   But now there has been an explosion of little bijou hotels which call themselves “bed and breakfast” but which have no relation whatever to the classic British version I remember so fondly (a spare room in some little retired couple’s house).   There has been an even greater  efflorescence of apartments for rent; if you start noodling around on the Net, you might think there is no dwelling  left for Venetians, a feeling which many Venetians have begun to share.

So with all these places to stay, about ten to fifty times more people are hauling their stuff around today than even two years ago.   The second-floor apartment across the street from us — all of ten feet away — belongs to someone who rents it through a French agency, because only French people stay there.    They annoy the hoo out of the Venetians who live in the building, because they forget to close the front door, or they put  their garbage out at inappropriate times (“Well we’re leaving  before the trash is collected tomorrow,” one woman told me huffily, and I had to admit she had a point).   And they toss their cigarette butts out the window.   I never see them do it,   but I  also don’t see any excuse for it.   Every few days I go out and sweep  up all the cruddy  filters strewn between their door and ours.   (Filters — strange, I know.   They don’t make French smokers the way they used to.   Next thing you know, they’ll be drinking Coke.   Oh wait — 42 percent of the French population does drink Coke.   Well there you are.)

Via Garibaldi toward evening, not long before the kids begin to have their nervous breakdowns.
Via Garibaldi toward evening, not long before the kids begin to have their nervous breakdowns.

The sounds that shape the rest of the day depend on weather, whether or not school is in session (parents and children chattering  on their way home), when the shops close (usually between 12:30 and 1:00) which means clumps of women  form at the foot of the bridge to finish whatever it was they were discussing).   It also depends on whether or not the kids have had their naps, or snacks, or have been thwarted in some way as their blood sugar plummets.   Between 5:00 and 6:00 it seems that every toddler in the neighborhood collectively snaps, because what I used to think of quaintly as the “aperitivo hour” I have now re-labeled as the Hour of the Imploding Child.  

The invisible piano.   This is my favorite summer sound.   I’ll hear it in the early evening,  wafting out of an upper-storey apartment at the foot of via Garibaldi, behind some trees.   It’s obviously a person and not a recording because of repetitions and occasional errors, and whoever it is (man? woman?   no way to guess) plays well enough for it to be enjoyable but not so well as to be off-putting.   Chopin ballades, sonatas by Scarlatti, “Invitation to the Dance” by Weber, music my mother used to play after supper.   It makes me feel happy.

Fog is always beautiful, even if it does wreck your day's logistics.
Fog is always beautiful, even if it does wreck your day's logistics.

Foghorns.     My favorite winter sound.   There are a few unpleasant aspects to fog, of course — clothes on the line which have given up all hope of ever drying; vaporettos re-routed up the Grand Canal for safety reasons, which drastically distorts your route to wherever you need to go.   People not from Venice think that high water is a nuisance, but they’ve never seen what fog can do to your day.   Hordes of tired, hungry, harassed people accumulating on the dock at Sant’ Elena waiting for the vaporetto with the radar to finally arrive and take them the five minutes across to the Lido.   No radar, no vaporetto.   Boats used to make this little crossing all the time, now you’d think that they were facing the iceberg zone off Greenland or something.  

But when I   hear the distant foghorn, it carries more romance to me than 289 gondola rides — or even one, actually — under the Bridge of Sighs.   The occasional deeper blast from the Minoan Lines ferry arriving from Greece    — warning? threat?   — is also exciting, especially if you’re out rowing in the fog and it’s blowing at you.   This has happened to me.  

Bells.   The bells in the campanile of San Marco ring several times a day, but I pay special attention   to certain ringing.   Such as the single bell that sounds at 3:00 PM every Friday, to recall our thoughts to Good Friday and the crucifixion of Christ.   There is the midnight tolling of the marangon, the deepest of all, which you can hear from many parts of the city.   Depending on which way the wind is blowing, I’ve even heard it when we were out in the lagoon.   Deeply comforting, like the sentinel on the battlements.   The bells also ring every July 14 at 10:02 in the morning, to commemorate the epochal collapse of the campanile at that moment in 1902.  

But with the dark that sumptuous stillness (eventually) returns, permeated not only with the voices of forgotten doges but also the voices of exasperated mothers and Macedonian plasterers.

Of course it would be terrible  to be blind in Venice.   But it would be  at least as bad  to be deaf here.

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The Voice of Venice

This morning around noon — about the time the sun had begun to turn  the stone sward of via Garibaldi into a griddle — I heard in the middle distance the lyric blaring of the neighborhood tenor.

He’s tallish, and heavy-ish, and not at all decrepit even though his hair is white, and he is sometimes attended by a small entourage of drinking buddies/music-lovers.   And for some mystic reason I have never had my camera with me when the muse has struck him.  

Via Garibaldi is the perfect stage for anyone and/or thing, but our tenor has never been heard this early in the morning.  Those cadenzas require a fully hydrated voice, and hydration takes time.
Via Garibaldi is the perfect stage for anyone and/or thing, but our tenor has never been heard this early in the morning. Those cadenzas require a fully hydrated voice, and hydration takes time.

He’s not bad, actually, though the decibels he prefers lead me to think he spent several seasons somewhere singing without any microphone, or maybe he  sang opera at hog auctions.    I can picture those swine just flying out of there on the strains of    Verdi or Mascagni.  

I think he imagines the accompaniment.   Sometimes the spirit will move him to plunge into the depths of “Addio alla madre.”   This morning it was “E lucevan le stelle,” from Tosca.   He goes for the heart-rending stuff — I think it’s because the stronger the emotion, the more he gets to turn up the dial.   His friends don’t look as if their hearts were particularly rent, but they applaud anyway.

He tends not to come out when the weather is more interesting than he is.  Or maybe he's just somewhere keeping his muse warm.
He tends not to come out when the weather is more interesting than he is. Or maybe he's just somewhere keeping his muse warm.

The most  striking feature of these moments musicaux is how they just start — BANG! — and off he goes into cadenza-land.   Our man obviously doesn’t have an orchestra struggling to keep up but I’m not sure he notices that.

Like any clever performer, he retains a slight elusiveness.    Days, weeks will go by and I won’t even see him.   Sometimes I’ll see him but he’s not singing.   And then there are those times I hear him but can’t locate him.   Maybe he’s resting in  the nearest bar, which may not have been the one he was in when the sacred fire fell.  

I sometimes wonder if people make requests.   Maybe they make bets on what he’s likely to come out with next.   Or maybe they just stand back when the divine flame ignites his vocal cords.  

Not a moment that would -- or did -- call forth the
Not a moment that would -- or did -- lure Euterpe from her lair. Or favorite bar.

I’m tempted — and I will do it someday — to broach a small conversation, perhaps when he hasn’t got his claque around.   I wonder if he would be inclined to talk, or if he’d be likely to reply in arpeggios.   I, of course, would be ready with a witty rejoinder in the Lydian mode.

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Mary, waterborne

Before the month of May disappears in our mental/emotional/devotional rear-view mirrors, here’s what we did on May 31.   Which is not, obviously, Memorial Day here, but the last day of the month dedicated to  the Blessed Virgin Mary, as I’m sure you know.   Or at least, as you know now.

P1000667 corteo mad compOur neighborhood is one of the few which is still inhabited by enough people who care to maintain certain religious habits  which used to be pretty common in most parishes in Venice, but now are virtually extinct.

An example was the evening of May 24, the Feast of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice (Holy Mary the Helper): A few hardy men hoisted a large statue of Mary, surrounded by little lightbulbs, on their shoulders, and carried her from the church of San Francesco della Paola on via Garibaldi all the way to the church of San Pietro.   She and her native bearers were followed by a long procession of parishioners, including the children who had recently been confirmed (they wore their white robes and little garland crowns).   As they walked, they recited the Litany of the BVM.   The priest would say his phrase, then  they would respond with theirs, and so on, occasionally interspersing various prayers.

As per tradition everywhere in Italy, at least according to my experience, the priest’s prayers and cues were spoken with aid of an amplification system which would be happier if it could be a mule and just stop working altogether.     There are inevitably random breaks in the connection, so the flow of piety is punctuated by sudden silences, and the occasional electrical shriek.

Getting ready to row also involves a little badinage with one of the off-duty parish priests (right), in mufti.
Getting ready to row also involves a little badinage with one of the off-duty parish priests (right), in mufti.

A week later, on the evening of May 31, the visit’s over, and this imposing statue has to go home.    But this time she goes by boat.   For several years, the local rowing club, the Remiera Casteo, has organized a corteo, or boat procession, loading the priest, acolytes and sound “system” on two sturdy caorlinas, followed by whoever wants to join in.

Getting her aboard requires steady nerves and a strong back, and someone ready to keep her from toppling backward.
Getting her aboard requires steady nerves and a strong back, and someone ready to keep her from toppling backward.

The first year we participated, Lino and I came in two sandolos rowed by cadets from the nearby Morosini naval college.   That was the best version of all.    

Then the priest comes aboard.
Then the priest comes aboard.
The acolytes are already in place.  They don't have much to do, but they look great.
The acolytes are already in place. They don't have much to do, but they look great.
I think the boys liked it mainly because they got to be out after dinner.
For me, it remains special  for two reasons.

First, as we rowed under the wooden bridge  leading to San Pietro, someone standing on it was tossing rose petals  toward the boats as we passed.   We rowed through little eddies of petals in the shining twilight water.

And the caravan begins to move out.
And the caravan begins to move out.
The ecclesiastical contingent had to be divided onto two caorlinas. The microphone was on the first, the loudspeaker on the second. Maybe this explains something about the sound quality.
The ecclesiastical contingent had to be divided onto two caorlinas. The microphone was on the first, the loudspeaker on the second. Maybe this explains something about the sound quality.

Second, after the statue was safely ensconced in her church, we rowed out the rio di San Isepo and into the Bacino of San Marco to get back to the college.   The moon was so full it had completely overflowed, pouring a river of silver along our path.   Then the boys started singing.    I have no idea what the song was, though I do know that none of them will be appearing at La Scala.   But their singing was  wonderful because they were happy.

A number of people had decorated their windows with festive hangings, or even small candles on the windowsills.
A number of people had decorated their windows with festive hangings, or even small candles on the windowsills.

This year there was the usual chilly breeze — not strong, but insistent, highly annoying  — and  no rose petals.   No cadets, either.   Lino and I rowed  a two-oar mascareta from the club, which we have now joined.   The modest amount of singing was instigated by the priest, who as we turned the corner of the rio San Daniele to head down the long waterway flanking the Arsenal, segued into the classic “Mira al tuo popolo, O bella Signora” (Gaze upon your people, O lovely Lady).

Along the rio di Sant' Ana, past our house, flanked by a mass of parishioners walking along the fondamenta.
Along the rio di Sant' Ana, past our house, flanked by a mass of parishioners walking along the fondamenta.

Even in the best of times (whenever those are), this hymn has a lugubrious undertow which gives piety a bad name.   And in this case, the priest didn’t know many more of the lyrics than I do, and after the first verse he began to mangle even the bits he could remember, with the occasional improvisation.   Lino snorted.   A priest who doesn’t know the words (A) should turn in his badge and keycard or (B) not sing.   This was one situation, though, where the sudden microphonal silences didn’t really do much damage.

Two boats ahead of us, two boats behind.  That was the procession.  I still think it looked great.
Two boats ahead of us, two boats behind. That was the procession. I still think it looked great.

   Madonna safely ashore, we rowed back to the club.    There was still just enough light left in the darkening sky; we could see without having to turn on the warning flashlight,  and better yet, there were hardly any motorboats out now anyway  (it was going on toward 10:00).    We glided over small smooth waves lifted occasionally by a few larger ones, which gave me the sensation that  the lagoon had just breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction.

Or maybe that was me.

P1000722 corteo mad comp

Ready to turn left down the rio de la Tana, past the Arsenal walls.
Ready to turn left down the rio de la Tana, past the Arsenal walls.
Getting her back on dry land is only slightly less tricky than bringing her aboard.  I saw somebody almost get brained by an oar.
Getting her back on dry land is only slightly less tricky than bringing her aboard. I saw somebody almost get brained by an oar.
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Bring flowers, wear a helmet

In a city full of special news comes something even more special than usual.  

The columbarium at the municipal cemetery on the island of San Michele  is aging and deteriorating faster than some of its past and future residents.   This means that the dear departed are not resting in much peace anymore, and they’re not going to let you be  feel too serene either.

Today the Gazzettino  announced:  “If you want to go put some flowers on your loved one’s tomb, you have to wear a helmet.”  

Grieving relative takes cover.  (Credit: Il Gazzettino).
Grieving relative takes cover. (Credit: Il Gazzettino).

 

Yes, lack of money (“no ghe xe schei“) has brought us to this: A cemetery where you have to protect yourself from your relatives even after they’re dead.   Three hundred final resting places have become public hazards.

I can hear the helpful advice now, as you set out with your little bunch of chrysanthemums:

“If you’re going to visit Uncle Max today, watch out — he could be throwing  bits of rock and cement  at your head.”  

“He never liked me very much….. “

Veritas, the private agency that oversees the cemetery (and, let it be noted yet again, also  disposes of Venetian garbage), says that the necessary funds for repairing the cemetery have been allocated by the Special Fund (money being  spent on something that isn’t part of the MOSE floodgate project?   Astounding) — but that the money hasn’t been freed-up yet.  

“Dig we must.”   It takes on new resonance when the guys are drilling and backhoeing around your family.   So meanwhile, wear your hard hat.   And try to ignore the fact that the stuff that keeps falling on your head will probably not be raindrops.   It could be cousin Lola.

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