Venice: I am not making this up

Acqua alta: here we go again

March 3, 2010 2 Comments

If there’s one thing people everywhere know about Venice, it’s that sometimes those romantic canals try to barge into your house.

This is the kind of image that is often presented as "the end is nigh" for Venice. As you see, the man is having hysterics.

Rather than “flooding,” Venetians call this acqua alta, or “high water” (literally “high tide”). Or, depending on how deep it’s likely to be, sometimes they call it “acqua in terra,” or “water on the ground,” which is less dramatic and often more accurate.

I’ve got water on the brain at the moment because night before last, the warning siren sounded again. It indicated the lowest predicted level, one out of four, which was nice, and in the end we barely got any at all. With rare exceptions, acqua alta, more than being some kind of apocalyptic affliction, as it is often portrayed, is really a low-grade nuisance. If it happens often, as it has this winter, it becomes as annoying as any other uninvited guest who doesn’t realize it’s time to go home.

There are so many notions people have about high water, based on the generally inaccurate and overwrought accounts in the press, that I thought I’d review and readjust a few of them.

It’s always happening, or likely to happen. Not really. This winter we’ve had more acqua in terra (again, not really what I’d call “alta”) more often than many other winters. On the other hand, there have been years when I haven’t put my boots on even once. Yet all kinds of claims keep being thrown around in stories written about this little phenomenon. The website of the basilica of San Marco states that water begins to flood the Piazza San Marco, just in front of the church, 250 days a year. Check my math, but that works out to 8 months. A photo caption on the National Geographic website claims that Venice has high water ten times a month. That’s crazy talk.
It creates, or will create, really big, really bad problems.
If for some reason your kids (or somebody else's) don't have boots, high water can be somewhat demanding. Then again, why don't they just go barefoot? I've done it and I'm still alive.

I’m not sure what people think those might be, but the words “acqua alta” seem to inspire a lot of hyperventilating outside Venice (and even inside Venice, mostly from merchants around the Piazza San Marco). I’m not saying that having to put the stuff in your store up on higher shelves isn’t annoying, or that having to sweep out the receding brackish water and then wash the floor with fresh water isn’t annoying. But in 9 cases out of 10, the situation doesn’t exceed the annoyance level — not much worse than having to shovel the snow out of the driveway for the fiftieth time this winter.
It’s going to be alarmingly deep. Those fun photos of people rowing boats in the Piazza San Marco don’t ever show how deep the water actually is. (In fact, those boats can be rowed in four inches of water.) Venice isn’t flat as a griddle — the streets undulate as much as the water does, which you discover when the water comes ashore. There can be dry spots even in a wet street.
The entire city’s drowning. The municipal tide center reports that when the tide is predicted to reach 110 cm above mean sea level, 14 percent of Venice has water on the ground. And that that might not be a depth of more than an inch or two. Fourteen percent doesn’t strike me as an immense area, and several percentages of that would always be the Piazza San Marco, the lowest point in the city.
When the water starts to rise in the Piazza San Marco, it looks like this. Sometimes it doesn't get any higher than this amount. I guess you could say Venice was flooding, but there are still plenty of dry spots left.
It’s going to hurt you, or hurt something. Not that I’ve noticed. Acqua alta is nothing like real floods. Rivers overflowing their banks in torrential rainstorms are dangerous; tsunamis are dangerous. With acqua alta, nobody dies. People survive, buildings survive, art works are fine. The water rises very gently, even politely. Despite the distraught tones in which the event is almost always reported, I still don’t understand why the mere term seems to have acquired such a menacing overtone.
If the water rises near a low sidewalk, it flows over the edge. It's even more common -- as here in the Piazza San Marco -- for it to come up through the storm drains. Naturally it also goes out the same way.

Acqua alta is not dangerous. It’s not even especially upsetting. In my experience, if it happens more than a few times, though, it can begin to seem like a two-year-old who’s gotten into the “Why?” groove. Nothing wrong with it, really, except that it gets to be irritating. The kid turns three, and spring and summer come, and all of this fades from memory.

In my next post: A few real-life aspects of acqua alta which tend to mitigate its fearsome reputation.

True, this was not one of our most amusing moments. And it didn't stop there, nor did our impressive barrier do much good to keep it out. This was once in six years. — True, this was not one of our most amusing moments. And it didn't stop there, nor did our impressive barrier do much good to keep it out. But this has happened only once (for about two hours) in the six years we've lived here.

If you were looking for a new apartment and saw this, you might think twice. The barrier you could kind of accept, but a pump as well? Not good.

Venetian-ness

Overheard

February 24, 2010 5 Comments

One of the great things about staying pretty much in one neighborhood is that as I walk around doing the eternal mundane little things of life — which are just as mundane here as anywhere else, I’m sorry to say — I sometimes have the sensation of being carried along on a gentle current of badinage. Sometimes it’s complaining, sometimes not, but the art of quip and banter has been honed here to a comfortable edge that doesn’t draw blood. It depends on your tone of voice.

It’s a skill you’d expect to find developed in any small area where people have known each other for a long time (convent, factory, school, office, etc.) and can’t really avoid each other.

Truckers and haulers -- which is what Queequeg and his friends here are -- are famous for their repartee in most parts of the world, except when they have to concentrate.

This morning we went into the pharmacy; someone was there to get something for a strained muscle. After some conversation about this item or that, he decided, paid, and turned to leave. “I don’t know,” grumbled the client/patient, somewhat loudly, “it seems like I’ve got just one pain after another.”

Filippo the pharmacist has undoubtedly heard this far too many times. “Pains are like money,” he bounced back: “The more you’ve got, the more you keep.” Was that comforting, or did laughing just make the person feel better? I wonder if they teach you these witticisms in pharmacy school. I hope not. I’d rather think he made it up.

We moved on to the butcher shop, where the ever-smiling Marcello was doing his usual micro-surgery on shapeless masses of meat. It’s kind of hypnotic to watch him work, using just the right knife of just the right length and shape and sharpness, deftly stripping away strata of fat and dislodging inappropriate pieces of bone.

He smiled at us. “By now the knife can do it all by itself,” he said, smiling at our fascination.

“Well, you need hands that know what they’re doing,” Lino remarked.

“Sure,” Marcello replied. “But after 50 years, it’s like there are little eyes on the point of the knife.” A self-guiding butcher knife; a knifebot. I like it.

Then there are plays on words. I realize this may be hopelessly hard to explain, but I heard it just yesterday, and not for the first time — a minor quip that was probably funny the first ten times or so, back in 1329. You might need to have already had a few to find it amusing anymore. Here goes:

“La porta” means “the door.” “La” also means “she,” or “you” addressed to a female. “Porta” can also mean “bring” or “carry.”

So on the vaporetto, it is happening more and more often that someone entering or leaving doesn’t shut the sliding door. In the winter, this is rude and also kind of dumb (is it not obvious that these doors aren’t automatic?? Does the freezing wind somehow not touch that person?). These will be the same people — or their relatives — who, when we are suffocating with heat and humidity in the depths of July, will make a point of closing the door.

But it’s winter, and the door’s open, and sometimes a person (Venetian) near the door will just get up and close it. Or sometimes an exasperated passenger will call out to the offending party: “La porta!” (The door!)

To which someone else (Venetian), feeling frivolous, might respond: “Un litro!” (A liter). Saying this has instantly shifted the scene from a frigid, real vaporetto to a warm and stuffy imaginary osteria, where the men clustered around a table playing cards would be very likely utter the same exclamation, but in this case “A liter” means “Bring us a liter of wine.”

Maybe I’ve crushed the humor, but thought I’d give it a try. I think it’s funny.

Then there was the other morning. I was standing in line at the cash register at the little super-low-price supermarket wedged back into a corner of the campo behind and beyond us, a remote locale not far from the geographical frontier past which there are only sea monsters, just before you drop off the edge of the world.

Then you eventually reach the point where you don't even have to talk anymore.

The man in front of me, a grizzled, generic sort of retired working-class dude, had put his few items on the conveyor belt and the young man at the cash register had picked up one of them, a small plastic bottle of honey. I tuned in at the moment when the cashier had decided (I don’t know why) that he needed to explain how the nozzle-top worked. Perhaps the man had inquired, though he didn’t look like the type that would even have noticed it had a nozzle. Or cared.

“So you just take off the top, like this,” the cashier was saying, “and turn it over, and squeeze, and out comes just however much you need,”

“Oh this isn’t for me,” the man replied. God forbid anyone should think he had degenerated to the point of eating honey. “This stuff is for my wife.”

“So you don’t eat anything calling for honey in the morning?” the cashier confirmed in a friendly way.

“God no,” the man said. “I have a mortadella sandwich and a glass of red wine.”

This makes me smile. First, because it’s kind of a distinctive breakfast concept (I’m guessing it would be the “Canal-Dredger’s Special” on the coffeehouse menu). And second, because it sounded normal. Not good, not healthy, not to be recommended under any circumstances — but totally normal. Not only do I know that this is absolutely what he would have been expected to have in the morning (mortadella, being probably the cheapest cold cut you can get, sometimes goes by the nickname of the “plasterer’s prosciutto”). I don’t even see anything … how can I put this … wrong with it. I mean, I wouldn’t have it — but I wouldn’t not have it, either.

When you can look at something and grasp it as being both weird and normal, you’ve been wherever you are for too long. If I were a police officer they’d long since have rotated me out, sent me somewhere on the dark side of Sardinia. But here I am.

Events, History, Problems, Tourism

Carnival: mopping up

February 19, 2010 No Comments

You thought Carnival was over with the sprinkling of the ashes on penitential hairdos? Not quite.

Carnival doesn’t slink away under cover of darkness when the marangon, the basso profundo bell in the campanile of San Marco, tolls midnight on Martedi Grasso. Two things have to happen for it to really be over — in my opinion, that is. Two things which are more predictable than the swallows returning to Capistrano.

One of the regular car ferries is engaged for the carnival trucks.

The first is the pulling apart and hauling away of the traveling amusement park (what they generically call a “Luna Park” here) which has been gracing the Riva dei Sette Martiri since — I believe — early December.

These people (as in much of the world) are almost exclusively families which have dedicated many generations to the setting up, operating, pulling down, and rolling on to the next location of their ride or concession stand.

After three months, I’m going to miss the smell of the hot-doughnut-frying-oil and the screeching of the children. It was fun strolling along the waterfront late every afternoon to mingle and kibitz. And I am convinced that as long as there is at least one small child walking home carrying a small plastic bag containing water and a goldfish, the world will not come to an end.

All this concentrated traffic is a lot to ask of a stretch of walkway which is made of small stones atop packed damp sand.

Anyway, the men start work early on Ash Wednesday morning, and by Thursday morning the funfair is gone. The only sign they’ve ever been here are the patches of new cement filling the holes in the pavement where their big rigs (or something) went astray.

Speaking of itinerant carnies, I went to the small town of Bergantino a few years ago when I was working on a story about the Po River (National Geographic, May, 2002). This former farming town has, since the Twenties and much more since the Sixties, become dedicated to the design, construction, and (eventually) operation of carnival rides — merry-go-rounds, bumper cars, etc. Despite the town’s modest size — it’s really just a village of some 2,000 people, when they’re all there, I mean, and not out on the road — they’ve carved away a heavy slice of this international industry for Italy. One of the major markets for their inventions is the USA.

Well, wherever they’ve gone, I’m already missing them.

The second element of the end of Carnival is the orgy of articles, editorials, and letters in the Gazzettino reviewing, celebrating, and vilifying the festivities just concluded. I can tell you without even having opened the paper that there will have been too many people for this fragile city to support; that the managing of this predictable overload will have shown inexcusable organizational flaws and failures to resolve the most elementary large-event necessities (toilets, in a word); that the money taken in doesn’t justify the stress and expense to the city; that it will have lacked originality and creative genius, and that for the residents and shopkeepers of Campo Santa Margherita, the ten days just concluded have been nothing less than at least six of the nine rings of hell.

And every year, the apex of all the claims and counter-claims: That this event would be (or ought to have been, or next year definitely will be) the “Carnival of the Venetians.” I saw Venetians having a fine time carnivalizing in their own modest way in various neighborhoods of the city, but not in the Piazza San Marco. I’d have given you a cash prize if you’d found any Venetians besides Lino in the Piazza San Marco.

Going-home time near San Marco. I count eight launches ready to load up and head back to the mainland, and this picture is only one third of the traffic panorama. This traffic is not composed of Venetians.

So when this wish to involve Venetians is mentioned, as if it were obviously a good thing, I ask myself if the speaker believes that a “Carnival of the Venetians” would have the slightest probability of pouring the millions of euros into the municipal strongboxes that all those tourists do. After all, Venetians don’t spend money on hotel rooms, restaurant meals, fancy masks, or whatever else makes Carnival matter. So frankly, what would be the point of spending money to organize a ten-day carnival for the few remaining locals? Just wondering.

Let’s go to the videotape (so to speak). Here is a smattering of the Gazzettino’s overview of Carnival 2010, as published yesterday:

The organizers claim that 150,000 people came the first Sunday; 250,000 the second Sunday (let that sink in…) and 40,000 on Martedi Grasso. Altogether, they say a total of 800,000 people came to Venice during Carnival. Perhaps not much compared to Rio, but for a city that covers a mere three square miles, not bad.

They estimate that each visitor spent 50 euros, for an exciting total income of 40 million euros. Not sure where this number came from; a professor of the Economics of Tourism at the University of Venice says that the “bite and run” day-trippers spend an average of 30 euros each day, while the more solid tourist spends 150. In any case, let’s not quibble over a million more or a million less. Restaurants and hotels certainly made money, not to mention the ACTV and their spectacularly expensive vaporetto tickets.

One new comment is by the businesspeople (especiallythose of restaurants and cafes) in the Piazza San Marco — they don’t want a maxi-stage there anymore. I’m not sure why, but I imagine it’s because it takes up too much space which needs to be available for them to put out their tables and chairs.

I could go on, but it’s probably not that interesting. These few days following Carnival are mainly spent in a sort of emotional and mental scrubbing and disinfecting.

The summary is fairly concise. Apart from numbers, claims, and counter-claims as to success or failure, as one reporter wrote, “Now the Venetians can give a deep sigh of relief and put their hands on their foreheads and say, “‘Once again we’ve lived through it.'”

Events, Food, Tourism, Venetian-ness

Ash Wednesday

February 17, 2010 No Comments

Carnival was definitely over early for the family who owns this tobacco shop; the sign on the door says they're closed for mourning. The blind left askew on the door emphasizes the point. And all that cheerful confetti has been swept up by the trash squad and left right here. Still feel like partying?

It’s not as if the city goes into mourning when Carnival is over (the merchants are too busy with their calculators to feel sad), but if you had gone out with me for a walk this morning, you wouldn’t just feel that something was missing (like, say 100,000 people). You would have the distinct sensation that you were at the bedside of a patient whose fever had finally broken and was sleeping peacfully.

A tranquillity comes over the city that is nothing less than miraculous. All that’s left to do is to clean the room and change the sweat-drenched sheets. So to speak. (I do hear some desultory sweeping going on outside.) And now we can see the simple, austere, monochromatic 40 days of Lent stretching before us.

Here’s what I won’t miss: The mighty force of the touristic masses being sucked into the city’s gullet as if through some colossal straw. The wall of humanity blocking entire streets, a good number of which had to be organized as strictly one-way. The incessant rumble of the launches hauling and re-hauling loads of countless people from the mainland to San Marco, not to mention the choking poison of their engines’ exhaust as they idle by the Fondamenta degli Schiavoni waiting for the next batch.

Here’s what I will miss: The neighborhood in full frivolity, the kids of all sizes in all sorts of costumes, their entourages of relatives, doting or beleaguered as they may be. And — you know what I’m going to say — the fritole and galani.

Lent personified during Carnival; detail from "The Battle between Carnival and Lent (Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1559).

Food seems to be the standard by which every human experience is measured here, and now we’re supposed to get serious. The list of (technically) forbidden goodies for the next month and ten days is well known and can be fairly detailed. But I narrow the “forbidden” list to two items: Fat and sugar, which means no more fritole or galani (sob). And you are expected (technically) to pretty much give up on meat, at least on Ash Wednesday and Fridays.

In this officially Catholic country where hardly anybody (it is said) goes to church anymore, today the butcher shops are closed. You’re supposed to eat fish. Or nothing, I suppose — maybe you get extra points for fasting, which wouldn’t hurt anybody after the gorge-fest we’ve been through.

We stopped by Marcello the butcher yesterday, looking for a cheap steak to eat before the culinary window slams shut on our fingers. He was busy doing brain surgery on a batch of chicken breasts so we watched his deft slittings and peelings and trimming while waiting our turn. Now that I think of it, it’s not so much brain surgery as couture tailoring.

Lino said, “I’ve always loved watching butchers work on meat. It’s a real art.”

“All the work that artisans used to do were arts,” Marcello replied. “I used to love watching the baker making bread. He could twist and tie and arrange it in all sorts of shapes. You don’t see that anymore — now it’s all stamped out by some kind of form. I’d stand there for hours to watch him.”

“You going to be closed tomorrow?” Lino asked, not having noticed the handwritten sign in the window saying “Closed Tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said Marcello. “It used to be that on Ash Wednesday all the butchers would be closed. The butchers, and the salumieri [butchers who work only with pork], and the pastry-makers. Those were the only ones to close, and we still respect that.”

No need to have mentioned the pastry-makers: it’s obvious. They are the CENTCOM of fat and sugar. They also must be worn out by now.

Even if nowadays anybody can go to the supermarket on Ash Wednesday and buy chops and ground beef and veal brains and so on, it wouldn’t really be in the spirit of the day. We’re hanging tough with vegetables, mostly. So healthy, so spiritually fortifying.

While we’re thinking of food, have you ever noticed that fasting, instead of clearing the mental decks for you to contemplate matters of the soul, usually has the opposite effect? That’s something to meditate on when you run out of repentance.

Meanwhile, we ate seppie in their ink tonight with polenta made the old-fashioned way (40 minutes of constant stirring). The seppie were so fresh that they practically smiled at us from their plastic bag — Nardo the fisherman had struck again, and we scored his last two. Technically the menu was well within the Ash Wednesday rules, but we totally violated their spirit — it was outrageously good.

I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to repent of that too.