Venice: I am not making this up

Let’s lighten up

April 9, 2021 21 Comments

The big picture (of the world, life, etc.) is still being painted in various gradations of grim — we are in various gradations of lockdown till May, just to give an example — but all it takes is a walk (or a vaporetto ride) and two open eyes to discover a whole world of strange out there. Strange is refreshing, so have a look.

It all started a few weeks ago when I walked past this door. This arrangement makes no sense.

I could have stood there for an hour gazing at this but I wouldn’t have been any closer to understanding it. I realize that the flowers can’t be in front of the door, that’s obvious. But when did the railing come on the scene, and more to the point, why is it opposite the door? The door has always been on the right. I see that the door opens outward, so it might have blocked the hand reaching for support. Closest I can come is that Aunt Maria Rosa Addolorata died and it cost money to remove the railing, so the family left it, and so did the new tenants. Anyway, the railing and the plants seem to have decided that seeing as they’re in the majority, the door is going to have to adapt to them somehow. This stalemate appears permanent.

Rowing with a baguette? This entrancing vision is promoting, in a quintessentially Venetian way, the take-out services of the Rizzo chain of bakery and gastronomic shops. “Lunch at work?” the poster says. “We can think about it!” As in: Just leave it to us, we’ll be the ones to organize and plan and provide, all you have to do is eat and pay. Not in that order.

Continuing on the theme of food, these fresh tuna steaks are gorgeous. The sign uses all the important key words, no need for whole paragraphs: “Tuna. Red. Alive. Local.” Skipping “red” — one can see that — I stop to stare at “*vivo*.” Alive? This is pushing me into deep philosophical waters. Does this mean it’s so fresh it might as well be alive, an interesting concept if seen from the tuna’s point of view? Or is it the red that’s alive, which seems like a pointless remark to make when you can already see that this is a red that could give Venetian scarlet some serious competition. Vendors will often add “fished” to make clear that it was caught, and not farmed. But live slices of dead tuna, or dead slices of once-alive tuna — nope. We bought a piece and grilled it. It didn’t taste alive. Were we cheated?

This is primal polenta and I haven’t encountered anything that resembles its elemental perfection in any restaurant. This is home cooking straight from Lino’s childhood. First, you make real (not instant) polenta in his mother’s deep copper pan, stirring for 40 minutes. The result is soft but solid (out in the world, it’s either one or the other). Butter from the Alps, grated parmesan cheese — technically, its lowland twin, *grana padana*. Take a forkful of polenta, dip it in the well of melting butter, dab it into the cheese, to which it sticks, and eat. This could be dinner, as far as I’m concerned. No disrespect to the cook, but this is a very tough act to follow.

This poster is a dauntless relic of the shop it decorates, now extremely closed. As an advertisement for truffles, it obviously bounces off “A diamond is forever,” the famous advertising slogan for De Beers diamonds created by genius copywriter Mary Frances Gerety in 1948 and still in use today. She died in 1999, so she was spared this vision of creative sloth. Besides, what does it mean? Of course a truffle isn’t forever — you’re supposed to eat the dang thing. No food is forever, unless you count frozen mammoth wedged into the permafrost. They might as well have written “This is not a truffle” — homage to Rene’ Magritte: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

Venice is just full of things that aren’t. First we have a truffle that wants to make sure you know it isn’t a diamond, and here we have the recycling set out on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday, obviously one of the days that paper is picked up. So is the paper in a paper bag? Of course not. It’s in a plastic bag carefully labeled “Carta e cartone” (paper and carton), just so you know. A trash collector told me that there are people (the same people?) who put plastic in paper bags. Someday I’m going to ask somebody what they’re doing.

It’s 856 meters (2,808 feet) from the vaporetto stop at San Pietro di Castello to the far end of via Garibaldi, and in this stretch of city not only do many people pass, but they are often carrying bits of things they need to throw away. There is not one trash can. Not that I’m excusing whoever it was who decided his/her plastic cup had become a hindrance, though I have to say I feel that they deserve points for creativity and willingness to take risks to have disposed of it by jamming it into the space atop this bricola. These pilings must be three meters (nine feet) high and they’re too far from the bridge to make it likely that anybody could have leaned out to get rid of the pesky plastic.

Similar problem outside the Crosara bakery on via Garibaldi. Also a similar solution, the old just-jam-it-anywhere move. Like the bricola, it’s fairly high up. Somebody brought a ladder? They think if it’s up high nobody will see it? Because I can promise that the trash collector isn’t going to see it.

It’s a plastic drinking glass containing tea of some sort. It appears that the brand is Estathe’. Must check from time to time to see if swallows are nesting in it or something.

I see that the house-number painter did not consider the space at the center of the arch to be sufficient. I myself wouldn’t have drawn that conclusion, but I failed geometry. In any case, even if it was done decades or centuries apart, I admire the artistic sensibility that made the numbers lean toward each other. It could so easily have gone the other way.

I can’t explain the fascination of this little scene. Of course I was curious to discover what she was perusing so very carefully; something about her clothes, or the battered condition of the tiny book, gave me a strange impression of an immigrant arriving at Ellis Island 150 years ago. Naturally I tried to make out what was written as I passed by, but no. The pages have kept their secret for a long time, by the look of it; I hope she found whatever or whoever she was looking for.

On another day, another vaporetto, I discovered a brand of shoes I’d never heard of before: “Scarpa.” This is a very common Venetian last name (actually comes from Pellestrina). Kayak champion Daniele Scarpa won an Olympic gold medal. architect Carlo Scarpa is world-famous. That’s all fine till you stick it on a shoe. It means “shoe.”

I thought it was runny paint and was going to file this in the “You had one job” folder. But it’s not paint; it’s soot from the coal fires of yesteryear that dribbled out with the condensation of humidity inside the chimney. Lino recognized it immediately. His father was a train driver for the state railway, back when the trains were still steam-powered, and one of his perks was an allowance of anthracite each month for their home. But people used many different grades of coal or charcoal.

Everybody’s chimney looked like this, to one degree or another.

Street of the Chimneysweeps. (Sorry I didn’t have time to wait for the sun to move; the word is *scoacamini*.) Lino remembers that they worked in pairs, and walked along the neighborhood streets carrying a ladder and calling out; if you needed them, you just nabbed them then. None of this making appointments. Many people walked around crying their wares; the *gua*, or knife-grinder, for example, or the old man who called out “*Strasse, ossa o fero vecio da vender*” (rags, bones or old iron to sell). You’d bring out a newspaper full of bones you’d saved, or some old nails you’d scavenged, and so forth, and he’d weigh them and pay you.

I saved the best for last. I noticed this girl as we waited for the vaporetto. What struck me at first wasn’t her Anouk Aimee/Amal Clooney vibe but her legs. Was she tattooed? Scarred? I got up to look closer. No, it’s some design on the tights themselves. It’s … words?

Words indeed: It’s Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. Written on her legs. First-rate gams that don’t need sonnetry to make you look at them, but I have to say that anybody who walks around with Shakespeare on her stems has reached a level of panache I can only dream of. For the record, she is a German university student who bought them somewhere here, and she shot my day into an entirely new orbit.

Uncategorized

Happy Easter

April 3, 2021 10 Comments

Easter chocolate eggs germinating sugar flowers.

Or to my non-Christian friends, happy whatever spring-time commemoration you observe.
The operative word is “spring.” As in “budding flowers and fruits.” We have them all over Venice and environs. So please accept these images in the spirit of reawakening, and let us continue to hope for the best.

Peach blossoms from Sicily. I watch for them every year.

Lemon-buds waiting to blossom, seen on a lemon tree in a big pot at the Rialto Market.

You don’t only see spring here, you eat it. Some of the earliest delicacies are (clockwise from upper left): Bruscandoli, or wild hops; carletti, the leaves of the unhappily named bladder campion; asparagus; and the slim strands of “barba di frate” (friar’s beard). Get them when you see them, because they’re not staying long.

A small fig tree getting to work on Sant’ Erasmo.

Uncategorized

Bells at 4:00

March 27, 2021 8 Comments

“Nuovo Trionfo,” the only extant trabaccolo I’m aware of, decked out with the mast dressed or, as they say it in Italian, with the gran pavese. There’s a story behind that expression, but not right now.
The trabaccolo was for centuries the everyday cargo-transport workhorse of the upper Adriatic; Lino remembers them still working when he was a boy.

There ought to have been colossal festivities on March 25; after all, a city doesn’t turn 1,600 years old every day. Or millennium.

But 1600-year birthday parties are impossible to pull off in the middle of a big fat Red Zone, so what we had on Thursday (as mentioned in my last) was a solemn mass in the basilica, and bells at 4:00. Thousands of greetings and messages inundated social media, and any official you could name seized his or her chance to offer trite yet heartfelt remarks on the city’s age, beauty, fragility, grandeur, historic importance, and the need to protect, love, honor and cherish Venice forever, like some wonderful marriage vow.

Word was that church bells would be ringing everywhere in the city at 4:00, but we headed to the Piazza San Marco. The atmosphere was so low-key you might almost have missed it — no sense of accumulated emotion, only scatterings of people in what I’m now used to seeing as a vast empty box. Critical mass is beyond our capability these days, though it is years since we’ve seen all three flags flying in front of the basilica.

Here is my very amateur (yet heartfelt) video of the event. Because of space limitations on such files here, I have had to stop the video before the bells stopped ringing. I wish I could have cut out those very irksome episodes of shaky hands, but just put it down to emotion this time. I hope you feel the moment in spite of it.

The three worthy men who stroll in are Francesco Moraglia, the Patriarch of Venice (black cassock), with Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor, on his left and Vittorio Zappalorto, the Prefect, on his right.

For anyone who prefers still photographs, here are a few snaps.

Half an hour before bell-tolling time, not everybody in the Piazza periphery was interested in the ringing. These moms have been instructed to tend the scooters while their tiny ladyships proceed. They’re walking away from the Piazza, so bells evidently have lost their power to entice.

Further along the edge of the Piazza we find a private security guard standing watch, so to speak, over the corralled chairs of the Caffe Todaro. I wouldn’t have thought a guard would be necessary, but there he is.

I can hear this little girl telling her great-grandchildren “Yes, I was in the Piazza San Marco on the city’s 1600th birthday. It was the first time I managed to pick up my red ball.” History — it’s everywhere.

The mayor has put on his ceremonial sash, and the three stand there with the rest of us, all listening to the bells.

Hope to see more people here on the 1,601st birthday.

Venetian History

Happy Birthday, Venezia

March 24, 2021 4 Comments

I should look so good at 1600 years old.

This will be quick: On March 25, Venice will begin what is planned to be a year-long celebration of its 1,600th birthday. (March 25, 421 AD was the beginning of Year One, according to later calculations. In any case, it was the laying of the first stone of the church of San Giacometo at Rialto.)

Strictly limited by pandemic restrictions, the festivities will begin at 11:00 AM on March 25 with a solemn mass in the basilica of San Marco celebrated by the Patriarch of Venice. My source says that you can watch this on the network Antenna 3 or on the Facebook page of Gente Veneta, a diocesan magazine.

That afternoon at 4:00 PM, all of the 130 churches in Venice will be ringing their bells. I don’t know if that will be broadcast. I’ll be outside with fingers in my ears.

In the evening at 6:30 PM on Rai 2 streaming, will be a concert from La Fenice entitled “Venezia 421-2021.”

I haven’t studied any further details, but for those who’d like to try to watch these two events, happy streaming. Note that until Saturday night, Venice is 5 hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Daylight time (thus, 11:00 AM here is 6:00 AM in Bat Cave, North Carolina).

Meanwhile, some beauty to get you in the mood.