Venice: I am not making this up

A stroll in the Grand Canal

April 27, 2021 12 Comments

Let me set the scene: Below is a glimpse of a typical high-season day in the Venice of yore. Till last year, high season had spread across most of the calendar.

Just a brief refresher on what “normal” used to look like on any summer morning.

A late-summer afternoon in 2016. When I made this photograph I was concentrating on the gondolino — I was so accustomed to the traffic that only later did I notice how much there was. Does it seem like there are more taxis every year? That’s because until 2020, there were more every year. An undated overview of unscheduled water transport (i.e., not vaporettos) listed 271 taxis and 158 tourist launches.

I’m not sure why Tony Catanzaro decided to give this student a rowing lesson in the maelstrom of the bacino of San Marco, and I’ll never know if she ever came back for another one. But if you’re going to row around here, you have to find a way to deal with all this. It’s like those jungle survival courses.

Enormous tracts of Venetian water are essentially off limits to anyone rowing, unless they know how to handle the waves. It may be counterintuitive, but summer is the worst season of all for going out in a boat with oars. One can certainly renounce rowing. But when one suddenly finds the city floating in what amounts to a millpond, the way it has been for a year or so, it’s like a paper-thin silver lining to the rest of life.

Let me state that there is nothing good about the pandemic, so don’t think what I’m about to say is to be taken as positive. Except that in its tiny little way, it is.

Over the past months, the daily armies of motorized boats of all shapes and purposes and horsepowerage roaring around everywhere — particularly in the Grand Canal — have made a forced retreat. This is bad (see above), but the side effect has been a Grand Canal liberated from the appalling turmoil that had long since become normal.

Note: Barges and their cousins are still at work, but what are missing are the approximately 39,210,443 taxis and tourist launches that had claimed the waterways as their own.

Result: Space, tranquility, and calm water for Venetian boats to return to their native habitat, which they have been doing on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Perhaps also at other times, but I’m not there to see them.

So for anyone who might want to breathe the atmosphere of a watercourse that has been unintentionally restored to many Venetians who had been effectively banished for years, here are some views of our Sunday morning row in our own little boat a week ago. There were even more on Saturday, because boaty people like to go to the Rialto market, but Sundays had long since been taken over by herds of taxis thundering along one of the world’s most beautiful streets like the migration of the wildebeest in the Serengeti.

Here are some glimpses of what the Grand Canal looks like when there are more Venetians than anybody else. Enjoy it, because yesterday the Great Reopening began here, and we may have seen the last of this.

Hark! Is that a boat I see on the horizon?

Yes indeed it is, a sandolo rowed by three friends from the DLF Sport Mare rowing club. Odd numbers of rowers are not ideal in Venetian rowing, but maybe somebody couldn’t make it. Or wasn’t invited. Or maybe they just like it this way, because we saw them two days ago as well.

Approaching on the left is a pupparino from the Remiera Canottieri Cannaregio rowing club, while lurking along the right side of the canal is a sandolo from the Associazione Canottieri Giudecca. Surprising how many clubs have chosen red and white as their colors, though the reds vary. Even from this distance you’d never confuse the bordeaux tint here with the fire-engine red (not shown here) of the Unione Sportiva Remiera Francescana (full disclosure: we’re members).

Slipping up behind us is a mascareta from the Reale Societa Canottieri Francesco Querini.

I don’t exactly know the man in the bow, but I have had a little run-in with him and it appears that almost every boating person in Venice has encountered him at some point. Let’s just say he can be difficult. (Also, he likes to video his excursions; note the video cameras set up on the bow and stern of the boat.) Still, he was in a great mood and not only said hello as they went past, but called his partner to execute an alzaremi for us. Too bad their oars weren’t synchronized, and neither was I in time with my camera. But the intention was very nice.

Hark! We meet again. It’s the three from the DLF Sport Mare, heading upstream on their way back to their boathouse.

DLF Sport Mare was previously known simply as the “DLF,” Dopo Lavoro Ferroviario, the Railway Workers After-Work club. Their boathouse is up behind the railway station, of course.

A private s’ciopon being rowed “a la valesana,” with two oars per rower. The man astern is the former president of the Reale Societa’ Canottieri Bucintoro rowing club.

Coming up fast on the inside rail, so to speak, is a gondolino, also from the Bucintoro.

This is a hard boat to row in the throes of the usual Cape Horn waves around Venice, but with water like this it’s really fun.

Another mascareta, this time from the Remiera Ponte dei Sartori, has slid down the Cannaregio Canal and has turned left into the Grand Canal. Seems like everybody had the same idea this morning and I felt somehow that everyone belonged, because of course they do.

The compatriots again. Usually people row to the end of the Grand Canal and back up it again, or go home another way. It just depends on many factors ranging from the weather, the tide, how much time you’ve got for this, maybe what’s for lunch (rush home, or take the long way back….).

Querini club again. Great to see so many people out today.

Two mascaretas from the Gruppo Sportivo Voga Veneta Mestre club, on the edge of the lagoon at the end of the bridge to the mainland. They are indefatigable, especially on Saturday when batches of them row to the Rialto to check out the fish.

We went home by the back roads, so to speak, and found that some gondoliers were making the most of the lack of traffic to help their aspiring students practice rowing. On the gondola hiding just behind the corner was another gondolier with beginner aboard.

So we have swung between two extremes — the old days entailed lots of work and craziness and also hugely damaging motondoso, then the pandemic period was marked by no work, no craziness, lots of people with no money. But I will whisper this: I never would have thought I’d have the chance to feel that the city returned somehow to its origins, and it has been beyond wonderful. Whether some middle ground between the two extremes can be found will be clear only when the pandemic is well and truly over.

Venetian Events, Venetian-ness

The voyage of the bocolo

April 26, 2021 11 Comments

As everyone knows, April 25 is a big date on the Venetian calendar: Not only is it the Feast of San Marco, but also Liberation Day, commemorating the end of World War II.

Seeing that San Marco gets precedence, having been around for some years before World War II, I like to focus on that part of the big day. And arguably the most important element is the long-stemmed red rose known as a “bocciolo” in Italian, and “bocolo” (BOH-ko-lo) in Venetian.

It’s simple: Any and every Venetian man gives a bocolo to the dearest ladies in his life, from wife to mother to sister to whoever else really matters to him. Or they just stick to mother and wife.

We went out early in our little boat to row around the city for a while, and the first step — literally, as we have to cross a bridge to get to the boat — was to buy a rose from the young man prowling on the bridge with a fistful of roses. Lino planned to give me a much more glamorous bocolo a little later, but it was unthinkable to appear in Venice in a roseless boat.

So until we finally reached the florist nearest to our hovel, we rowed around the city on a sampierota proudly bearing its very own bocolo, totally in tune with the day.

P.S.: Any reader who wants to chance his or her arm in plotting our route based on the photos is very welcome to let me know where we went. It’s just a game — if I’d wanted to make it really difficult, I’d have showed mainly reflections and walls.

You are looking at one of the main reasons why starting early is such a good idea — mirror-like water. It has become more common over the past year with the economic collapse of Venice (fewer boats of many types), but don’t let that mitigate your appreciation for seeing the canals as they all were when Lino was a boy.

The roses are almost always inserted into a plastic sleeve. One reason might be to keep the petals in place until you’ve paid your money and are walking away. The cheap roses, such as this one, seem to be cut sometime between Epiphany and Easter (made up) — I’ll never forget the shower of petals that fell from the bloom-downward rose I bought at the last minute from a street vendor to put on our boat a few years ago. Precious little was left in the sleeve by the time I got aboard. This rose, though, seems to be of hardier (or more recent) stock.

The meeting of the Venetian symbols. I just learned that you could call this an example of syzygy, but that would be pretentious even if accurate. It exists in Italian, though (*sizigia*), so I’m going with it.

Not the first image ever made that shows the bacino of San Marco as it is without traffic, but in the pre-2020 era you’d have had to be out at 2:00 AM to see no waves. Here it’s 9:00 AM on a sunny Sunday morning, and there ought to be phalanxes of taxis and tourist launches. I want you to enjoy this as long as you can, even though we know it represents a world of hurt.

The entrance to the Grand Canal, with the slightest wavy trace of the passage of one (1) motorized vehicle, going slowly — specifically, the very small motorboat heading upstream in front of the red dock. Seems only fair that I acknowledge that there is still some sort of traffic. I know things have to change, but I am going to miss this.

Speaking of traffic, this is a scene that I have savored — small boats being rowed on glass-like water, usually on weekend mornings — more than I can say.

A typical sandolo — a private boat, I notice, which is nice — set up to be rowed alla valesana (notice the momentarily unused forcola on the port side). The square of wood attached to the stern, however, reveals that he, or someone, set up the boat to use an outboard motor sometime.

Another private boat — as I’ve discovered in the trafficless Canal, plenty of them still exist — in this case a mascareta rowed by two doughty ladies.

A pause to run to the fancy florist for the fancy bocolo.

Plenty of people have had the same idea, and as we left the line was even longer. There used to be more florists, as I recall….

Not that these aren’t worth waiting for.

Waiting for his friend inside the shop. Better get home soon, the wife is waiting…

Off you go, gents. Well done. Note to apparently undecided man on the right: A bocolo-colored jacket is not going to save you. The florist is right there — make that decision now!

Technically there’s nothing wrong, I guess, with a lady buying her own bocolo. But it seems somehow slightly askew. It’s like any present you buy for yourself: Not the same as someone giving it to you.

Mission accomplished, and he’s walking fast. No telling how far he’s got to go (see: lack of florists in town).

The two musketeers have paused at the end of the street for some light refreshment. The pastry shop unseen at the right dispenses all sorts of wonderful things, but Sunday was the last day in months in which we were required to stay outside to consume them. We had to drink on the street, and not even stand — we were supposed to move along and drink while walking. All this was to avoid cramming people together, especially because, as you see, eating and drinking pretty much depends on not covering your mouth. Danger is still lurking everywhere. I will go to my grave wondering what has happened to the second bocolo.

Like all the other bars/cafes, this one blocked the doorway with a table, which was useful also for the placement of items being bought, or in this case also the customer’s (Lino’s) detritus. The sign on the door says “Orange Zone, Only Takeaway.”

Lino boatward-bound with our very glamorous bocolo.

Our little bocolo still doesn’t know that we’re about to put a rock-star rose into the boat. Not sure what the horticultural equivalent of “I was here first” is, but I hope they’ll work it out.

Not wanting to disrespect Bocolo 1, still standing so firmly in its bracket, I laid the stately Bocolo 2 on the bow. Then I began to worry, and so did Lino, about the wind possibly blowing it around and deranging its perfection. So down it soon went (see below) onto the cruddy floorboards next to the cake in the pink box.

The cruddy compartment was covered by the small wooden door for most of the return trip, but here you can see how we arranged the most important bits: the cake, the rose, the folded boat cover, also the sponge…. I bet Bocolo 1 was snickering because Bocolo 2 was lying down there in the hold where nobody could see it.

The home stretch. The area looks only slightly better for having the compartment covered. Now that you know that Bocolo 2 is prone you can slightly make out its plastic sleeve.

And finally we’re back to home itself. The boat is moored and ready to be covered and put away for a day or two. Our little bocolo has really gone the distance, not one petal out of place. Bocolo 2 still prostrate.

Walking past us is a man with a mission: It looks like he’s carrying three bocolos (bocoli?). It’s going to be a fun day for him and the family. Hope all the relatives have had their shots.

On the left, the boat’s bocolo, and on the right, the 3-foot monster from the fancy florist. Tradition maintains that the greater your love, the longer the stem, so I’m happy with the monster even though my secret favorite is the runt of the litter. I suppose they’ve reached an agreement, I didn’t hear any scuffling during the night.

Outside on the fondamenta, the monument to the Partigiane (female partisans of World War II) is more than usually floral this year. On the left is the traditional laurel wreath offered by the city, and on the right the traditional mass of roses from the national Partisans Association. The other flowers have obviously come from individual hands and hearts.

Gerbera daisies also welcome. Anything red will do. They earned every blossom countless times over.

Venetian History, Venetian-ness

I brake for justice

April 23, 2021 4 Comments

Another great lion of San Marco, this time painted by Donato Bragadin, also known as Donato Veneziano, in 1459.

This lion is holding a book, as usual, but the message is not the traditional “Pax tibi Marce Evangelista Meus,” etc. It reads: “Legibus quibus immoderata hominum frenatur cupiditas quenpiam parere cogatis.” “Compel everyone to obey the laws by which one restrains the immoderate greed of men.”

What great ideas! Make everybody obey the laws! And put the brakes on greed! Looking at the lion’s expression, however, one intuits that he knows this is a battle that he’s not only losing, but lost. I’ve made an effort to discover what was significant about the year 1459 to inspire this painting, but haven’t found anything out of the ordinary, which is a disheartening realization: The “ordinary” is exactly the situation that the statement was referring to and it has been valid every year since the Cambrian Explosion. To review: Need for brakes, need for laws that will apply brakes, need to force people to obey the laws. Find me one person (or lion) who would disagree with that.

The Sala dell’Avogaria is fairly small, especially compared to the magnitude of the tasks the three avogadori had to deal with. The room is decorated not only with pithy sayings, but with portraits of the trio of avogadori, decked in Venetian scarlet and ready to mete out justice and pump the brakes. (Pere Garcia, on Wikipedia)

The painting was originally placed in the Sala dell’Avogaria in the Palazzo Ducale. The Avogaria de Comùn was an ancient magistrature composed of three members elected from the Great Council who were responsible for the maintenance of constitutional justice. Hence the paintings in the room were intended to reinforce the principles of good government.

So our rainbow-winged lion above is flanked by two Doctors of the Church: St. Jerome on the left of the image, and St. Augustine on the right. St. Jerome holds a white banner that says “nihili quempiam irati statuatis,” or “Do not sentence anyone for anything when you’re angry.” St. Augustine, complete with bishop’s mitre and crozier, displays this thought: “hominum uero plectentes errata illa non tam magnitudine peccati quam uestra clementia et mansuetudine metiamini,” or “In reality, in punishing the errors of men (you must) measure not so much the size of their sins as of your clemency and goodness.”

There was a marble plaque in the Sala dell’ Avogaria incised with the following reminders: “‘First of all, investigate always with diligence, sentence with justice and charity, and do not condemn anyone without having first held a fair and truthful judgment, do not judge anything on the basis of arbitrary suspicions; instead, first test and only afterward utter a sentence inspired by charity; THAT WHICH YOU WOULDN’T WANT DONE TO YOU, REFUSE TO DO TO OTHERS.’

Essentially the same simple dicta that have been expressed over the centuries and that are often inscribed in courtrooms and City Halls and anywhere else that people and the law are destined to meet.

But the lion says it best: Hit the brakes already.

“*Venezia in veste di Giustizia*” — Venice attired as Justice, a role she often played in decoration as well as life. The sword and the scales held in her hand are fine on their own, but she is often buttressed by lions. To keep order in the court? (by Jacobello del Fiore).

Venetian Curiosities

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.

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