Yesterday I crossed another of the myriad little stepping-stones of life here that form my path across the seasons, things that are wonderful the first time partly because they’re surprising, then become more wonderful as I anticipate their annual return.
Yesterday I was given a flower. And not just any flower: two slim branches of calicanthus (Chimonanthus fragrans), with their small yellow blossoms and — supremely important — their fragrance. You hardy gardeners out there probably take it for granted (“a spiny shrub from Japan related to Carolina allspice”), but its common name, wintersweet, hardly begins to do it justice.
I grew up in Upstate New York, where winter comes with multiple personalities, most of whom are not in the mood for jokes. It snowed from October to April, for starters. Skiing, skating, sledding — all great for kids with some free time. Frozen locks, icy streets, whiteout conditions on the Thruway, chilblains — not so great for anyone responsible for anything or anyone.
So winter in Venice, with its heavy, grey skies and lacerating northeast winds and films of ice on the immobile water of the canal — or even its dazzling, diamond-cut dawns or scintillating, frost-encrusted trees — brought out the primitive, Protestant, life-is-real-life-is-earnest-and-the-grave-is-not-its goal side of my spirit. Winter isn’t just something to survive: One must prevail.
Then I was walking down a street one rigid day; the Calle de le Pazienze, to be precise, not far from Campo Santa Margherita. It’s not so different from most streets: narrow, stony, lined with solid objects (in this case, houses on one side, a brick wall on the other), and I was just passing through.
Suddenly I inhaled a waft of music, a delicate little caress, an aroma so warm and so sweet that it made me stop in my tracks. What? Where? And more to the point, how? Winter doesn’t smell like chiffon steeped in sunrise; winter smells like a constructivist experiment, all angles and sharp points and edges.
I looked up and saw a mass of branches rising from behind the brick wall, and (I am not making this up) the sun was shining behind them, turning the tree into a huge bouquet of tiny, glowing yellow blossoms.
Tears came to my eyes but they didn’t fall because I was too entranced by how something so blithe could be so compelling. A philosophical point which I will attempt to resolve some other time.
And so, every December, I manage to snag a few branches. Of course the thrill of discovery is gone, but in its place is the knowledge that winter has a heart that isn’t made of titanium. My Protestant forebears must be pretty pissed that I’ve found that out.
As you recall, poor old Venice got dragged out into the middle of the stage a few weeks ago and forced — not to recite poetry or sing a comic song in front of all the relatives — but to present itself as a plausible candidate for the Summer Olympics of 2020.
There's no question that Venice could make an amazing Olympics poster. It's a start.
You might also recall that Rome intends to make a serious bid for the same candidature. And that Italy only gets to field one.
There was a flurry — a small hurricane, actually — of fevered activity/ verbiage from a group of people here who all had clear and present interests in snagging the nomination and, eventually, the Olympics themselves, for Venice. There was also an equal amount of either rebuttal or silence (a more potent form of rebuttal) from non-believers. The cads.
But the dream is probably dead, though its proponents aren’t ready to admit it. (They’re like that person I read about a while ago who went to pick up the pension check for his just-deceased friend. Obviously without having revealed that the check-worthy individual was just-deceased. Obviously with the purpose of using the money himself. When the person was told that the friend had to come in person, he propped his dead buddy in a wheelchair and wheeled him to the pension office. Too bad it didn’t work.) The Venice Olympics people are still wheeling the idea around, but they’re not much more credible than the aforementioned dude at this point.
CONI (the Italian Olympic Committee), in the person of its president, Gianni Petrucci, had what must have been a fairly vivacious meeting the other day with mayor Massimo Cacciari, who is also a professor of philosophy. Everyone likes to point that out, I don’t know why. Maybe to emphasize that he isn’t just a boring old politician, but a genuine intellectual, which ought to be an impressive thing if you didn’t notice that the two qualities are seem to be mutually exclusive.
Unfortunately, sometimes just being beautiful isn't enough.
Mr. Petrucci was pretty clear when the meeting was finished. “As the philosophers say,” he began, “reality is that which is, and not what we would like it to be.” Nice one! “And I’m a realist: What will count is what is.”
What “is,” in this case, is a raft of sports facilities which are already up and running (or jumping, or throwing) — and not a list of facilities which are all going to have to be built new from the ground up.
“I was a realist with Prof. Cacciari,” Petrucci went on. “CONI wants to win, therefore we want to present a really strong candidate.”
These remarks were met with a random barrage of retorts — kind of like those moments when the embattled citizens on the parapets begin desperately to launch whatever they can get their hands on — rocks, wagons, donkeys — over the edge to stop the enemy advance.
“Venice would be something new,” was one retort. The Northeast is a region that “gives much and receives little” (translation: you owe us) is another. “They treat us like provincials.” And so on.
Giancarlo Galan, the president of the Veneto Region — in whose head dreams of a shiny new Veneto full of big new projects paid for by somebody else had been dancing — decided to object, not to the message so much as to the manner of its expression.
“I don’t think you’re capable of ironizing (it’s a verb in Italian, very useful) about philosophers,” he huffed in a letter to Petrucci. “It shows that you haven’t understood two things: The fact that the Olympics serve to transform the infrastructure and change an entire territory. (I never knew that. Is that why the athletes cry when they hear their national anthem?) The second is that you don’t know the Northeast and what we’re able to accomplish. Venice and the Veneto deserve this recognition because we’re among the most advanced in the world.” (I didn’t know that either. We may have reached the stage of launching a Jeep Cherokee over the ramparts.)
Petrucci was unfazed by this predictable range of objections. (You don’t love us, you don’t understand us, you don’t care…..) He replied, “Everybody knows his own world best. Galan knows the Northeast well, and I know the Olympics well.”
While this was going on, the mayor of Rome was off in London, busy bagging mayor Boris Johnson’s future vote for the Eternal City.
Maybe he’s the one who’s actually got the right philosophy for this situation.
Each is easily munchable in one bite, assuming you have even the slightest desire to consume it. Folpi have the interesting property of becoming tougher, not more tender, the more you cook them.
This is apropos of absolutely nothing, but as I was discussing the folpo the other day, it occurred to me that even with my impressive powers of description, a picture of the creature after its refreshing plunge into boiling water might be in order. So here are four of the little honeys, ready for immediate annihilation.
The great thing about fishy creatures– most of which were so familiar to Venetians in days gone by that they could have been members of the family– is that they make excellent synonyms for non-fishy things. The folpo, for example, provides the ideal code word for a person (of either sex) who is overweight — not grossly, but noticeably — in a formless, galumphing sort of way. You might hear someone say, “Look at that folpo” as an individual goes by who looks as if he/she might be more comfortable (and attractive) submerged than walking on land.
A very close relative of this mollusc, in biological but especially metaphorical terms, is the zottolo (ZAW-toh-lo, or zotolo, in Venetian: SAW-to-yo). Official name: Todarodes sagittatus. It’s another one of those tentacly creatures, related to the seppia and the folpo. You may not notice them in the fish market but you might well get a batch of their babies (totani) in a mixed fishfry here. Little crunchy deep-fried objects somewhat bigger than your thumbnail that don’t look like they ever were anything.
The reason I’m telling you this isn’t the animal itself, it’s because “zotolo” is also a common and highly useful way to describe a certain kind of person. In fact, there are people who can’t be characterized as anything other than zotoli because of their particularly unfortunate assortment of mismatched traits.
Why a zotolo would be considered less attractive than a folpo is a mystery.
A person who can — and even must — be described as a zotolo would be someone who would be not only physically unattractive in a way that might be mitigated or even overcome if he or she were to care (heavy, scrawny, uncoordinated, slouchy, clumsy, perhaps also pimply or with neglected teeth), but would dress and/or behave in only a marginally civilized way.
Your zotolo could be the person who comes to the office Christmas party (evening, trendy bar) wearing a slightly frayed shirt and/or torn jeans. Or maybe he or she dresses just fine, but who can be counted on to say or do something that’s just that little bit cringeworthy. In other words, a person who gives the impression of being upholstered, physically or mentally, with the old slipcover from the divan in the basement rec room.
Power-walking to the Piazza San Marco two days ago, what should I see but a new mega-piece of publicity covering the facade of the Biblioteca Marciana. And it’s not for Swatch or whoever else has recently benefited from what must be one of the more valuable pieces of billboard space in a major town.
Nope: It’s advertising Istanbul.
In an exceptionally elegant and simple design — with the added allure of a black-and-white photograph that makes the former capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires look like Rita Hayworth swathed in Blackglama mink — the world is being advised not only that Istanbul in 2010 is going to be a European Capital of Culture, but that it is “the most evocative city in the world.” The world. It says so right there.
Not a bad choice of words, considering that Venice seems to have a lock on the phrase “most beautiful city,” though the echo is a little unfortunate. And defining itself as “European” is pretty cool, considering that much of Europe is doing everything it can to make sure only it knows the combination to the lock into the EU. I suppose that the fact that part of Istanbul sits on the European side of the Bosporus could technically make this term admissible. In any case, something worked.
What struck me first as I went striding past was a bracing blast of irony. (I seem to be unusually susceptible to these, like some people are to drafts or mold.) Between 1463 and 1718 Venice was involved in eight major wars with the Ottoman Empire, and a war isn’t some little let’s-agree-to-disagree. Countless Venetians died in all sorts of ways, especially their commanders — Marcantonio Bragadin was flayed alive, Paolo Erizzo was sawn in half — enduring epic sieges, making phenomenal sacrifices, and even achieving one of the great naval victories of history, October 7, 1571, at Lepanto.
And now we have its capital, the Sublime Porte, the epicenter of enmity, looking all sorts of gorgeous and up in the Piazza San Marco, no less.
But on the other hand, what about the Fontego dei Turchi up on the Grand Canal? For centuries there was a thriving Turkish business community right here, which was allowed to have its own headquarters, just like the Germans, Persians, Arabs and many others. This type of establishment was known as a fontego (in Italian, fondaco, from the Arabian fonduk, meaning “inn”) and these establishments usually contained storerooms, strong-rooms for cash, meeting rooms, even bedrooms. (In the case of the Turks, their fontego also contained a hammam and a mosque.)
For a foreign merchant doing business in Venice, having a home base was extremely helpful. It was no less helpful to the Venetian government, considering that keeping ethnic groups corralled simplified surveillance. Simply put, scimitars may have flashed elsewhere, but here Turkish traders were just another part of the immense and complicated commercial reality that sustained Venice’s seemingly effortless glamor.
So that’s what struck me second: That in fact there isn’t any irony at work here at all. Venice had constructed so many trade connections, treaties, and other means of coexistence with the Muslim world — Egyptian Mamluks, Ottoman Turks, and so on — that it’s almost as if the wars occurred on another plane from the daily/yearly business of business. Your Venetian, whether patrician merchant or grimy artisan, was never in doubt as to the need to cultivate and maintain clients; whenever the Pope occasionally placed bans on trade with Them over There, Venice just kept going, trading as usual except by way of Cyprus and Crete.
In fact, Ottoman markets were crucial to Venice’s prosperity, being insatiable customers for Venetian luxury goods: heavy fabrics of silk (especially velvet) and wool, glass, books, and china. Venetians also exported work in gold, especially filigree, which was famous throughout Europe. As one historian puts it, “Without trade with the Muslim world, Venice would not have existed.”
Yes, this is actually how my brain works as I’m cantering around Venice trying to get assorted things done: buying fish, picking up dry cleaning, replacing the battery in my watch, collecting shoes from the man who calls himself a cobbler but who evidently isn’t able or interested in doing anything other than replacing heels. Try to get him to stitch a torn strap on a handbag and he goes all helpless on you, as if the machinery (one hand, one needle, one piece of heavy string) hadn’t been invented.
"Venice receives from Juno the doge's hat (corno)" by Paolo Veronese, in the Room of the Council of Ten, Doge's Palace. He makes it fairly clear that Venice and gold coins were born for each other.
So while I’m involved in the daily drudgery, dealing with all those little tasks that breed in dark corners at night and produce litters of new little tasks every day, I’m also meandering around mazes of history. I really like living in a city that gives you so many centuries and points of view all knotted up together.
And from what I keep noticing about Venice’s history, I think they really hated having to get involved in all those wars (and not just with the Ottomans, either). Put aside the possibility of death or dismemberment; wars with anybody are so bad for business, so distracting, so disrupting. How much more tempting is the clinking of coins, so warm, so musical. Except, of course, that the wars were intended to make more clinkage possible, otherwise there wouldn’t have been much point in bothering.
So here’s my conclusion: What better place than Venice to publicize Istanbul? That huge billboard practically amounts to the Return of the Native.
Yesterday I was given a flower. And not just any flower: two slim branches of calicanthus (Chimonanthus fragrans), with their small yellow blossoms and — supremely important — their fragrance. You hardy gardeners out there probably take it for granted (“a spiny shrub from Japan related to Carolina allspice”), but its common name, wintersweet, hardly begins to do it justice.
Suddenly I inhaled a waft of music, a delicate little caress, an aroma so warm and so sweet that it made me stop in my tracks. What? Where? And more to the point, how? Winter doesn’t smell like chiffon steeped in sunrise; winter smells like a constructivist experiment, all angles and sharp points and edges.
In any case, something worked.