One of my favorite things to do on November 21, while I’m sitting in the choir behind the high altar after finally managing to consign my candle, is to gaze upon an extraordinary bas-relief on one wall, fairly high up. It is strange and dramatic and full of emotion and I have been unable to discover any information about it except that which is implied in a memorial plaque on the facing wall.
I apologize for the quality of the photograph but was unable to improve on it in the short, crowded time I was there. Here is the carving:
As you see, a triumphant angel hovers above the figure of a man being pulled bodily from the water into a gondola. The faint outlines of the nearby palaces can be discerned. The hair on the victim's head is dripping with water.
I always assumed that the man survived. One reason was that the angel seems so powerful and triumphant that it’s hard to interpret in any way except that of victory or success.
The second reason (and this is only slightly cheating) was because of the dedicatory plaque facing it, which to my primitive brain seemed to be an occasion for offering thanks. Then a friend of mine who teaches Latin translated it for me. It’s not happy.
It says: “That which Pietro Nicola F. Michiel, torn from life by a mournful destiny, had begun to do [or make] on the first of January 1824 , Anna Badoer, who survived her husband, carried to completion according to the terms of his will.”
This only raises so many questions I have to remain calm. Why was he making this? I seriously doubt he was carving his own tombstone. Or perhaps he was making the stone for someone else and he died of an entirely different cause, like appendicitis or cirrhosis or gout. (Can you die from gout?) The incident itself: Who is the man and how did he end up in the water? Diabetic crisis? Suicide? Who was it that pulled him out and — who knows — attempted to administer CPR? I can’t stand not knowing the answers.
What I can tell you, by merely looking at their surnames, is that they were both from old (extremely old) patrician Venetian families. The Michiel came to the primordial Venice in the year 822, and were recorded as one of the 12 “apostolic families” of the city, as was the Badoer family, whose original surname was Partecipazio. It’s easy to find barrels of information on their families, but hardly anything about them. It’s conceivable that he was old enough to have lived during the Venetian Republic and to have gone through its fall and reincarnation as an Austrian colony, which would be enough to make me throw myself into the canal, anyway.
What little more I have been able to learn about Anna Badoer is that an oratory dedicated to her is one of four in the church of San Giorgio in a small village called Maserada sul Piave, 12 km [7 miles] northeast of Treviso. Or it was there in 1838, date of the survey document that listed the church and its possessions. This oratory would presumably not be there because she had achieved any level of sainthood, but she probably paid for it to encourage people to pray for her soul.
And, as we see, we also know that she was faithful in fulfilling her husband’s wishes, whatever or whyever they were, and that’s something worth remembering any day.
I will eventually be organizing a Gallery page, but meanwhile here are a few additional views of the water-on-the-ground of yesterday. They are not intended to be sensational, but instructive. There is an important difference in the two concepts, especially where issues involving Venice are concerned.
As you see, the streets of Venice are neither perfectly flat, nor a uniform height above sea level. Therefore reports of Venice being FLOODED are not very helpful. Is this street flooded?The immediate point of pumping is not to empty your place of water; it's to keep the level from increasing while the tide is still rising. (Then you pump to get it all out.) One theory of what is making the liquid white is that it is detergent. The theory of my nose leads me to suspect something more primeval.
Sorry, your prescription isn't going to be ready till the pharmacists finish bailing out the store.
No special drama here, they keep the vegetables up off the floor all the time anyway.
Now here's a solution: Get your stuff up off the floor before the water comes in. Simple, cheap, effective. I welcome explanations of why so many merchants prefer to beg for sympathy as well as handouts from the city to pay for damage. Why should there be damage in the first place? And by the way, the city doesn't own your shop, you do.
What often contributes to high water occurring is an insistent southeast wind, as you see blowing across the water here.
High-water etiquette requires you to slow down when approaching and passing anyone with knee-high boots. If you are sloshing along you will splash them, and they are already desperately trying to keep their clothes dry.
A very humble but crucial side effect of high water is that it makes it impossible to pass under most normal bridges. Gondolas, taxis, and especially barges have to either find an alternate route or just wait till the tide falls. Even some vaporetto lines are sent up the Grand Canal because they can't pass under the bridge near Piazzale Roma.
Oh gosh -- we couldn't get to work on time because there was acqua alta. Here are some men who are looking desperately concerned and distressed by this. I imagine at least one of them is trying to think of the nearest cafe that is on dry ground.
Or maybe it's a guy thing and not related to having boots at all, the need to stop in groups to analyze, compare, contrast, discuss, and otherwise dissect the moment.
I am fascinated by the problem-solving approach taken by the man on the left. His knee-high socks were drenched (see wet footprints) and he is rolling up his trousers. I'm hoping he had the sense at least to have taken off his shoes before he stepped into the water. But why didn't he take off his socks as well?
One has heard of a bridge to nowhere. I offer the passarella, or walkway, to -- well, not exactly nowhere. Right to the water from which it has been placed to defend you. Maybe they ran out of boards.
As you may already have noticed, the world didn’t end last night.
First, it didn’t rain. So much for the Deluge from Hell. This is also a Good Thing because when there’s lots of rain it not only irritates me, it can also aggravate the acqua alta — not so much because of precipitation precipitating into the lagoon directly, but into the streams and rivers which then, overloaded, empty into the lagoon.
Our street as seen from across the canal at 7:45 AM. The tide is still rising but there is an island (shrinking) of dry pavement.
At 5:00 AM the sirens sounded, and I waited to count the tones. There were three. I enjoyed two seconds of relief, then checked myself because of the clearly demonstrated unreliability of the forecast. (It hasn’t rained yet.) But where the sirens are concerned, it wouldn’t have been the first time that one message arrived, to be followed by a revision. It’s better not to be too quick to heave those sighs of relief.
So I lay there in the dark, listening for clues to the water’s progress. I heard someone walking by the window: Normal footsteps. No water yet. Before long, I heard someone else pass making plk-plk-plk noises: Water only an inch or two. Not long after that, I began to hear sloosh-SLOOSH-sloosh-SLOOSH. Water deep enough to require shuffling instead of stepping. Oh well.
This is a beautiful thing to see: water that hasn't risen beyond our first step.
At 7:45 the water was still rising, which was to have been expected. I went out to get the newspaper. At 8:30 it had peaked and was still well within manageable limits. Excellent! What would I have called this on the official warning scale? Code Mauve? Code Robin’s-Egg Blue?
Water all gone. Now let's think about lunch.
At 10:00 the tide was noticeably falling, and by 11:00 the streets were no longer, in Benchley’s famous phrase, full of water.
The scirocco wind, however, has been fairly strong (they said “moderate”) all day, and is predicted to increase to “strong” right about now. Then we’re supposed to have a thunderstorm, then everything should return to normal.
Speaking of normal, one thing which always happens here with acqua alta is that various people put out their bags of garbage for the garbagemen to collect, even though they must know that the men are not going to be collecting because they’re all supposed to be working like crazed beavers setting up and taking down the temporary walkways. So the bags sit there until the rising water lifts them from the pavement and eventually floats them away, out to sea.
Floating bags of garbage: Just one of many unsung aspects of acqua alta.
Floating bags of garbage are NOT acts of God, no matter what their owners may think. Oh wait — the bags don’t have owners. As soon as a bag is on public soil, it suddenly becomes mystically orphaned, anonymous, invisible. Except to me, the maniac foreigner, who watches these plastic spheroids bobbing around and sees a big neon sign above each one flashing
“BRAIN DEAD.”
The show -- the bread, the detergent, the whatever -- must go on. And someone must go with it.
The people out on the street were pretty much moving along with Monday morning as usual. Shops which are likely to be awash were indeed awash; their owners were pumping them out. Some others, like two different butchers, were letting nature to take its course while they got on with business. Evidently neither snow nor rain nor dead of night nor high water can stay these men from the swift completion of their appointed pork chops.
The floor is ankle-deep in brackish water and he is cleaning the plexiglass covering the case of meat. I didn't ask.
I ran into Paolo, the bank teller, out on via Garibaldi.
“No work today,” he told me. “Those idiots from Bergamo [owners of the bank] didn’t listen to us when they were designing the interior. We told them, ‘Put the electric outlets up high.’ They said, “What the hell do you guys know?’ So now all the electric outlets are under water and if we turn on the computers, everything will go poof. All they needed to do was put the outlets higher, but nooooooo…”
For the record, his plan for the day wasn’t altered all that much, because I went past a few hours later when the water had begun to subside and there he was at his teller’s window, working away. High water — unfortunately, if you really want the day off — does not last forever.
Like virtually all Venetians, he took it all in stride. If he has time to think about the street, he clearly isn't worried about his house.
Walking back to the house, I passed a man who was sweeping the water toward the canal. I paused. He was sweeping the pavement of a large street which was still very much under water — hence the water was not being removed, only shifted. This required investigation.
“Dogs,” he said briskly, smiling. “High water is really a good thing for Venice. It doesn’t hurt anybody. And it takes away the smell so dogs don’t go looking for someplace where another dog has ever pooped.”
I recalled having heard a similar comment from Arrigo Cipriani (of Harry’s Bar) when I interviewed him years ago. A native Venetian, he too wasn’t especially impressed by high water. “It’s a great way to get the streets clean,” he declared.
Back in the old days no mother would have carried any child who could walk. Here's a woman thanking God that she stopped at having two.
“High water was a delight for us when we were kids,” Lino has told me more than once. “But it never made any sense — we’d be in school and the teachers would say ‘There’s high water! Everybody go home!’ And so we’d walk home in the high water; you can imagine what kind of state we were in by the time we got there. Soaking wet right up to here.” (He indicates his collarbone.) “What sense did that make, sending us home because there was high water? In just another hour, the water went down anyway.”
No boots in the old days, either. “Boots? Who had boots? Boots are a newfangled thing that began to come in after 1966. We went home barefoot, carrying our shoes.”
Clearly a few people can still figure out how to get where they're going without boots.
I too, may I note, have walked home barefoot in high water. More than once. I can’t understand people who stand there at the water’s edge looking trapped and helpless like lemurs on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Just take your shoes off and get going! Besides, I can attest that the water is virtually always warm (if that helps to convince you.) The scirocco wind is warm, and we haven’t even had a real cold snap yet. How cold could the water be? Get a grip, people.
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We’re sitting here holding a sort of tense little domestic vigil awaiting the end of the world, which is predicted to reach Venice some time tonight.
Acqua alta doesn't necessarily have to come pouring over the battlements. As here in the Piazza San Marco, it often comes up through the drains.
Briefly, a huge weather system is moving across Italy and will be bringing high winds, torrential rain, and acqua alta, or high water, sometime tonight. I say “sometime” because Things Might Change (at least slightly — maybe the wind won’t settle into the southeast after all, for example) but we’re going to be getting wet. Just how wet is the question that is keeping the lights burning in our little hovel.
The tide is going to turn and begin to rise about 3:00 AM. Which means we can expect to hear the municipal high-water warning sirens begin to wail not very long after that.
The tide forecast is: Maximum at 9:30 PM tonight at 75 cm [29 inches above mean sea level] ; minimum at 2:25 AM at 45 cm [17 inches]; maximum at 8:35 AM at 130 cm [51 inches]; minimum at 3:40 PM at 20 cm [7 inches].
This is Lino on December 1 last year, watching the tide rising outside our front door. This is me, taking the picture, still hoping that the tide will stop here. It didn't. And the barrier didn't do anything useful to keep it out.
My only hope and prayer at this point is that the tide will only reach the three-tone level, because that means we’re still dry. We discovered last December 1 that when we hear four tones, we’re basically doomed.
We had water in our very own domicile; what was unnerving wasn’t so much its height (I guess it never exceeded an inch on the floor) as its inexorability. I can’t recall a sensation to compare it to: The realization that you can’t do one single thing to stop it. I suppose going into labor might be something similar.
I can tell you that the garbagemen are working an extra shift right now, setting up the temporary walkways in the parts of the city which will certainly be submerged to some extent, especially around the Piazza San Marco, the lowest point in the city.
There is also absolutely no doubt that Paolo Canestrelli and his band of hardy forecasters are working the lobster shift at the Tide Center, refining their predictions probably minute by minute. What they really, really hate is to turn out to have gotten the numbers wrong. People may snicker at them when the tide doesn’t rise as high as they thought it would, but people rage and snarl and shriek when they estimated too low. Not a job I’d be at all interested in having.
For the record, a normal tide (measured in height above mean sea level) is between -50 cm and +79 cm [minus 19 – plus 31 inches.] One siren tone.
Code Yellow (“sustained tide”) is between +80 and +109 cm [31 – 42 inches.] Two tones.
Code Orange (“very sustained tide”) is between 110 cm and 139 cm [43 – 54 inches.] Three tones.
Code Red (“exceptional high tide”) is over 140 cm [55 inches.]
Here I was last year, standing in our little street and contemplating the mysteries of the universe, still not convinced that the water was going to rise any further. Shortly after this, we stopped taking pictures and started bailing.
In case anyone has heard about the MOSE floodgate project (perhaps to be operational in 2012), intended to block high tide from reaching the city, I want to point out that it is intended to be used only in the case of Code Red. Which means that for 3/4 of the high-tide events, we’re still going to be pulling on our wellies.
Another point: The numbers don’t really tell you much because Venice is not uniformly level. So a number in one place isn’t going to signify the same experience in another — sometimes even just 50 yards down the street.
More tomorrow, at some point. Going back to doing laps around the rosary.
