My personal account of living real life in real Venice, and more
A niece of don Ferruccio’s sent me a few pictures of her to-me-he’s-famous uncle, and being that I didn’t have a portrait of him for my earlier post AND being that I never saw him in his youth AND being that even though I never saw him this way, this is the way he always seemed inside, happy and radiating energy, here they are. Evidently left was his better side.
A reader has written to ask for some elucidation on my phrase “death notices taped up around the city” in my post “RIP don Ferruccio.”
There are several ways to announce the decession (it ought to be a word, so now it is) of your loved one. You have your choice of any or all of them, depending on how much money you feel like spending.
One of the most common ones translates as “No one dies as long as they live in the hearts of those who love them.” I think that’s painful. Anyone who has lost someone dear to them knows perfectly well that the person is dead, no matter how much love they may feel. Makes it sound as if loving the person is practically the same thing as having them there in the flesh. End of unsolicited opinion.
These notices are taped up around the neighborhood on convenient corners. There’s a corner near us which seems to be a common favorite; sometimes there are two or three stuck there. Lino calls it the “Wailing Wall.” But it is a very useful way to let people know what’s happened, and often little clumps of people will stop to read it and discuss the person and express feelings or opinions. Sometimes, to save money, the family will photocopy the notice and tape that up. I think that’s painful too.
The cost of these plastic announcements is usually included somewhere in the total cost of the funeral, though the job of sticking them up on walls is completely up to one of the family members, or whoever feels like doing it. I think it’s inexpressibly sad to see, say, the widower taping up the melancholy announcement about his wife on whatever corner seems right to him. But then again, maybe doing it helps somehow. What’s really sad is to see someone taking it down after the funeral.
However, you can also order them separately from a funeral home, even if you haven’t engaged them. In that case, they cost about 5 euros ($7.42) apiece.
Whether to put the news in the paper might be a very easy decision to make when you hear the price, which is generally calculated by the line rather than the word. In any case, the minimum is 300 euros plus 20 percent tax (360 euros or $534). If you want to add a photograph, it starts at 150 euros plus tax (180 euros or $266).
If the person who has gone to glory is sufficiently notable, a small article will be published. Presumably this doesn’t cost anyone anything, but I can’t promise that. You just never know in this world.
One thing I noticed a while ago which gave me a hint that I was becoming even more broken in — like a shoe or a new pair of jeans — to Venice is that I began to look at the death notices taped up around the city. I mean, as if it were possible that I might have known the person.
And by now, I have gone to numerous funerals for one degree of friend or acquaintance or another. Sometimes they’re Lino’s friends, but I get to share.
Today I got a phone call that don Ferruccio Gavagnin has (finally) entered the more abundant life. He was the parish priest of San Pantalon and a true Venetian who grew up in Lino’s neighborhood (San Barnaba) and even on Lino’s street (Calle Lunga). Lino knew him, but was at least a decade behind him, so they didn’t have much connection.
The funeral is going to be Monday, which isn’t good because I’m going to be busy Monday — but I imagine there will be quite a scene. He was 80 years old but he seemed at least 30 years older than that — I think time just got tired and lost track of him. But in spite of pain and infirmity toward the end he carried on through sheer, unadulterated, industrial-strength grit. He was like a goddam racehorse who keeps going on a broken leg.
In the last few years of his life he was very ill with assorted maladies, which I never completely understood. I believe it started with a small stroke one night. After his ancient mother died (she had lived with him in the rectory, where he took care of her; “Priests are good at taking care of other people, but they never seem to take care of their own family”), he lived alone for several years until the night he suffered some brainal lapse which caused him to lose his balance and fall down the stairs.
The stairs are stone, narrow, and extremely steep. He lay there all night with nobody to even imagine he needed help, much less provide it. The next morning the sacristan came to work (Odd, the door is still closed?) and found him lying there, all busted up. Things got progressively worse, as you might imagine. I’ll just leave it at that. But he really hung on, even when he was finally in a wheelchair (they installed a transporter on the staircase). Retire? Surely you jest.
There were times when I’d go by the church in the afternoon, when it’s open to the public. People come in to look at the painting (not a fresco) on the ceiling. It’s the church’s main attraction, a ponderous Baroque effort depicting The Martyrdom and Apotheosis of San Pantalon by Gian Antonio Fumiani (painted between 1680-1704) and it is cautiously described as being perhaps/probably the largest oil painting in the world. It’s not at all beautiful but it’s as big as your average Mongolian steppe.
Don Ferruccio would be sitting there at a desk in the back, to the left. He might be waiting for the kids to show up for catechism, but he was mainly keeping an eye on the place as tourists wandered in and out. He would have made an excellent Electrical/Operations Officer on a nuclear submarine, or maybe a meat inspector for the Department of Agriculture. Whatever you can think of that requires a relentless level of vigilance.
In the winter he would still be at his post, wrapped up in a heavy coat. We would sit there in the enveloping chill, bantering — he was very good at banter, especially the pretend-insulting kind — but our banter was limited by two things. One, he had a way of masticating his words that made it hard to understand him, and the other was the way he kept interrupting the conversation with comments sotto voce on the visitors and what they were doing, and the fact that virtually all of them entered and left without leaving so much as one (1) coin in the offering box.
I often wondered how he must have appeared to the unwary tourists who stepped in out of mere curiosity or to have a chance to sit down for five minutes. There he was, a shrunken, gristly little figure bundled in black, giving sudden sharp thwacks on the desk with his cane to draw their attention to whatever error they were about to commit. Don’t go there! Don’t touch that! I considered myself his friend but he would make even me jump.
Inexplicably, I have no photograph of him to add here. But I will gladly contribute what I wrote about him in 1994 (“Venice: More than a Dream,” National Geographic, February, 1995):
“Meanwhile, somewhere in or around the church of San Pantalon, don Ferruccio Gavagnin is also hard at work. He is always working: He’s the priest of what is technically the smallest parish in Venice, but his congregation won’t stay small. ‘The other priests are a little bit jealous,’ he says. ‘But I can’t refuse people. If they need help, they know they can find me.’
Don Ferruccio has been at San Pantalon for the past 26 of his 41 years as a priest [today that would be 41 of his 56]. He’s balding, compact, and his keen, kind eyes framed by steel-rimmed glasses miss nothing. He has a tendency to bustle, and a let’s-get-on-with-it way of talking. He’s up at 5:00 to pray, do paperwork, and look after his 93-year-old mother, who lives with him in the small house attached to the church. At 7:00 he opens the church, and eventually, being a shepherd, he heads out to check on his flock.
In and out of shops and cafes, a quick cup of coffee, a quick word, a smile, a wave — into the butcher shop, into the optician’s shop, into the firemen’s headquarters (he’s their parish priest). We stride down the street past the church of San Silvestro — “The ugliest church in Venice” — we pause in the church of the Frari, where he speaks with one of the friars about the bishop’s impending visit. I notice that the friar smiles at him with particular coolness — the interparish rivalry continues.
There’s always too much to do. Catechism classes, visiting the sick in four different hospitals, planning a funeral or a wedding. ‘Yesterday was a hard day, and at the end of the day I received two young people who asked me to marry them. They met at a hospital — they both had an eye disease. I told the boy, ‘You probably didn’t see her properly.’
You can’t lure Don Ferruccio into a long conversation; he has no time, and less inclination. Favorite Bible story? He twinkles at me; not a chance. Besides, ‘I don’t believe in words,’ he tells me briskly. ‘I believe in deeds. Words are not important.’
There is a long, slender crack in the austere, dark-brick facade of the church of San Pantalon. Don Ferruccio says it’s always been there; a surveyor recently reported that it might, or might not, get worse over time. As long as don Ferruccio is there, I don’t think it would dare get worse.”
November 1st and 2nd pack a one-two punch here, though the first is a holiday and the second isn’t (every year I struggle to remember that because it seems wrong to me). (I think they should both be holidays.)
November 1 is All Saints Day — shortened here to “i santi” (“the saints”). There is no special way of observing this feast, other than going to church which for some people is asking too much. I know men who will proudly tell you that they haven’t been to church (or put on a tie) since their wedding day. Strangulation seems to be the theme.
November 2 is All Souls Day — shortened here to “i morti” (“the dead”). This is a day (even if it isn’t a holiday) which Venetians observe with more attention. The vaporetto to the island of San Michele, the cemetery island, is free. In the not-so-old days, within Lino’s memory, a bridge on boats was constructed for the day from the Fondamente Nove to the island (a distance visibly shorter than the Giudecca Canal, whose bridge for the feast of the Redentore was also on boats). Many people make a point, at least once a year, of visiting their relatives’ graves, tombs, loculi, and if you’re ever going to go, this is the day. The florists on the Fondamente Nove make some real money.
I’ll write more about death in Venice some other time — it’s an interesting subject about which there is plenty to say, partly because of the age of the population. Funeral homes are probably one of the few businesses here that are immune to the global economic situation.
The traditions still associated with this feast-day naturally have mostly to do with food. For about a week before November 2, the pastry-shops and cafes put on sale little bags of what appear to be roundish colored styrofoam blobs, like lumpy cherries, colored white, pink, or brown. These are called “fave” (FAH-veh) and come in either the small (Trieste) form or the larger (Venice) form. It’s inexplicable to me but the Triestine are everywhere. Seeking a sack of Venetian fave will cost you some time and effort.
There are differing recipes, but the one I picked had only three ingredients: powdered pinoli nuts, sugar, and egg white, baked for an hour at low temperature. For the record, I tried making them yesterday and while the simplicity of the recipe was part of its appeal, I can confirm that if you halve the recipe, you’d better make an effort to halve the egg white. They were a spectacular failure.
However, from one of my favorite Venetian cookbooks, A Tola co i Nostri Veci by Mariu’ Salvatori de Zuliani, comes a recipe that makes more sense.
First of all, he makes the point quite firmly that coloring the fave is a newfangled fad; the classic Venetian version is always plain white. Remember that if you want to be a purist.
Venetian Fave for All Souls Day (November 2)
200 gr almonds, 300 gr sugar, 125 gr flour, pinch of ground cinnamon, 20 gr butter, 2 whole eggs, lemon zest.
Leave the “peel” on the almonds and pound them in a mortar with the sugar, then sift. Add the flour, a pinch of cinnamon, butter, eggs, and the lemon zest and mix well with your hands.
Divide the mixture into blobs the size of walnuts, arranging them in lines on a baking sheet that’s been buttered and floured. Press each one lightly with your finger to flatten it slightly — the purpose is to make them resemble as much as possible the normal amaretto cookie.
Bake at “moderate heat” he says; I’ll take that to mean 150. He doesn’t say how long, either (I love the old-fashioned way of writing recipes).
Of course you have already been thinking, “But a fava is a kind of bean.” This is true. So why call these “beans” and why this particular composition, and why on the Day of the Dead?
The rituals associated with death are so ancient there’s a point where explanations fail, but offering food to the gods on certain occasions, especially death, goes back to when people were cooking on stones. In the Mediterranean a great deal of attention was paid to the cult of the Parche (as they were called in Rome), or Fates, who were the goddesses of destiny. (The Greeks also had them under the name of Moirai.) Nona spun the thread of an individual’s life, Decima measured its length, and Morta was the one who cut the thread. Hence they were revered as, among other things, the goddesses of death.
It became known (I always wonder exactly how) that the Parche especially like fava beans. There are undoubtedly reasons for this — I’m guessing spring and fertility, that seems to be what motivates many divinities. So since real fava beans are impossible to get this time of year, or have been — I suppose nowadays you could fly them in from Zanskar — these little nubbins were invented to symbolize them. Sweetness, I seem to recall, was also an important element of some funerary offerings; often honey was used, which also embodied a raft of symbolic meanings.
These fave don’t really have a flavor, unless you count sheer, unadulterated, industrial-strength sweetness as flavor. They’re pleasant enough in the mouth, but as they go down they sort of close up your throat behind them. After two and a half you won’t want any more till next year, and you’ll be vaguely sorry you ate that extra half.
Next year I’m going to try Zuliani’s version, and I hope the Fates will be kinder to me in the kitchen, if nowhere else.
