Venice: I am not making this up

Welcome to the neighborhood

August 12, 2009 6 Comments

Via Garibaldi used to be a canal, which you can tell by the white stone border on each side. It contains everything needful for human life, including two pharmacies. The fact that they both stay in business tells me something about the neighborhood but I'm not sure what.

If someone in Venice were to ask me where I live, the generic answer would be “Castello,” which is the name of the sestiere, or one of the six neighborhoods into which Venice is divided. But that’s just a little too generic, considering that Castello is fairly large and has several hundred little subsets with all sorts of variations ranging from the sublime to the moderately mystifying.

The more precise answer is “Via Garibaldi.” We don’t actually live right there — we’re down beyond the end of it. But it’s an answer which represents not only geographical coordinates and a zip code, but an entire biosphere of its own with its own history and climate and fauna, a zone which to Venetians of other sestieri still connotes verging on the exotic, even vaguely hazardous.

Carnival means the street is clogged with kids, the only difference from every day is that they're in costume. Otherwise, it's just craziness as usual. — Carnival means the street is clogged with kids, the only difference from every other day being that they're in costume. Otherwise, it's just chaos as usual.

Once, when we were living in Dorsoduro, we overheard a mother snapping at her kid: “Stop shouting! You sound just like somebody from Castello!” And when we moved away — to Castello, of all places — Lino could hardly believe how far down in the world he had come. To his relatives, he might as well have gone to Tasmania. In fact, Tasmania would have made some sense. But Castello?

Many, if not most, people who visit Venice think of the city of palaces and monuments, and maybe also some trendy boutiques and clever little galleries. Our part of Venice is a gristly precinct beyond and behind the Arsenal. The Arsenal was the shipyard where Venice’s fleets were built, the foundation on which Venetian power — economic, military, political — rested. It’s thanks to the Arsenal that all those palaces and monuments exist, so Castello doesn’t have to apologize to anyone if it has chosen to remain in its primordial state. During Venice’s Great Days there were as many as 10,000 people working in the Arsenal, and their dwellings and relatives surrounding it constituted what amounted to a company town. Although very few, if any, locals still work in the Arsenal, I’m convinced there are people here who still haven’t discovered fire.

A member opens the clubhouse of the Mutual Aid Society of Carpenters and Caulkers, a flourishing remnant of the old Arsenal days when the workers had only each other to turn to for help.

If Venice isn’t a place for everybody, Castello is even less so. And Via Garibaldi is the axis of a Hogarthian world where the men’s bodies swarm with tattoos; where men and women alike use hand-hewn phrases which can’t be translated and shouldn’t be repeated, and their rampant children have two basic ways of communicating: Yelling and crying. They’re a lot like London’s East Enders (denizens of another once-great seaport enclave) — tough, practical, unromantic yet sentimental homebodies to whom family and neighborhood are the universe, where grown men call each other “love” and women call each other “girls.” It’s not that they don’t know there’s a world out there, they just don’t find it all that interesting.

I love Venice in a complicated way that I don’t understand very well. In the midst of the obvious beauty and grandeur and all, the city is also composed of so many aspects which verge on ugliness but which, strangely, also have their own sort of allure. Nelson Algren once wrote that “It isn’t hard to love a town for its greater and lesser towers … but you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too.” You discover this in unexpected moments and glimpses, where she doesn’t mind you seeing her without her girdle: no excuses, no apologies.

The “alleys” would be out here, with the ingenious, illegal, improvised sewer outflows, and the “What, me worry?” deposits of dog poop and the hand-lettered signs vilifying the anonymous neighbor who has left his bag of garbage under your window, and the mismatched lifelong friends in the bar shouting at each other — the one who’s right and the one who’s wrong — about something that happened years ago. In fact, they’re both right. Or wrong.

What happens is this: People put out plastic bags of garbage long before the collection is due to begin. Sometimes they do this on a Saturday afternoon, which means the bags will sit there till Monday morning. This time frame gives the seagulls plenty of time to bust open the bags and scavenge. Now the pigeons have started to take up the habit. Everyone knows this, including the people who put out their bags, bags which would be collected from their very own doorstep, but which they prefer to bring secretly to this anonymous corner. It's so stupid it's almost beautiful. — What happens is this: Some people put out plastic bags of garbage long before the collection is due to begin. Sometimes they do this on a Saturday afternoon, which means the bags will sit there till Monday morning, thereby giving the seagulls plenty of time to bust open the bags and scavenge. Now the pigeons have started to take up the habit as well. Everyone knows this, including the people who put out their bags, bags which would be collected from their very own doorstep, but which they prefer to bring secretly to this anonymous corner. It's so stupid it's almost beautiful.

This is not nostalgie de la boue; many things about life down here in the bilges range from infuriating to only slightly flinch-worthy. Then there are the aspects you can’t easily categorize — say, the septic tank somewhere on the other side of our canal which for far too long desperately needed pumping out. When we had company for dinner I used to pray that the wind wouldn’t shift. They say you can get used to anything, but I’m here to tell you: Not that.

I was walking down the via Garibaldi one early evening; there was a middle-aged Venetian couple coming toward me.

There had been a few airplane crashes that month: One in the sea just outside Palermo, another that hit near Athens, now one in Venezuela somewhere.

Anyway, I reach earshot just as the woman is saying to her husband, “Not me. I’ll never go on an airplane. Forget it.”

He says, “What about a ship?”

“Not even a ship. I’m staying home, I’m not going anywhere. If I die, I’m going to die right here in Via Garibaldi.” (Wait a minute — “If” you die?).

That’s what the true voice of a neighborhood sounds like — especially this one. Via Garibaldi to the bitter end.

I’m with her.

You'll always run into somebody to talk to -- or about -- on Via Garibaldi.

Food, History

Street Names: Refreshing

August 11, 2009 2 Comments

There are four places in Venice which share a mystic link, which is discernible only to the initiated. The initiation will now proceed:

The "'Passage Under a House' of the Waters"

The “waters” in this street name are not those of the adjoining canal, you may be glad to know.

They were the delightful iced drinks which were sold in shops often called botteghe da acque, or “shops of the waters.” Such a shop was doing great business here in 1566, run by a pair of brothers, Alvise and Girolamo Giusto.

In 1724, a guidebook stated that “The best chocolate, coffee, refreshing frozen waters, and other such drinks are made and sold in the Calle delle Acque, near the Ponte dei Baratteri.” Right here, in other words.

These places were not unlike the cafes we know today; they were often small, crowded, loud, and attractive to gamblers. (There are still assorted joints around town where little old men sit all day playing cards and shouting at each other, but their drinks usually involve some kind of alcohol, and it’s not particularly frozen, either.) On November 10, 1756 a decree forbade gambling in this very locale, which leads me to suspect that things had gotten even further out of hand than was usual.

Frozen beverages require ice, which was made and sold in various places around the city. Older Venetians have no trouble remembering the boats loaded with large blocks of ice, which the men who rowed the boats would haul ashore wrapped in sheets of coarse hemp to whatever customer had ordered it. The block went into the refrigerator — in America it was simply called an icebox — where it kept the food cold (or cool, anyway) until it had melted away, dripping into the pan below.

In 1661, when this street was mentioned in a property document, the sale of ice was a semi-monopoly of the coffee business. This is not surprising, considering that the coffee-house was where the iced drinks were made.

While we’re discussing potables, you also had the option of something stronger, particularly grappa and its relatives, distilled liquids near which one should not play with matches.

The spelling of this street name is a bit eccentric; it ought to be acquavite, or “water of the vine,” as grappa and some of its relatives are made by distilling either wine or grape residue (vine, stems, seeds, skins, etc.), while aquavit is made from grain. But as the word has also been transmogrified into acqua vitae, or “water of life” (“life” being “vita“), we won’t quibble. I guess they know how to name their own streets.

And who had the concession to sell these shots of liquid fire? The coffee-house owners again. In 1711, in the street above, near the church of the Gesuiti, there was just such an establishment being run by a certain Elia Giannazzi. By 1773 there were 218 shops in Venice specializing in acquavite. Life was hard, winter was long, it kept you going.

A very Venetian product which Giannazzi and his confreres would also have sold was rosolio. Still made today in various forms, it is a liqueur made of rose petals which is often used as a base for other liqueurs. I’m not sure what would happen if you asked for rosolio in a cafe or bar today; you’d probably have better luck asking for one of its siblings, such as limoncello or maraschino.

A note on alcohol: You will frequently read that alcoholism is hardly known in Italy because wine is such an integral part of the culinary and social culture. Children start sipping wine at an early age, at meals, and so it is assumed that they are immune to excess. However, these cliches do not acknowledge the popularity and omnipresence of what are generally termed super-alcoolici, or hard liquor, especially with people living along Italy’s northern rim where mountain traditions often involve making and consuming highly inflammable liquids.

Young people today in Italy may or may not drink wine with their meals, but increasing numbers of them will almost certainly be binge-drinking hard liquor in discos and bars on the weekend and then attempting to drive home. In Venice, this often means using a motorboat, probably without any lights on, usually at high speed. More often than you’d wish, you read about some adolescent who never made it because he “painted himself on a piling,” as they say here. Or dying by alcohol poisoning. And in case you’re tempted to similarly romanticize the seemingly so-grown-up approach to alcohol in France , which like Italy shares the stereotpical image of the jovial family, children included, tranquilly drinking wine out in the garden with their baguettes and challenging cheeses and all, I merely note that France has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world. So, easy with the cliches, here as everywhere. Nothing is simple.

And so we come to the fountainhead of all these concoctions: The cafetier, who sold and prepared coffee to be consumed on the spot and who, as we have seen, had his finger in the ice and booze businesses as well.

Coffee has a long and glorious history in Venice; Venetian merchants first recorded its use in Turkey in 1585, and began to sell it in Venice in 1638, whence the enthusiasm for coffee-houses spread across Europe. The Caffe Florian in the Piazza San Marco opened on December 29, 1720, and makes a good case for being the oldest coffee house in continuous operation.

The “mystic link” I mentioned above is therefore revealed to be coffee. The coffee-house owners and/or operators managed a very large slice of the liquid refreshment business in Venice, and while Venetian coffee doesn’t enjoy the fame of its Neapolitan or Roman cousins, I’m willing to call it the water of life. Especially first thing in the morning.

Venetian-ness

Flashback: Signor Vitale

August 8, 2009 No Comments

Vitale Rossi was the last luganegher (yoo-ghan-eh-GHAIR) in Venice, and his shop and workshop happened to be just across the canal from our first apartment. In the shop, he and his implacable wife Anna sold the myriad pork products he had created: prosciutto (cured and cooked), pancetta (smoked and otherwise), sopressa, salame, culatello, zampone, and so on. If it had been any relation to scrofa domesticus, it was fair game to him.

More important to me — as after all this time I still have only a cordial, if not passionate, relationship with swine products — Signor Vitale was my guardian angel. I deeply regret not ever having taken even one picture of him, but I doubt that a mere camera could have captured, much less conveyed, the profound kindness that radiated from his eyes, his smile, his follicles, his synapses, his DNA.

Facade of the former scuola of the luganegheri, on the Zattere at number 1473. At the fall of the Republic in 1797 there were 684 individuals registered in 198 shops working exclusively with pork.

Back when I was totally new here, knowing nobody and speaking only the most rudimentary pidgin Italian, he would gaze at me as I attempted to order with the gentlest and most patient expression I’ve ever seen. If I came into the shop on the verge of closing time, at the end of a long and tiring day, and asked for a mere bottle of water or two rolls, in some silent way he convinced me that this transaction was the best thing that had happened to him all day.

There were many, many afternoons around 4:00 or so when I would go over to buy some fragment of something just so I could absorb for a moment his extraordinary aura. He would relax for a few minutes by expressing some opinion on the current state of anything, or relating assorted tidbits about his past, or about the business, or the finer points (explained very carefully but lovingly) of curing prosciutto. Occasionally he would take me back into the laboratory and show me the various pieces of meat undergoing treatments and processes involving smoke, salt, and time.

As a workplace, it couldn’t have changed much from the pork labs of the Dark Ages. But for Signor Vitale, raising a herd of Olympic heptathletes would not have required more devotion or given him more satisfaction than he felt every day as he tested and turned and smelled the progress of his assorted hanging hocks.

Their patron was Saint Anthony Abbot, who is often depicted with a pig. Monks of his order would support their charities by raising swine.

On dark, foggy winter nights, the light shining from the shop window was the only illumination on that entire stretch of fondamenta. It was the lighthouse of the neighborhood, in more ways than one.

As my language skills improved, so did our conversations, obviously. I still depended on the smile, but now was much more curious to hear his opinions and ruminations. He never disappointed me. Talking with him did me more good than five homilies.

One January morning I stopped in for something and there he was, alone. This was great — it meant he had a minute to “exchange four words” with me, as he put it.

I started: “Did you see the eclipse of the moon this morning?” (We had gotten up before dawn to go out and witness the event.)

He smiled. “I have to work.”

“Working at 4:30 in the morning??” I asked.

“I was sleeping.” His eyes smiled at me. I don’t know how he does it. If I were a pig, I’d say “Yes, come slaughter me. Just as long as you’re happy.”

I said, “Well, it was beautiful. We didn’t get up at 4:30 — we saw it from 5:30 to 6:00. But we’re up then anyway.”

He looked startled. “I get up at 6:30,” he said. “If I’m going to work a 12-hour day, at nearly 80 years old, I need to get some rest. No point staying up late or getting up too early.”

Which brought to mind the subject of age, which segued almost immediately into the topic of one’s departure from this life. The notorious exiled politician Benito Craxi had died of a heart attack the day before, and the funeral was today, in Tunisia. So people out and around have been discussing him, with heavy moralistic overtones (anything from “What a pity, he was a good, innocent person who didn’t deserve to die” to “What a crook, he should have died years ago”). No one, clearly, taking into account that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and whatever you do, your train is headed in the same direction as everybody else’s.

“Look at Craxi,” Signor Vitale volunteered. “”What use was all that struggling for power and money? There he is, dead at 66. Didn’t do him any good at all. You don’t need a lot of money in order to live.” He touched his forehead, to indicate that the only requirement was a functioning brain. “People need to learn to content themselves with what they have. We need to learn how to take life for what it is.”

“Yes, but he wanted to be big,” was my very unoriginal observation.

“You can’t be big,” Signor Vitale stated. “Or anyway, not past a certain point. You know the balloons kids have at the fair? They blow them up and blow them up to the point where the balloon can’t hold anymore and it explodes. The same thing for us. We can’t be big past a certain point. After a hundred years, nobody will remember we even existed. You know?” He seemed completely at peace with that fact.

“He wanted more,” I said, just to keep things going.

“Well sure,” Signor Vitale replied, one of his large, machete-like knives in his hand. “Mussolini wanted more, and he got it, too” — he made a thrusting motion with the knife and smiled seraphically. “Yep, he got more.”

At 6:00 the same evening I found myself back in the shop. Needed milk and butter. Signor Vitale was at the helm alone again, but this time there’ was a lady wearing an extremely gorgeous mink coat buying some milk and few other oddities. As I waited, I stared at the mink, struggling not to reach out and caress it — it was one of those furs that is so lush and gleaming that it not only screams “Money,” it also screams “Touch me.” I didn’t, but I stared.

When she left, I said to Signor Vitale, “Did you see that coat?”

He shrugged. “I’m no expert on fur.”

“I’m not either, but even a civilian like me could tell that it was something exceptional.”

He looked unimpressed. “Doesn’t it seem a little much, to wear something like that to go shopping?” I’ve gotten so used to see women here wearing fur coats, especially mink, that it hadn’t occurred to me. She has to wear something, after all. But of course he was right.

“Was it mink?” he asked.

“Indubitably,” I replied.

“I guess it usually is.”

“Well yes,” I said, “but there’s mink and mink.”

“I don’t know,” he went on. “Some people try to make themselves appear to be something greater than they are. Look at Craxi.” This was clearly the topic du jour, a very useful tool should you want to calibrate your personal values along with the barometer.

“He went so high, but people who go so high, who achieve all those glories, usually have humiliations to match. It’s better to be content with what you have. All that money. What was it for? He could still be alive” — he seemed to be implying that the desire for pelf was one contributing cause to the man’s demise. I didn’t know that “love of lucre” could be listed as a cause of death, but there was no doubt in Signor Vitale’s mind.

“The important thing is to love your work,” he declared, smiling that incredibly benevolent smile. His eyes beamed on me. I felt like a mink coat. “If you can work with serenity, you’ve got all you need in life. You need to be honest.” Evidently Craxi’s dishonesty — which he dishonestly denied, of course, up to the last palpitation of his flawed little heart — was another reason for his dying so young.

“What you need in life,” he continued, “is to work, to listen to the birdsong, to look at a beautiful woman” — he smiled, but seemed to sense he might be wandering onto tricky terrain, “to read a good book,” he neatly recovered. “This is what matters in life.”

These were clearly not opinions he was expressing, but facts. You can’t argue with a philosophy like this, especially when you know that the person expressing it spent several years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany during World War II, and raised four children, at least one of whom is a doctor, on the money he made from a batch of prosciutto.

Anyway, he was preaching to the converted. I had just noticed, crossing the bridge, the exquisitely pale, violet gleam of the winter sunset, and how the transparent sky was beginning to show tiny dots of stars. (I had also noticed a small water rat swimming sturdily from the drainpipe on one side of the canal to the other, leaving a perfect rippling V behind him or her. It’s all nature.)

I wondered if the woman in the mink coat would have noticed the same things, and if they’d have given her spirit the same lift they gave mine. Or does mink act as a sort of protective layer against more than mere cold? (Let’s be fair here, even philistines have to keep warm.) I have to watch out that I don’t fall into the mindset of those Russians who boast that they’re more spiritually alive than the materialistic clods in the West, even as they’re scraping the mold off their last piece of bread. It’s a very tempting frame of mind sometimes. The old “less is more,” but taken to metaphysical extremes.

This is the sort of musing that Signor Vitale almost always lures me into. Still, it so obviously works for him that you’re really, really tempted to believe it.

Problems

The Daily Budget: A modest handout gratefully received, sort of

August 4, 2009 No Comments

main10centsmall-ten-euro-cents-front — Buddy can you spare a dime? This coin is worth ten euro-cents.

Not long ago I outlined some of the elements in the Venetian municipal budget, especially the way in which the budget is always discussed to the basso continuo of keening and rending of garments (theirs, not mine). The city is broke, we have no money, no ghe xe schei, we’re going to have to go on the dole. Oh wait — we’re already on the dole (see: Special Law for Venice).

By now, Mayor Massimo Cacciari and his associates have acquired the habit of reminding the constituents that the coffers are bare; the search for cash anywhere was beginning to resemble one of those harrowing cinematic scenes of near-starvation where people start to kill each other over a piece of tree bark.

But good news!! The federal government (otherwise known as “Rome”) has just found another 50 million euros for the beleaguered most beautiful city in the world. Where? How? Why now and not earlier? These are futile questions and let’s not even bother asking them. The mayor’s response to the largesse: “It’s not enough, but it’s something.” (This is one phrase which does not sound better in Italian.)

The Italian ten-cent coin shows Botticelli's "Venus." If every work of art in Italy could be converted to specie, even the mosquitoes would be rich.

Now that we’ve all savored that rush of joy and relief, let’s look at the fine print.

The entire 50 million aren’t going straight into the city’s desiccated bank account. Thirty-five million are earmarked for assorted groups which are responsible for overseeing various aspects of the lagoon, and 15 million are going to the Veneto Region. That leaves 28 million for Venice itself.

Of course this news, like much of the preceding news, doesn’t resolve the problem; a large part of the funds allotted by the Special Law in recent years has been dedicated to the construction of the protective floodgates (MOSE) to prevent exceptional high water from entering the lagoon, i.e. Venice. In other words, too much has gone to too limited a purpose. Worthy though it may be. Which I and many others strongly doubt.

Predictably, the measured gratitude of the (left-leaning) mayor has attracted — as does his every thought, word, or deed — the scorn of the (right-leaning) President of the Veneto Region, Giancarlo Galan.

“I’m sure he (Cacciari) will say that the funds aren’t enough and that it’s all the fault of MOSE,” quoth he. “The Special Law for Venice is an inciucio [a word whose translation defeats me; it contains elements of scam, flimflam, scheme, entanglement of plans and plots and counterplans, sharp dealing, etc.] of the former social-activist regime which re-routed ‘special funds’ (hundreds and hundreds of billions of euros) from its primary objective, which was to confront high tide and environmental degradation of the lagoon, instead to the repaving of piazzas and sidewalks in Mestre and Marghera. It’s these disturbing remnants of aid-ism that cause me to urgently request the reform of the Special Law for Venice.”

I will let you know if anything truly interesting transpires from this parry-riposte, which is the only way they communicate with each other. If “communicate” is the right word.

So let us smile, because today we have 28 million more euros than we did yesterday. If I could say that about myself instead of about the city, you wouldn’t hear any snidery from me about anything. I’d be a walking compliment factory.