Roberto Dei Rossi has been making gondolas for 40 years, one of only four men in Venice capable of this feat.
Yes indeed, it has been several eternities since I have scribbled a post — though I have written many in my mind, as I watched the pages fall off the calendar and blow away in the wind, etc. etc.
I was entangled in the finishing (“ultimating,” in Italian, which is so cool. They can make verbs out of anything.) of a large and very long-drawn-out project of researching and writing an article on the gondola, and more specifically about Roberto Dei Rossi, who makes them. I started the research in February, 2019, and there were many stops along the way, especially that long one during the three-month lockdown from March to May. The story is now online at “Craftsmanship” magazine.
I’m hoping to get back in the groove now with my blog, for any of you who may still be out there waiting to read….
The gondola’s fundamental secret is its asymmetry. The boat isn’t straight, but that’s what makes it go straight when rowed by one oar. Note: Not paddle, not pole, but an oar.The basic ribs of the gondola, made of three pieces of wood, reveal the inherent shape. The straight bottom piece is made of oak, the side pieces are elm.The gondola is built from the inside out; what look like the boat’s sides are temporary pieces (“serci”) that resist the pressure of construction until it’s time for the permanent sides to be attached.It is not falling over. This is the gondola at rest and it’s built this way to make it easier to maneuver through the narrow canals and even to turn on its own axis without any headway (the only boat that can do this).Most rowing clubs have at least one gondola. This view of a gondola returning to the Remiera Francescana clearly shows the boat’s asymmetry.Certainly there are standard measurements, but the work is done largely by eye, followed by fingers and experience. You will never be able to build a gondola by working merely from a plan; there are too many adjustments to be made and these are only discovered by practice.Of course he knows exactly what he’s looking at and either seeing or not seeing. Some infinitesimal change may be at hand; I never asked while he was working. We’d still be there, a year later, if he were to have stopped every time I wanted to know something.He could have all the tools that were ever made, but this folding metal measuring stick is the one that really counts.I almost never saw him wearing glasses. It began to obsess me.It’s strenuous with power tools? It was even harder without them, especially when gondolas were always built with planks of wood instead of marine plywood. Still, a day here can easily wear you out.Or maybe suffocate you a little, from time to time.The inner surfaces are now full of the points of screws. Well, it’s inside, you may think, what difference does it make?It makes enough of a difference that he has to spend some time now cutting off each point, one by one.Eight different kinds of wood are used to make a gondola.Dei Rossi doesn’t carve the decoration; a master carver executes the designs according to the gondolier’s request.Of course he’s happy — after two months of work, the next new gondola is about to be launched.
At mid-afternoon, families and costumed kids began to roam around via Garibaldi, shaking down all the shop owners they could find. “Scherzetto dolcetto!” they cry (trick or treat), bouncing into shops and holding out bags or buckets or whatever container was available to receive some sort of placatory offering from the owner. I give a bonus point and a handful of bite-size Milky Ways to the kid who painted his soccer ball to resemble a pumpkin.
Over the past few years, Halloween has made inroads into the autumn-festival calendar here. I would say I’m at a loss to understand it, but then I realize that any excuse for a kid to wear a costume and score free candy is bound to be a success.
Venice had its own version of this sort of maneuver (without ghouls and skeletons) in the Saint Martin’s Day fun: Walking around the neighborhood banging on pots and pans and singing a doggerel song about St. Martin, annoying people and asking for handouts. So now the kids have managed to have two sugar-laden feste in the fall, and very close together. This shows either high intelligence or at the least, as a friend of mine used to put it, a form of low cunning.
Too much candy? How is that possible?The plastic bucket is the best.
The lady took so much time talking to the pharmacist that, hopeful as these marauders were, they finally gave up.The only thing more Halloweeny than fog in the daytime is fog at night ( here on the rio di San Piero). You totally expect to hear or see something creepy.On a brighter note, a morning row to our favorite farm on Sant’ Erasmo — “I Sapori di Sant’ Erasmo” — is a sort of orgy of autumnal goodness.
Checking out all the pomegranate trees lining the canal on Sant’ Erasmo. There were plenty, but mostly loaded with disastered fruit.As you see. Somewhere there is a bird asking itself “What was I thinking?”The best tree was at the farm. Looks like it’s practicing for Christmas.
Back in the depths of the summer heat, about the time when the sun began to set and the air to cool, we liked to go outside and sit on the edge of our little fondamenta and watch everyone going to and fro along Fondamenta Sant’ Ana on the opposite side of the canal.
Many were hurrying along carrying boxes of pizza from via Garibaldi, presumably going home; others were dressed in ways showing various degrees of effort, heading toward via Garibaldi. Tourist couples and families were undoubtedly going in search of somewhere to eat, but where the variously adorned teenage girls were going is something of a mystery. They were dressed for bars and clubs, and while we have plenty of bars, I have no idea where the nearest club might be. But obviously they knew, and they meant to get there.
There were homeward-bound mothers dragging strollers over the bridge, and old ladies (and sometimes men) dragging loaded shopping trolleys, either from the Coop (if they’re proceeding from right to left) or the Prix (left to right). Speaking of dragging things, there were also a few rolling suitcases somewhere in the mix.
This is the fondamenta Sant’ Ana; early in the morning there isn’t much to see. Watching this now would be like watching the color bars on TV at 3:00 AM.
And of course there are always people Lino knows, or who know him, which is almost the same thing. I thought of those early evenings sitting outside as watching LinoVision.
Example: A 30-ish man was walking briskly with his little girl, who appeared to be four or five years old. He stopped and waved to Lino. His daughter’s little voice asked him “Who’s that?” He replied, “He’s someone who taught me how to row when I was little.” Smiles and waves. It’s really nice. They move on. I ask Lino, “Who’s he?” He replies, “I have no idea.” He’s taught thousands, probably, to row. Can’t be expected to remember them all.
A middle-aged blonde woman goes by. “See that woman? She used to work in the bakery in Campo San Barnaba.” (“Bakery? You mean Rizzo?”) Of course that’s what he meant, but it wasn’t always Rizzo. I’m a latecomer on the scene. But she herself isn’t what he’s remembering.
He grew up two minutes away from the bakery, down Calle Lunga San Barnaba, and it was owned by a man by the name of Morasco. “I went to nursery school with his son,” Lino said. This is not a startling thing to hear; by now, the people we encounter generally are sorted into a few broad categories: Went to nursery school with, went to school with, was in Scouts with, worked with, and a couple of “I used to be in love with”s.
“The family lived over the shop — the bakery itself stretched the entire length of the building from the campo to the rio Malpaga. They had an enormous room upstairs and it was full of toys. We didn’t have toys, but this room was full of them.”
“Was he an only child?” I guessed.
“Yes, he was. Died young, too. I don’t know of what.” There you go: Your next novel all sketched out.
I would bet you that these two have known each other since birth. Anything they ever had to say, they said it long ago.
Another blonde woman, somewhat younger than the first, was going over the bridge. She’s a nurse in the blood-test department of the hospital; Lino used to go there occasionally for some intermittent checkups. Her technique with the needle would leave purple marks on his arm that looked like the Nile delta, and after the first two times he was sent to her station, he rebelled. He just said to another nurse nearby, “I’m not going to her.”
Why not? I didn’t hear his explanation, but it didn’t seem to surprise her. “Never mind, I’ll do it.” Maybe that’s why the blonde nurse never says hello.
Then there are the occasional individuals from his working life. For example, the silver-haired owner of the fish-stand, usually somewhere in the background cleaning fish. One day Lino noticed his resemblance to a long-gone colleague named Biagio.
“Are you Biagio’s brother?” he asked, as he was glancing casually at the array of fish.
“No, I’m his son,” was the reply. Discovering connections like this doesn’t strike anyone but me as wonderful. They evidently take it for granted.
You don’t have to tell me there’s somebody in here that Lino knows. I just take it as a given.
We pass two older guys on via Garibaldi. One of them is a man I see fairly often, mixed into the daily mashup of locals. Does Lino know him? Trick question: OF COURSE HE DOES.
He came to the Aeronavali as an adult, as opposed to Lino, who started as an apprentice there when he was 16. He was what Lino termed an “aeronautical adjuster,” specifically a first-rate welder, one of those mythically talented workmen from the days before machines came with instantly replaceable parts. “He was amazing,” Lino recalled. “He could put the legs on a fly.” Just an expression, of course, but a compliment of the absolutely highest order. If you needed to connect anything to anything else, he was your man.
“I don’t know where he came from,” Lino went on. “When the Arsenal closed in 1955, some of their workers came to the airport. Or he might have been with the ACTV” — then called ACNIL — “I can’t say.” He came aboard some years after Lino, so not much more biography is available except that at some point he left to change careers, leaving behind the fly’s legs to work as a garbage collector. “He probably made more money,” is Lino’s conclusion. Mine too. You don’t become a garbage collector for the glory or the fame.
Looks empty to me, but every place in Venice is swarming with memories. When tourists talk about how crowded Venice is, they’re only talking about people they can see. Anyone who’s Lino’s age sees hundreds more everywhere.
I’m not going to lie: I never thought I’d see this day. Either it would never come, or by the time it did, I’d have long since turned into tera de bocal (clay for making chamberpots, as they put it here). But here we are, or more specifically, there it was this morning — the Adriatic to the right, the lagoon 70 cm lower to the left, and the vaunted MOSE floodgates ensuring for the first time that the twain shall never meet.
Years, decades, lifetimes have been devoted to constructing (and paying for) this thing, and I had little (in ErlaSpeak that means “no”) expectation that the gates would ever function. But they did. Allow me to doff my chapeau and say I’m not only astounded, but slightly weirded out. Because hearing three signals on the warning siren at 8:00 AM put all my nerves on high alert, even though we’re not in danger till four signals warn us of the possibility of the tide’s exceeding our personal domestic ground-level safe limit of 150 cm. Instead: Nothing.
I think everybody’s nerves have been a little tense, after two days of forecasts predicting an acqua alta to peak today at 135 cm above mean sea level at 12:05 PM. But at 9:00 AM (and at a mere 70 cm of rising tide) it was instead the long-discussed, -doubted, -reviled floodgates that rose, and stopped the sea at whatever the watery analogy of “in its tracks” may be. At the measuring station at the Diga Sud of the Lido the tide was at 119 cm, but the water at the Punta della Salute — bacino of San Marco, basically — was at 69 cm. When the tide turned, just after noon, it had reached 129 cm, but in the city was only a paltry 73.
This graph clearly shows the track of the tide, from its lowest point at 6:00 AM to the moment when the gates began to rise. Game, as they say, over.
We went outside to look at our canal. The water wasn’t moving. A lost pear, fallen from the fruit/vegetable boat upstream, was bobbing tranquilly in one place when it ought long since to have been carried off by the rising (or, by then, falling) tide.
Even on a normal day, the water in the canal is almost always moving at some speed, in some direction; only briefly, twice a month, does the tide pause in what is called the morte de aqua (“death of the water”). But here it was, stock still. It might as well have been in the bathtub. And so it remained until some time after the Adriatic began to withdraw; I suppose that didn’t need to be said, but perhaps someone other than myself might have forgotten that you wouldn’t lower the barrier until the sea was at least even with the level of water in the lagoon.
I didn’t used to think of 135 cm as anything more than “God, this is annoying.” But I think it’s fair to say that the doomsday inundation of November 11-12, 2019 is still too screamingly fresh in everybody’s mind to allow the casual return of “Sure, this is Venice, what do you expect?” Any tide above normal now appears potentially apocalyptic. And if our nerves were slightly on edge, so were those of the hopeful travelers who had booked hotel rooms and then, having heard early mentions of the dreaded words “acqua alta,” quickly canceled the reservations.
That’s too bad, because they missed a verifiably historic moment. And I’m glad I was here to see that pear not going anywhere in our canal.
The breakwater at San Nicolo’ on the Lido was an excellent spot for watching this epic event. This clip gives a sense of the force of the wind, always a crucial player on Team Flood Venice. This morning it was up to 41 kph (25 mph).
In case the still photograph above doesn’t convey the dynamic of what’s happening, this video from Corriere della Sera (particularly at the beginning and end of the clip) gives a glimpse of the force of the tide, as seen against the barriers as they rise, one by one. Fun fact: It took one hour and 17 minutes to raise all 78 of the gates, so the process obviously needs to start in a timely manner and not wait till the last OMG minute.
Beautiful in its way…But this is astonishingly beautiful: Noon today in the Piazza San Marco, the moment of the peak tide which ought to have covered the pavement with some 45 cm/17 inches of lagoon. The only water that dampened the stones here came from the clouds.
Note: Two videos, and all of the images with the exception of the water in the Piazza San Marco, were forwarded to me by friends via WhatsApp, so I am unable to give appropriate credit to their sources.
