This small Nativity scene is just inside the entrance of the church of San Francesco de Paola on via Garibaldi. There’s a bigger scene up near the high altar but I’m sticking with this one: It’s made almost entirely of recyclable materials, primarily bottle caps. It was created, according to the sign below, at the “Sant’ Alvise” day-care center in the neighborhood for persons with various disabilities. Whatever those disabilities may be, the group created a small masterpiece.
Technically, we are still well within the Twelve Days of Christmas, so Christmas images are more than appropriate — except that everyone has now fixed their beady eyes on the arrival of the New Year, so Santas and creches don’t seem quite so…necessary?
Fine, I will go with the marching calendar, but not without sharing a few more glimpses of Christmas hereabouts. To call it “low-key” would imply that there even was a key, but however modest the celebrations may have been, we treasured them even more.
Mary’s face is a bit mystifying — how did they make those eyes? Perhaps I will pursue this matter, perhaps not. Just add it to all the other mysteries of the year.Are those angels made of fluorescent light bulbs? Outstanding!The tobacco-toy-lottery ticket shop constructed Christmas in the window entirely from Lego bits. Not for me to say, but anyone who had time to do this must be escaping from something.Calle Lunga Santa Maria Formosa is the site of a silent battle between green-and-red windows. I have awarded the prize to the one on the left.I’m just sorry you can’t admire how enchanting the twinkling little lights made the whole arrangement. These are just crying out to be turned into wedding bouquets. With the lights.In the splendid entryway to the hospital (I’m fine) is this phenomenal Nativity scene constructed on a mascareta from the nearby Querini rowing club.Matting made of rushes from the lagoon marshes. Reliable sources (via Giuseppe Tassini) maintain that the sestiere of Cannaregio took its name from canne (rushes) that once lined its canal banks. The calle de le Canne near San Giobbe is named for a long-ago storeroom of rushes; these had various uses, primarily to apply pitch to waterproof the hulls of wooden ships.Some resourceful person(s) managed to obtain a not-worm-eaten bricola. Many of these pilings out in the lagoon are in desperate shape, but this is worthy of its exalted role here.From the day after Christmas until Epiphany hundreds of panettoni will remain in the supermarkets, placed front and center at ever diminishing prices. The management obviously hopes it won’t be forced to throw them away at season’s end. Or leave them in a warehouse till next Christmas?Undaunted sunset reaches via Garibaldi from however many miles away. I hope your 2021 will be just as bright.
I’m down to the holiday wire, sending this out on Christmas Eve, but as I race to finish the dusting (which I had about five months to accomplish) and Lino is wrangling the canoce (Squilla mantis) into pasta sauce and antipasto nibbles, I thought I would send a few Christmasy images from here.
Heartfelt best wishes to everyone for the end of 2020 and all of 2021.
Christmas fish-traps at the Rialto market. A festive sight for everybody, except the fish.There are so few gondolas to be seen in the canals — phalanxes of them have remained at their moorings for weeks on end — that this brave little red bow stood out like the brightest beacon of the holiday spirit.The good news was that it was probably the last day of school before the Christmas vacation. The bad news, obviously, was that it was so much earlier in the morning than he would have liked. Having his father nearby to haul his backpack clearly wasn’t enough.This was edgy — the bright sparks at Nevodi Pizzalab decided to create gifts-of-the-Magi pizza. They sound pretty good, but I’m uneasy that there may be something in the fine print of the catechism that would label this blasphemy. I just don’t know….. (Peperoni here are not spicy sausages, but bell peppers.)And speaking of the fish market, on Saturday there are also flowers there. It’s a little uncanny how she designed her shopping to complement her cart. Or vice versa.Sunrise always lifts my spirits, and I hope it does the same for yours. I have not done anything to the color here — this is how it was.
Seen from afar, it’s the Little Christmas Tree that Could. The bright glow in the glum is admittedly rather pleasant.
You might wonder how a Christmas tree could possibly make people mad (though considering the year almost past, you might not). Whatever your Yuletide habits, a lot of Venetians would have welcomed a honking big Norway spruce to its traditional place in the Piazzetta, some looming aromatic conifer loaded with scintillating lights, sumptuous ribbons, glittering glass baubles, etc. It would have been greeted with open arms, many smartphones, and shining faces.
But because we haven’t had enough computer screens in our lives this year, now we have the Christmas Screen.
It’s art, naturally, art that, from afar, sort of resembles a tree, though this structure isn’t even alive. But it does have the consolation of being, as I mentioned, art, groaning beneath loads of symbolism and verbiage.
Installed in the usual position last Thursday, this structure is the creation of artist Fabrizio Plessi, sponsored by the Assicurazioni Generali. No way of my knowing who had the final, or even the first, word in the discussions that led to this creation. It can’t be to attract tourists, because at this point in the evolution of the pandemic it would be easier to attract a Great Auk than a tourist.
It’s tree-ness, on closer examination, is looking a bit eccentric. Also, it’s moving. Literally.
The public has not been amused by a novelty that appears to be more like a refugee from the Biennale than a festive fixture.
The artist explains: “It’s a message of hope.”
The public responds: “A heap of scrap metal.” “Hanging ingots.”
Anything wrong with this picture? In addition to everything else that’s wrong about this tree, Lino notes that it’s between the two infamous columns of “Marco” and “Todaro,” historically the place for public executions. I realize it’s not precisely between the columns, but to him that’s where it is. Not good.
“This year we need a message of light,” Sig. Plessi told La Nuova Venezia. “The 80 modules represent the flow of that many different cultures.” Furthermore, it would seem that the installation symbolically unites earth, water and sky.
“I understand whoever would have preferred a traditional tree,” Plessi continues, “but this is a message of hope. The use of digital in this context becomes spiritual emotion and expresses itself in the only possible language today, permitting us to reach others even if they are physically distant.”
Not sure about you, but while this is the sort of hot air that keeps the Biennale aloft for months on end, it doesn’t do anything for the spirit of Christmas. My own view is that the more you explain something, the less that something actually communicates. If you have to tell people what to think or feel about your creation, you’ve acknowledged that the creation is mute.
If there’s one city that isn’t suffering for lack of works of art, it would be Venice. But there’s always room for one more.
There is more. “This tree is well planted in tradition, but it is also a tree that wants to talk to the world,” says Simone Venturini, the city councilor for Tourism. “Personally I find it marvelous because it shows that Venice knows how to be, together, the city of great history and of the future. It shows that you can make contemporary art without waiting for the Biennale.” Of course you can, as long as you have a sponsor. I don’t want to put a pricetag on Christmas, but this installation, along with 50 kilometers of strings of lights in the Piazza San Marco and on the mainland, not to mention the lights shining on the Rialto bridge, cost a total of some 800,000 euros. So he could also have said that you don’t need to wait for the Biennale in order to spend money. I knew that.
Many years ago a homeless man at the entrance to the subway in New York stopped me with this request: “Hey lady, could you spare some change for an old wino?” How could I say no? His candor was irresistible.
If Mr. Plessi had said, “I like to make art using digital stuff. I don’t know why, I just like it. Maybe because it’s shiny. So here’s sort of a tree made of digital stuff. Kind of made me think of Christmas. Hope yours is happy, in spite of everything,” I’d have started a Fabrizio Plessi fan club.
And yet, at some magical moment in the last four days, some indomitable soul(s) did what they could to put things right. “Thanks, we brought our own….”Despite the condensation on the plastic, the cardboard sign is clear. The “opera d’arte” (work of art), is straight ahead. Christmas, on the other hand, is down and to the left.This is what some people (not tourists, I’m thinking) consider Christmas.! I’m just sorry there aren’t any fish to stick in the branches, like the baby owl in New York and the baby koala in Australia.. In any case, Christmas has been saved. This time.
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.
