A friend has sent this image of Marino Menegazzo’s gold leaf in Los Angeles.
The caption in Wikipedia (public domain) explains that the original 1939 building was home to the May company department store. For the curious, the style is Art Deco and Streamline Moderne. Formerly part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus, since 2021 it houses The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, located on Wilshire Boulevard at the western end of the “Miracle Mile.”
Lest you think, as I did at first, that the cylinder’s surface itself is covered with gold leaf (I tip my hat to the legendary Ca’ d’Oro on the Grand Canal), let me clarify that it is made of more than 350,000 glass and gold-leaf mosaic tiles. Some of the original tiles were so deteriorated that they had to be replaced, so preservation specialist John Fidler turned to the original producer, Orsoni, in Venice. Not for the first time, Orsoni turned to Menegazzo for the required leaves of gold to be placed within the new glass tiles.
Gold on its way to being beaten into a leaf seemingly lighter than air. Believe it or not, this leaf is still closer to the beginning than to the eventual end. This is merely the first step; these leaves have just undergone their first pounding (20 minutes under the tilt hammer) and now will be cut into smaller pieces and beaten again.Marino Menegazzo is beating gold leaves on a traditional block of marble, and is sitting because wielding an 8-kilo (17 pounds) iron hammer standing up would massacre his back. Turning gold into gossamer requires from 1200 to 1800 blows of the hammer.
For every “first,” there is a “last.” They come packaged together, kind of like up and down. Maybe you actually want your “up” to come down, so that makes you happy, but this particular “last” is serious. If you are seeking pleasant news today, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Sorry.
Slow-news-day stories from Venice occasionally bewail the shrinking population of the historic center (“real Venice” to me); the disappearing population of artisans, not so much. Venice’s fortunes were built not only on the cunning of merchants but the skills of the artisans who created whatever the people in the fancy houses wanted to sell. Now it’s 2025, and for an artisan to survive in Venice requires a fortitude and capacity for sacrifice that goes unnoticed by anybody except the tax collectors and landlords.
The result? The road to Going Out of Business sales. Two years ago, on April 20, 2023, Marta Artico wrote a report in La Nuova Venezia headlined: Venezia, in dieci anni hanno abbassato le saracinesche 4,000 artigiani. (“In ten years 4,000 artisans have closed up shop.” The statistics cover the metropolitan area, not just real Venice. But still.)
That’s bad enough, but what if an entire craft is slated to disappear? In the case of Marino Menegazzo, despite every effort, that is exactly what happened. Not in the distant past, but mere months ago.
Marino Menegazzo was the last man in Europe to beat gold leaf entirely by hand (I except the 20 minutes of the first beating by a 1926 tilt hammer, as similar hammers were in use centuries ago powered by water). And he didn’t beat only gold, but 17 various gold alloys.
Pure gold, leaf by leaf, seen as it is alloyed down to “white gold” — gold plus silver — in the center.
So now the skill, sensitivity and experience that he has perfected in his lifetime is gone, along with that of the centuries and generations of goldbeaters that preceded him.
Before I proceed, I urge you to read the article I wrote about him that is linked above. His story up to a few years ago is all there, so no need to repeat it all here.
The sign above his workshop/office/shop. (Battiloro means goldbeater.)
The “Mario Berta Battiloro” company was founded in 1926, and Marino had hoped to bring the family enterprise to its 100th anniversary. But no. The up has had to submit to its down. At its height (I refrain from referring to it as the “golden age”) the business had 14 workers producing 1,000 booklets of 10 to 25 gold leaves each every month and, in exceptional cases, even in a week. Impressive? In the 18th century there were some 340 goldbeating workshops in Venice.
Now Marino’s tools are silent, awaiting transfer to the National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, and a craft/skill/art that made Venice shine like the sun will no longer be part of the city’s greatness.
His hammers (l to r) weigh 6, 3, 4, 8 kilos (13, 6, 8, 17 pounds). Pick up something that weighs 17 pounds and imagine doing anything with it besides putting it down immediately. And carefully.
Many, even most, artisans have to grapple with the most basic challenges to their survival, from rent increases to shrinking markets, taxes, the cost of materials, and the occasional debt, a struggle that too often has led to the same mundane conclusion. But the craft of goldbeating deserves more than a “Hey, whatcha gonna do?” Gold leaf continues to be produced in many places around the world, but not like this. Not even close.
These are the leftovers. Bits of gold leaf that are sliced away from the edges of the perfectly-cut leaves are piled together, waiting their turn to be melted down and pounded again.
Marino Menegazzo managed to weather the effects of the pandemic, which blocked his customers for too long, and not all of them returned. But the failure to find an apprentice — there were some, but one by one they moved on — was followed by being compelled to sell his laboratory to pay debts, some reaching back to crises in 2007. (He kept ten workers on until 2015 because “they were part of the family”).
The gold is smelted at approximately 1750 C (3182 F). After smelting, the pure gold is poured into a form to cool as an ingot.This gold has no idea what’s waiting for it.The ingot rolled through the laminator sets out on the long road to gold leaf.Each pass through the laminator results in a longer and thinner strip, the first phase of becoming a leaf.He takes the long ribbon of gold and cuts off whatever size piece is destined for goldleafdom.The rest he folds up and puts in the safe till he needs another piece.
Losing the laboratory was the fatal step. He could certainly have kept going for at least a few more years if he’d been able to find a new one. Sound simple? Not in Venice. Because he works with flame, and has a few other technical requirements, he couldn’t move into just any old empty decrepit storeroom, and the search for an adequate new space was completely fruitless.
Appeals for assistance made to the city and the regional governments, and even to the diocese of Venice, were met either with silence or the kind of offers that are no better than none. Requests for meetings were ignored. A few foreigners seemed interested in coming to the rescue, but time was running out and there were no results. An artisan who in some other countries would be sustained as a Living National Treasure was left to his own devices. He wasn’t asking for favors, just a space! The Arsenal? Nope. A corner of the old ACTV yards at Sant’ Elena? Nope again.
So there you have it. There will be no more golden ribbons curling out of the laminator, no more leaves of gold patiently pounded to literal transparency. There will be no one who is capable of sensing the gold’s response to the winter fog or the summer drought and the heat and the pressure of his hammers.
Another piece of Venice falls away.
One gram of pure gold, circled in red. (One gram = 0,035274 of an ounce.)One gram of gold beaten into 49 filmy-fine leaves.
He is working with the heaviest hammer here. He must adjust the force and the rhythm to avoid overheating the gold. The two packets, or “cutches,” of mylar sheets are held steady by the green “shoder,” made of parchment.
Here he’s working with the lightest hammer. You may think you could handle the hammer, but could you keep track of perfectly counting every strike of it? Because that is crucial, and studies show that the capacity to concentrate is deteriorating under the effects of smartphones and the internet. Goldbeating resembles some form of meditation, with weightlifting added. Is that a thing?
Menegazzo periodically checks the thinness (and the evenness) of the leaf. The nature of the light passing through it reveals how thin it is, or what more he needs to do. He can beat leaves so thin that he can obtain a thousand pieces from just 20 grams of gold. (Photo from his book on the workshop, I regret the quality here.)
After the first beating the leaves are cut into four pieces and interleaved again between sheets of mylar for the final beating. As you see, each leaf must line up exactly with the one before. I probably didn’t need to point that out. Notice the square lined notepaper nearby — it’s there to check alignments when needed. Again I state the obvious.
The final leaves have to be cut to the prescribed dimensions (there are many options). That’s where his wife and twin daughters, and an occasional helper, came in.
Eleonora Menegazzo assembling a “libretto,” or booklet, of the gold leaves as ordered. Like goldbeating, this also has a contemplative aspect, work aided by various tools including her perfect fingernails.
The adjustable cutting tool is called a “wagon.” I suppose I can see that, though it seems like one of those spontaneous “That’s what we’ll call it till we come up with something better” ideas.Sabrina Berta, Marino’s wife and the guiding spirit of the workroom, was born into her family’s life of goldbeating. The workshop has barely changed over the decades.
The slatted floor simplifies the occasional clean-up operation to recover all the random bits of gold that have fallen by the way. Nothing escapes.Sabrina Berta
The angel Gabriel atop the belltower of San Marco gleams with Menegazzo’s gold.
A friend mentioned in a friendly way that it might be nice for me to lighten up (she didn’t put it that way, but that’s what I heard) and share some glances at Venice these days. Nothing easier.
In the search for diversion you can never go wrong with laundry. Here we have black clothes and white, and their children in the middle.That was the day reserved for all the pink clothes. Or one red item that ran.I can’t imagine that they have anything to talk about. They might have tried, once.Inside and outside are such bourgeois concepts. They manage to mingle rather well.I stopped for the reflection but stayed for everything the heck else. The palm frond is typically an appurtenance of ultra-pious Catholic groups. The nearby surveillance camera does hint at a belt-and-suspenders approach to security, though. The clips on the wall once anchored now-removed shutters. The significance of the flower in the pot eludes me. I am in love with the drainpipes.Reflections are always entertaining.I hesitate to deconstruct this moment’s delicate equipoise. But I think this father is happiest in the service of his daughter, the empress, so at ease with power that she doesn’t need to even look at her faithful servitor. No sarcasm here, I mean it. They’re both exactly where they want to be, and how often can that ever be said.I loathe my cellphone’s camera, for obvious reasons, but it was my only way to grab this extraordinary conjunction of hair before they all got off the vaporetto. They seemed not even to know each other, but most likely they were all going to the nearby high school. Perhaps these tresses are required of some adolescent cult. I’ll never know.I was there, and yet I still can’t explain why they all had open umbrellas. Yes, it had rained, but the street reveals that the danger was long past. They Just Were.The city can’t win. It puts out a trash bin AND an ashtray. But these passersby did not believe in using either. Their disdain almost seems to express some message. Yes, we understand what you want, but we will defend to the death our right to not dispose of them as you require.This tombstone carver is somebody I’d like to know. Or maybe he’s one of those people whose wit doesn’t come through except on paper. Or marble. Here he has substituted the standard “Mario Rossi” with the name of the “Universal Genius.” The sentiment is more modern: “We will always love you, your dear ones.” The dates are funny, though.And here we’re laying this script and design on the shoulders of the divine Dante. I doubt that any classical scholar ever wondered what the tombstone would have looked like as the Supreme Poet wandered the underworld. But here at least the dates are correct.Okay, if this were music it would be trills, arpeggios, scales, and the occasional mordent. I have no idea what the two geniuses mentioned on the marble would think about how their names are being treated, but I’m pretty sure a bereaved spouse or parent would fall apart in the face of all these possibilities. Butterflies for Michelangelo would be an audacious option, don’t rule it out too soon. (If anyone is interested, “N” stands for “nato/a,” or born; “M” is for morto/a, the opposite of born.)The view from the belltower of San Giorgio never disappoints, especially if you appreciate this vision of Giorgio himself in his “bring it” pose, waiting for his dragon. If I were a dragon I’d have been far away, reviewing my life choices.
In the canals, too much mud can be a problem, but one doesn’t see it until the extreme low tides of mid-winter. When anyone asks me how deep are the canals, I usually ask “You mean at high tide? Or low tide?” The height of the water changes, but over time so does the height of the mud.
You could call it the lagoon’s base layer. There are places where there’s too much mud, mainly in the canals; it accumulates and creates problems for boats when the tide is low and, equally important, problems for buildings whose drains it has blocked, and so we have to take it away.
But there is an equal and opposite problem of there not being enough mud in places around the lagoon, where dredging has been heavy or, more frequently, where the motondoso (waves from motorboats) has loosened the soil, and the tide and waves have washed it out to sea. Waves that demolish the wetland marshes (barene) or, on the other hand, fill up channels, have been known for years to be wrecking the lagoon’s wrinkly underwater shape, smoothing it out and slowly turning it into a sort of bay of the sea. Bays of the sea are an entirely different ecosystem from lagoons, but no matter! Motors are indispensable for keeping the city going, and the lagoon is just going to have to suck up (so to speak) the consequences.
At water-level you may notice only water, but the lagoon is full of mud.
The 17th-century Venetians knew the lagoon dynamics intimately. Their survival depended on it. Fears of the lagoon silting up from the several rivers that flowed into it led them to an epic undertaking: From 1600-1604 they cut the river Po to divert it southward into the Adriatic.
In 1993 it was decided to redistribute the quantities of mud in the city and lagoon: Simple, logical, effective, positive. Dredging proceeded and the mud was deposited in various locations where it was useful, or at least not problematic. In fact, moving mud around is far from a recent phenomenon — it’s been done many times over the centuries resulting in consolidations, expansions, and entire new islands. This assortment of maps showing the Morphological Evolution of the Lagoon of Venice from the XVI Century till today is very interesting. In the 20th century Tronchetto and Sacca Sessola, to name only two, rose from the lagoon bottom created with dredgings.
And so, in the fullness of time, the dredges were at work outside our door in 2021, and they were at it again just two months ago. All seemed to be going well, but suddenly we read that things have taken an unexpected turn. The mud is unusable!
The dredger the first day of work thought it was a good idea to tie his behemoth to one of our little pilings to resist the weight of the mud he’s pulling up. He was wrong. But you can appreciate something about the mud here: It’s tenacious. Once it grabs onto something, it really doesn’t intend to let go. This went on for hours, the modest pole yanked sideways, as you can see; it simply couldn’t be dislodged, although it’s now a bit shaky. The next day he moored the monster to the metal ring on the street, and we’re trying to help our piling begin to trust people again.
The headlines have been blunt: “Unusable muds, the lagoon in crisis, the dredging has been stopped in the lagoon.” “The new Protocollo of 2023 for the sediments dug in the canals doesn’t work anymore because the parameters of ecotoxicity are too rigid.” “First they were considered clean and good for reconstructing the barene. But no more: Now there’s a risk of blocking also the dredging of the most polluted.”
This problem has come up literally in mid-dredge. It’s a little awkward to discover that the Protocollo of 2023 is invalid when the barges are full of mud, so now what? Is there a Plan B? “Strictly speaking, we don’t have one,” to quote CIA operative Gust Avrokotos in the film “Charlie Wilson’s War.” “But we’re working on it.”
So what changed all of a sudden? It’s that, as the headline noted, the standards are suddenly stricter as to what mud is classified as “ecotoxic” (either biological or chemical) and therefore where it can be dumped. (Don’t write in, I know that everything is chemical, looking at the universe. We’re roughly distinguishing here between chromium and E. coli.)
Nobody’s surprised to hear that there are toxic substances in the lagoon — just look at the Industrial Zone shoreline and draw your own conclusions. A few years ago the University of Padova and Ca’ Foscari in Venice studied some mollusks taken from the channel bordering the mainland. Researchers found that the bivalves contained a quantity of poisonous substances 120 times higher than in the rest of the lagoon.
So here we are. Where will the mud go?
Men used to do this with shovels. Not underwater, of course.
All muds are not created equal. Category A, the cleanest kind, is safe to put under the water, so it can be used “nourish” the shrinking barene. Other muds, the more toxic Category B and C, can’t be put back into the lagoon, no matter how worthy the reasons, and have to be banished to the Tresse island. And God forbid all these muds should become mixed together. Burning the mud is an interesting proposal, but it’s hard to agree on where to put the ash.
Also, the Tresse at the moment is running out of space. There have already been discussions about enlarging it, but quantity and quality, as often happens, are in conflict. Decisions lag. Bureaucratic, legal, logistical issues keep bumping into each other. Cost must be in there too, somewhere. The Morphological Plan of the lagoon was shot down in 2022 and nothing has been heard of it since.
The Isola delle Tresse began in the 1930’s as Storage Tanks island, and was expanded in 1993 with a million cubic meters of mud and other material dredged for the benefit of the Port of Venice. This raised the island by nine meters (30 feet) and doubled it in size. Now it has been proposed to deposit as much as an additional four million cubic meters of mud, which would raise the island as high as 13 meters (43 feet). May I take just a moment to recall that when UNESCO designated Venice as a World Heritage Site in 1987 it also included the lagoon? Toxic mud doesn’t sound very World Heritage Sitey.
So, back to the dredging at hand: After weeks of hardy gouging and hauling, the mud’s permission to land, so to speak, has been revoked. The Department of You Should Have Seen This Coming isn’t answering its phone.
The barene (semi-solid mud) are beautiful and crucial to the whole ecosystem. But motondoso, or waves caused by the anarchy of motorboats, slices away at their soft soil. This goes on all year long, but especially in the summer. Note the distance between the wooden piling and the islet. They used to be much closer together. Shrinking barene aren’t good for the health of the lagoon as a whole.Of course the plant roots help stabilize the soil, but they only go down so far. Soon the upper layer will collapse and slide into the water, filling up the channel. We need the barene and we also need the channels, but they do not play well together. Eventually there will be too much mud in the channel, and not enough island, and dredging will be called for. And perhaps expansion afterward. Not literally inconceivable.To resist the waves gnawing at the barene, various defenses have been tried. Above is somebody’s idea of a breakwater. The barena is clearly not reacting as the planners intended. You can see here why it was hoped that the latest batches of dredged mud could enlarge shrinking bits of land, because more and/or larger barene would be a great thing for the ecosystem. Even if you don’t care about the ecosystem — I don’t judge — more barene would serve as barriers to slow the incoming tide, the way they always did before motondoso began to tear them apart.This construction is not destined to last long; the team behind this project seems not to have observed what happens to wooden pilings in the water.The lagoon loses 600,000 cubic meters of sediments every year, leaving an increasing wasteland behind. You can easily see the difference between the lagoon north of Malamocco (divided by the Canale dei Petroli, about which more below), and the southern lagoon. If too much mud in one place is a problem, too little mud in another isn’t any better. Fewer barene and fewer channels mean the water can rampage around and carry even more mud away with the tide, or deposit it unhelpfully elsewhere.1901. We see lots of squiggly channels back then (which, like the barene, slowed down the tide, and the dislodging of sediments). You also see that the shoreline was squishier and more ragged, providing more space for the water to come and go, moving more slowly in the process. But too many channels were doomed, like the little one circled in red above.1932. Look at the little channel (ghebo, in Venetian) circled in red again. You see that natural processes have caused it to begin to fill in, but it was still in good shape at least ten years later because Lino remembers it well. His father would take him out fishing in their little boat and they rowed along this canal on their way to the best spot to “dig” for canestrelli, or little lagoon scallops (Aequipecten opercularis). Note: The different colors indicate varying depths of the water. You’ll see that change over the decades too.
In the Thirties the Industrial Zone was being built; for Venice’s post-war economy it seemed like the greatest plan ever, and in many ways it was. In their great days (now past), the chemical refineries here were the largest in Italy. Oil and chemical industries require raw materials, and those require ships, and ships require reliable channels for passage. That broad, curving channel marked in yellow on the map above that enters the lagoon from Malamocco does not look like anything a big ship would want to navigate, and of course ships also need a waterway to reach the mainland port area. And so the Canale dei Petroli (“petroleum canal,” in honor of the expected tankers) was planned.
1970. The triumph of the shipping. The broad, curvy yellow channel (which also slowed the force of the tide) was bypassed in 1964-1968 by the digging of the channel that is straight as an airport runway: The Canale dei Petroli. The resulting tons of mud went to the shoreline, reshaping it by the formation of three longish islands (generically called casse dicolmata) that were created along the flank of the mainland. They were intended as the land for the Third Industrial Zone, which was never built. Left to their own devices, they’ve become a sort of oasis, especially for birds.Dredging the Canale dei Petroli created a channel 18 meters (60 feet) deep, 15 km (9 miles) long and 200 meters (656 feet) wide. If you had wanted to suck the sediments out of the lagoon, you could hardly have done better. But the wakes of the cargo ships also stir up the sediments and they don’t all reach the sea. Result: More dredging is needed periodically as the channel proceeds to silt up. Further result: The tide entered faster and with more force than ever before, and before you could say “Worst flood in Venice’s history, November 4, 1966” the city went under. Venetians weren’t slow to see a connection between the canal and the flood, but what was done was done.And this is more or less the situation today.Moving mud means moving water. These maps were made in 2009, so the situation may well have changed yet again since then. Looking at you, effects of MOSE. (On the right panel: This map was assembled for study use of the Committee of Public Health of Venice, from the pages published on the site https://www.istitutoveneto.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/IDPagina/1. Credit and rights to this work belong to Diego Tiozzo Netti. The indications of the tidal flows are by Umberto Sartori.)
We’re looking at tide patterns, otherwise known as the hydrostatic equilibrium of the tides in the lagoon over many centuries.
LEFT PANEL: The solid red lines show the tidal pathway from the inlet at San Nicolo’. The solid green is the water entering from Malamocco (Alberoni). The thin blue line across the center of the lagoon emphasizes what we can see where the arrows meet, the point where the two incoming tides form the spartiacque, or “division of the waters.” The dotted red lines show tidal flow before the landfills created by the Austro-Hungarians (who left in 1866) and Fascists (1922-1943). The dotted green lines show the tide before the landfills made by the post-war “democratic-clientele governments.” The dotted dark-blue lines are the principal zones of sediment deposits, which makes sense considering the movement of the tides.
RIGHT PANEL: The pattern of the rising tide in 2009. The solid red line shows the pattern of the tide entering the lagoon from the inlet at San Nicolo’. The solid green line shows the tide entering from Malamocco (and, obviously, along the track of the Canale dei Petroli.) This graphic shows the effect of losing the mudbanks, natural channels and barene, smoothing out the lagoon bottom that used to be naturally uneven and knobbly.
I think the tides and the mud matter more to many other creatures than they do to mere humans. This barena that was built next to the Certosa island is a haven for flamingoes, Eurasian oystercatchers, egrets, herons, common shelducks, and the now-ubiquitous sacred ibis. And undoubtedly more that I haven’t discovered yet.The ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus) love the mud.Snowy egrets (Egretta thula) don’t particularly care about mud, per se, but they like the easy fishing when the water is shallow.Curlews (Numenius americanis) absolutely love the mud, digging up worms and other little submerged treats.The plover (Pluvialis squatarola) is another huge fan of mud.The oystercatcher (Haematopus ostralegus) is really beautiful, unless you’re an oyster, obviously. They also wade around looking for mussels and earthworms.The grey heron (Ardea cinerea) is the apex wader. Evidently he’ll eat almost anything.Here the lagoon bottom is fairly firm when it’s exposed at low tide, but if you walk into the water you will sink into squishy mud up to your ankles. Pause to admire the tracks of the birds who have traversed this territory, snacking to their heart’s content.
The important thing is that the lagoon bottom isn’t perfectly flat.This is evidently the perfect place for a feast. The shore is littered with clam and oyster shells, the casings of creatures that need the mud to live.The mud doesn’t just feed the birds. There are indeed oysters in the lagoon and they are delectable. Lino spent one Christmas Eve afternoon out in the lagoon and brought home a batch of these for our dinner. These three clutched together, though, seem to have formed a sort of Wagnerian pact or something.We sometimes find scallops, even though they’re not as plentiful as when Lino was a boy and would go home with a bucketful.That was a good day out — lots of different types of clams (and this isn’t all of them, by any means). They may be pondering how unmuddy the world has suddenly become.Regard the mud. The waves from some passing boats clearly show that the mudbank is just below the surface.You see water, I see mud. The surface is smoother where the water is shallower as the tide rises or falls. If you’re out rowing and you see this, you have only yourself to blame if you run aground. You were warned.
If you want a lagoon, you have to want mud. Otherwise you might just as well look at your bathtub.
