If you were looking for a statue of a famous Venetian, it’s unlikely you’d have thought of finding it here. Was this its original position? Because there couldn’t be a more vivid way to express “Nobody cares — we’ll just work around it.”
Sharp-eyed readers, no matter how well-read, probably wouldn’t associate “Modena” (MOH-deh-na) with a man, but rather with the city which is the fountainhead of balsamic vinegar. A slightly curious last name, for someone born in Venice, but there’s a man in Modena with the last name “Venezia.” Seems fair.
Gustavo Modena (1803 – 1861) appears by now to have been consigned to corners — of libraries, of artistic and political discussions, and even of the Giardini Pubblici in Venice. But he was front and center in Italian artistic and political life in the mid-1800s — arguably the premier Italian actor of the 19th century — and active in the secret revolutionary society known as the “carbonari” which was a driving force in the efforts to unify Italy. When he wasn’t acting, he was being followed by the police. Clearly, activist-actors aren’t a recent phenomenon and he was equally amazing in both roles (sorry).
Judging by the pedestal alone, this was quite the man. The statue is by Venetian sculptor Carlo Lorenzetti (1858 – 1945).
“Like so much else in the arts,” the Cambridge Guide to Theatre tells us, “the early 19th-century Italian theatre was dominated by the struggle for national independence and unification, all the more fuelled by the sentiments of the romantic movement which in Italy was a revolt not only against French-oriented classicism, but against foreign domination, political fragmentation, economic retardation, and intellectual obscurantism. More, perhaps, than elsewhere, romanticism too had strong nationalist and popular emphases.”
There is no way for us to experience his acting, unhappily for us, though contemporary reports state that it was powerful and highly naturalistic. His writings may have been equally eloquent, but when read today can’t possibly evoke the same responses as they did when Italy was in turmoil. However effective he may have been in his lifetime, only faint reverberations, if any, reach us today. I have no reason to doubt commentators who state that he achieved “strepitosi successi” — sensational successes — on the stage, but we can’t feel them. The statue looks earnest, nothing more.
The white stain is regrettable.
As for his fervent and unceasing labors to liberate his countrymen from their assorted overlords, I don’t presume to recount all his adventures, because I don’t presume you’d be inclined to read them. That whole historical period requires concentration.
But he isn’t completely forgotten. There are theatres named for him, as well as streets –“via Gustavo Modena”s are scattered across Italy: Rome, Milan, Padua, Florence, Bologna, Treviso, Perugia, Vigonza, and of course in Mori, his father’s home town near Trento. It’s great that he is so honored; it’s just too bad that he now seems as distant as Pharaoh Sneferka of the First Dynasty.
In Venice, though, he’ll always have that plinth.
He’s much less imposing when he’s not on his pedestal (or stage), but much more appealing. Here he looks more like your tenth-grade geometry teacher than either a famous revolutionary or dramatic actor.The inscription reads: GUSTAVO MODENA NELLE TORMENTOSE VIGILIE DELLA PATRIA / L’AUSTERA E LIBERA ANIMA / NUDRI’ DELLA FIEREZZA ANTICA / DA LUI CON INSUPERATO MAGISTERO D’ARTE / RISUSCITATA SULLE SCENE. “Gustavo Modena In the harrowing vigils of the fatherland / the austere and free spirit / nourished by the ancient boldness / with insuperable artistic mastery / revived on the stage.” If I could manage a better translation, I would, but meanwhile just remember the most important words: “boldness,” “insuperable,” “artistic mastery.” It’s an impressive effort to honor his talent in the theatrical as well as political sphere but there’s no question it sounds better in Italian.On the western side of the pedestal is the simple notation NATO A VENEZIA IL 13 FEBBRAIO 1803 MORTO A TORINO IL 20 FEBBRAIO 1861. “Born in Venice 13 February 1803 Died in Torino 20 February 1861.” He died not quite a month before the Kingdom of Italy was declared (March 17, 1861), the fruit of his lifetime of struggle. I can only hope that before expiring he was able to confirm that the nation would finally be founded.Venice wasn’t alone in commemorating him: “To Gustavo Modena Dramatic Artist and Patriot Florence 1903.”On the via Tornabuoni in Florence is another plaque: “In this house Gustavo Modena in the year 1849 directed the journal ‘La Costituente’ (The Constituent). A daily promotion of Republican unity to lift the people of Italy to the dignity of a nation.” The Brotherhood of Artisans of Italy place this in memory on November 22, 1903.”A memorial to Modena in Torino, by Leonardo Bistolfi (1900).A bust of Modena belonging to the Civic Museums of Florence.Modena on the Janiculum Hill in Rome.The Gustavo Modena theatre in Palmanova.
All these monuments in his honor — not bad for a man hardly anyone remembers anymore.
This is the view out our front door as the situation was reaching the problematic stage. In this case, though, it wasn’t so much the water that we were looking at as the height our boat was reaching. This was the point at we put on our hip waders and went to tie the boat to the barely-visible metal railing. The reason: The boat was in imminent danger of rising so high it would slip off the pilings it’s tied to and float away with the wind and the current. It happened to more than one person.
On October 29, 2018, there was water on plenty of floors. The tide wouldn’t have been all that high if the waning moon had been in charge of the weather, but the wind took over, reaching gusts of some 70 km/h (45 mph). The scirocco, or southeast wind, was what really brought the water home.
The media was flooded (sorry) with dramatic images of not one, but two “exceptional” high tides. “Exceptional” is the official term for any height over 140 cm above mean sea level (we got 156 cm at about 3:00 PM, 148 cm at about 11:00 PM). And, as Lino and I know from our experience ten years ago, 150 cm is the limit of the top step leading into our apartment. Therefore we had already gotten busy preparing our humble dwelling for this uninvited guest.
So the water came in but, in the time-honored way of the tide, it also went out. And I — along with everybody in the city at street level — can tell you that while “water on the ground” (as the common phrase here expresses it when the quantities of water are more modest) provides dramatic photos, water on the floor is tiring. Everybody’s next day was dedicated to cleaning up. Which is also tiring.
Because many friends have so kindly asked how we are (or, by this time, how we were), here is a little chronicle of the event as we lived it. There aren’t many pictures of the water outside our house because, as you’ll see, we had plenty to take care of inside.
It wasn’t fun, and of course it created major problems for vaporettos, ambulances, and other necessary boats which wouldn’t have been able to pass under the bridges. But the water here wasn’t anything like the monstrous flooding of the rivers devastating the Veneto region, where epic rain had filled some rivers, such as the Piave, up to 30 feet above their normal height. Bridges overwhelmed, roads completely impassable, houses drowned up to their second-story windows. Unlike high tide, flooding rivers kill people, so no wailing from us. Our water meant I had to dust and wash things I certainly had no interest in dusting or washing, but everything is back to normal for us. Out in the countryside, they can’t even see “normal” on the horizon yet.
The view inside was dramatic in a different way. Everything was either up on blocks, so to speak, or on the bed (which I won’t show because all the stuff piled up is just too appalling. And dusty. It’s been ten years since the last time this happened, and I had no idea how much dust there was under there).I usually watch the top step at the front door to gauge the height of the water, but Lino showed me an entertaining new way to keep track: The tiny triangular brick in the wall across the street. That brick is exactly at 150 cm. So I watched the brick. Not much else to do, all the chairs were up on the table.We opened the door, not because we’re so hospitable, but because the water would have come in under it anyway. On the right side of the doorway is the metal frame which was installed to hold the well-known panel intended to keep the water out. You notice there is no panel (it’s up on the sofa at the moment). The first time we used it — which was also the last time — the water didn’t come under the door, it came through the wall under the kitchen sink, and up through a fissure in the floor. This time it didn’t come through the wall, so we learned our lesson.Meanwhile, as the water is spreading across almost our entire apartment floor, one can only wait for the tide to turn. There’s a difference between resignation and acceptance. When you’ve reached acceptance, having a coffee is the rational thing to do while waiting to be able to get back to normal.
The next morning, I had some errands to do on via Garibaldi. As I expected, what I saw wasn’t a scene of destruction and lamentation but universal enforced housecleaning. The Venetian bucket brigade, with mops.
While his son was busy with the water vacuum, Gianni at CityMedia got busy with the mop and a bottle of alcohol, which he said made the floor dry faster. Neat trick, wish I’d known that earlier. But I guess there will be a next time.The Coop supermarket was kind enough to clarify the situation for any early customers who couldn’t interpret the significance of what the employees were doing. The Italian version on the right-hand side politely added that they would be opening as soon as they could. Please do without your bag of potato chips and bottle of beer for a little while longer.At the pharmacy: Bucket and mop, check. Things up on plastic boxes, check. Soggy dirty mat at entrance, check. This would be the perfect moment to ask for lip filler, or to bring your little girl (or boy) to have a jolly ear-piercing.The video-rental and various photo-tasks store. When the machinery is okay, everything is okay. They almost certainly will have installed the electrical outlets up high. If not, they may be well planning to do it as soon as some electrician answers the phone.At the drygoods store, she wasn’t only wiping up the floor, but also washing the windows. I forgot to mention that for a brief, exciting interlude the ferocious wind brought a deluge of rain. It sounded like things were breaking outside. But this is her only, if toilsome, task; in the mountains there are still villages, isolated by masses of fallen trees and mudslides, which still have no electricity. They would love to be in Venice with only acqua alta.I like her spirit; she must be new around here. In fact, she is; this bar/cafe (which has no visible name) has been open only a little while.KirumaKata, another new shop, offers jewelry made of glass and also various ceramic objects. They’re very lovely. When I saw the barrier she had installed in front of the door (here we see only the frames), I thought, “Well, I hope that works out for her.” In fact, she told me that the panel keeps out water as high as 140 cm or so. After that — as our experience showed ten years ago — the water comes in however and wherever it wants to.Three days later (Nov. 1) is a holiday, so the banks are closed. Here on the Riva dei Sette Martiri, the Cassa di Risparmio left the front door unbarricaded, even though acqua alta is forecast for today. This shows either extreme tranquillity in the face of imminent inundation, or they’ve already organized everything inside really well.Towing a tree from somewhere to somewhere. Floating debris is a serious hazard to navigation, and there was plenty of it around after the high winds plus tide. Don’t think this is just somebody wanting to save on toothpicks.Needs no explanation.Nor this. The flat area is often used as an impromptu trash bin (seeing that there isn’t one as far as the eye can see, even if you use a telescope). In this case the border just floated on the surface of the water, and when the tide went down it left all this behind. Including the little bag of dog poop, because otherwise this wouldn’t be Venice.For the curious about the sanitation system here, I offer a rarely-mentioned note on acqua alta, at least at street- or canal-level. When the water is this high — which isn’t anything particularly threatening…..….the pressure of the tide makes it almost impossible for our toilet to do its work efficiently. After flushing, only a few teaspoons of water are left in the bowl, after a series of struggling, strangling, sucking noises from the plumbing. I add this information for anyone who might be on the ground floor someday during acqua alta and hears a noise that sounds like a hydraulic wrestling match. Also, I don’t use the washing machine till the tide goes down — I can only imagine it not draining at all and flooding the kitchen. Which would already be wet anyway, true, but I haven’t reached the point of WANTING water on the floor.
We complain — justifiably — about tourists who take up too much space on the vaporettos with their steamer trunks and expedition backpacks, though I have to say that Venetians with children in strollers the size of tanks is becoming an even more annoying, and even dangerous, problem.
But the other day I encountered a new twist on the “I’m here, deal with it” mentality as evidenced by an exhausted Venetian mother. (Perhaps “exhausted mother” is redundant.) In any case, she was evidently in “standby” mode, mentally speaking. But she was sufficiently alert to have offered me her seat as I passed by, which surprised me.
She wasn’t sufficiently alert, though, to register that she wasn’t at home in her living room, where clearly chaos reigns. I sympathize with that, considering that her little boy, sitting on her lap, appeared to be about two years old. The fountainhead and source of chaos, in other words.
But I am helpless to further interpret her spatial awareness. So I will say no more.
The little boy helpfully clutched it. People walked around it. I failed geometry in high school but even I understood the nature of 90 degrees. I’m not sure what planet we’re living on.
One of the most notable monuments in the Giardini — in its position, and in itself — is of Venetian aviator Pier Luigi Penzo. Like his next-door neighbor, Francesco Querini, he too was involved in Arctic exploration and met a very distressing, unexpected, undeserved, all the “un”s you want, end. Yet somehow his story lacks some crucial element that makes Querini’s so riveting. I think it’s because the real focus of attention was on someone else.
The inscription reads: ACCANTO AL MARMO DI FRANCESCO QUERINI QUI VUOLSI ONORATA E COMPIANTA L’ALA DEL VENEZIANO PIER LUIGI PENZO SORVOLATA SU L’ARTIDE CADUTO NEL RODANO NATO A VENEZIA 5 MAGGIO 1896 MORTO A VALENCE IL 29 SETTEMBRE 1928.” “Beside the marble of Francesco Querini here it is desired to be honored and lamented the wing of Venetian Pier Luigi Penzo Flown above the Arctic Fallen in the Rhone Born in Venice 5 May 1896 Died 29 September 1928.” The eagle and anchor represent his status as a Navy pilot before passing to the Air Force.Although the words don’t exactly soar, one can admire the design of the lettering. On a more modest note, it appears that the encroachment of the shrub is eventually going to cover the words completely if someone doesn’t intervene with the pruning shears.He looks entirely like someone who deserves a monument, though of course monuments tend to do that.
The barest outlines of his tale are that he participated in a massive rescue operation in the vicinity of the North Pole in 1928; on his flight home his plane struck some power lines near Valence, France and broke apart. It fell into the Rhone River, from which his remains were recovered two weeks later some 50 km (31 miles) downstream. I have found surprisingly little to add to that summary; Google searches mercilessly return articles about the Venetian soccer stadium, named — another sort of memorial — for him.
Therefore, and meaning no disrespect, you might be wondering why this person, who admittedly met a premature and unmerited demise, should have been given such an impressive monument. (In fact, two of them — the other is on the cemetery island of San Michele.)
I’m glad you wondered, because while the ill-fated expedition he was sent to rescue is lavishly described in numerous documents, not to mention a film (“The Red Tent,” 1969), Penzo himself seems not to have been the hero, but a team player in the grand sweep of several tragedies. I must describe these tragedies — some technical, some human, some political — in order to clarify why Penzo was literally put on a pedestal. Emotions of all sizes and sorts had been running extremely high.
The Gazzettino, then a weekly, published this portrait of the 32-year-old Penzo a few weeks after his death. He was posthumously awarded the silver medal of the Air Force.
In drastically condensed form, we pick up the tale of Italian efforts to reach the North Pole in the autumn of 1925, when Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen asked General Umberto Nobile of the Italian Royal Air Force to collaborate with him on a flight to the North Pole; Amundsen wanted to be the first to reach it by air. More to the point, he wanted to fly in a semi-rigid airship, and Nobile was already well-known as an important aeronautical engineer, pilot, and fervent proponent of dirigibles.
Nobile designed and piloted the airship Norge, accomplishing the first verified trip of any kind to reach the North Pole and likely the first verified flight from Europe to North America (Svalbard, Norway to Teller, Alaska) over the polar ice cap. This feat was known as the Amundsen-Ellsworth 1926 Transpolar Flight, so named for Lincoln Ellsworth who, with the Aero Club of Norway, financed the expedition. On May 12, 1926 at 1:30 AM GMT the North Pole was reached (though not actually touched). The flags of Norway, Italy, and the United States were dropped onto the ice and the airship proceeded to Alaska.
With the success of this exploit Nobile then planned another polar overflight, this time with an all-Italian crew in a dirigible named Italia. The project, however, met strong headwinds from his many enemies in the Fascist government, some of whom were also enemies of airships but huge fans of rigid aircraft. After grudgingly approving the expedition, Captain Italo Balbo, then-Secretary of State for the Air Force (later Minister of the Air Force), wished him a special bon voyage: “Let him go,” he is reported to have said, “for he cannot possibly come back to bother us anymore.”
The expedition went splendidly for a while. On May 23, 1928, after a 69-hour flight to the Siberian group of Arctic islands, the Italia began its flight to the North Pole with Nobile as both pilot and expedition leader. On May 24, the airship reached the Pole and began its homeward trip to Svalbard when it ran into a storm.
Rapidly losing altitude in the struggle against real headwinds, the next day the Italia crashed onto the pack ice fewer than 30 kilometers (18 miles) north of Nordaustlandet (astern part of Svalbard).
Of the 16 men in the crew, ten were thrown onto the ice as the gondola was smashed; without the weight of the gondola, the buoyant superstructure began to float away with six crewmen still inside it who, as they drifted skyward, threw all the supplies they could manage out onto the ice, which saved the lives of their severely injured comrades. The six were never seen again.
The disaster’s horror was intensified, if such a thing were possible, by the desperation of the month-long search for the survivors.
The men on the ice sent calls for help via a radio transceiver salvaged from the shattered gondola, but 30 days passed with no response. While a variety of the usual Arctic horrors were befalling them, an international rescue operation was seeking them — Soviet Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Italy, not to mention privately owned ships which had been chartered by polar scientists and explorers. Even Roald Amundsen put aside his bad feelings toward Nobile and boarded a French seaplane to aid in the rescue efforts. The plane disappeared between Tromsø and Svalbard, and though a pontoon from the craft was later found, the bodies of Amundsen and all aboard were not.
Enter Major Pier Luigi Penzo, joining the search on June 23, 1928 in his Marina II, an SM55-Dornier Wal hydroplane. Born in Malamocco, he had enrolled in the Italian Royal Navy at the age of 20, and earned his hydroplane pilot’s license at the seaplane base at Sant’ Andrea, just across from the Lido. He distinguished himself in combat on the Piave front in World War 1, and had become one of the most requested aerial rescue pilots then active. He was also well-known to Italo Balbo — I suppose you could say he was a friend — with whom he had flown on several occasions.
The “idroscalo,” or seaplane base, at Sant’ Andrea was where Penzo earned his hydroplane pilot’s license. There was a flourishing waterborne airmail route between Torino and Trieste in the Twenties, mostly following the rivers (Ticino, Po) till reaching Venice.
In the end, the survivors’ signals were picked up by a Russian ham radio operator who alerted the search teams, and it wasn’t even Penzo who spotted them for the first time, but fellow pilot Umberto Maddalena. And the first rescue plane to land was a Swedish Air Force Fokker ski plane piloted by Lieutenant Einar Lundborg.
Nobile had prepared a detailed evacuation plan, with the most seriously wounded man (the heavily built mechanic Natale Cecioni) at the top of the list and himself as number 4. But Lundborg refused to take anyone but Nobile, who also had been injured. Lundborg argued that the plane could only take one passenger, and Cecioni was so heavy the pilot was unsure he could take off. So Nobile was airlifted to safety, a captain who, it can’t be denied, had clearly not chosen to go down with his ship (so to speak). When Nobile boarded the Italian ship that served as expedition headquarters, he was arrested.
Worse still, when Lundborg returned alone to pick up the next survivor his plane crashed on landing, and he was left on the ice with the other five.
Meanwhile, Penzo and his crew (as well as another hydroplane) undertook a series of flights over the icepack dropping supplies and instruments to the marooned men. I can’t give any details on whether he took any survivors back to base.
After 48 days on the ice, the last five men of his crew were picked up by the Soviet icebreaker Krasin.
Time to leave? Nobile insisted that he wanted to stay to continue the search for the six men who were swept away in the airship when it disintegrated, but was ordered back to Rome with the others. He was to discover that the Arctic catastrophe wasn’t over, because it had given his enemies their chance to eliminate him.
When he and his men arrived in Rome on July 31, they were greeted by 200,000 cheering Italians. The popular exultation at the happy ending of the agonizing drama momentarily baffled Balbo and his allies, who had been seeding the foreign and domestic press with accusations against Nobile, claiming that agreeing to be evacuated first was an obvious sign of cowardice. (Pause to wonder why, in fact, Lundborg had insisted on taking him off before everybody else.) The official inquiry gave them the chance to place the blame for the disaster entirely on his shoulders. He was accused of abandoning his men, and Balbo went so far as to call for his execution by firing squad for treason and cowardice. Instead, Nobile resigned his commission and went to the United States, returning only in 1943 when Balbo was dead.
Here is a fuller, though still concise, account of the Italia disaster.
Italians of Lino’s vintage were raised with the conviction that Umberto Nobile was a craven poltroon, but this stamp commemorating the 90th anniversary of the expedition shows the “Italia” proudly aloft.
So, as I mentioned, there were tragedies: The technical tragedy was the crash of the “Italia”; the human tragedy was the loss of life; the political tragedy, as I see it, was the destruction of Nobile’s reputation. I don’t say he was right to be evacuated first, but the fact that the attacks on him were politically motivated is revolting.
In the months between the departure of the survivors in July and his own departure in September, Penzo remained at King’s Bay to continue the search for Amundsen, as well as for the six men lost in the envelope that floated away. In these flights he didn’t use his usual hydroplane, but a Macchi 18 biplane hydro-bomber (I throw that in for any aviation fans who might be reading). Unsuccessful in both cases, he was finally ordered back to Italy.
On September 27 (Thursday) he sent a telegram to his family that he was on his way home, and his brothers left Venice for Pisa, where his plane was expected to land on Friday. But it did not.
On Sunday morning a functionary of City Hall delivered the bad news to his wife. Two of his crew had survived the crash and been saved by fishermen, but Penzo and another two crewmen drowned. His remains were interred on the cemetery island of San Michele, under a honking big monument.
The memorial to Penzo is located in the section dedicated to the military. The eagles appear to want to be artichokes.The inscription in Latin identifies Petrus Alojsius Penzo April 6 1896 September 29 1928. Following his date of death is inscribed “E.F. VI,” for the sixth year of the Era Fascista (Fascist Era). The oak leaves above his head typically symbolize power, endurance and strength (also humble beginnings, which would certainly be apt for Malamocco); they’re often seen on military tombs.This interesting device is easy enough to decipher: The propellers and compass rose for aviation, the bear symbolizes the Arctic, and the corpse floating on the water would represent the victim.The other side of the monument isn’t much less impressive.“ASSUMENT PENNAS UT AQUILAE VOLABUNT ET NON DEFICIENT.” “They shall take wings as eagles, they shall run and not be faint.” Here the famous phrase from the book of Isaiah 40:31 is attributed simply to the “prophets.”“VIVENT MORTUI TUI + INTERFECTI TUI RESURGENT.” ‘Thy dead men shall live; thy slain men shall be raised.” (The Book of Wisdom).
But wasn’t enough; another memorial, in a more public place, was seen as desirable, and it was unveiled at an inauguration ceremony on June 1, 1932 by — of course! — Italo Balbo, then Minister of the Air Force. He had organized an international aviation conference in Rome, and added Venice to the program.
It was obviously correct for him, in his official capacity, to honor a fallen comrade, but he must have enjoyed the chance to castigate Nobile once again by glorifying a man who had lost his life in the effort, more or less, to save him. At least that’s how I interpret this extravagant conclusion to Penzo’s life.
The monument was designed by Venetian sculptor Francesco Scarpabolla (1902-1999). “Oh sure,” said Lino when I shared this information. “I knew him, he lived just down the street from me near San Vio.” We were all expecting that by now, naturally.
But the best monument to Penzo, to my way of thinking, isn’t either one of the statues, nor even the soccer stadium (sorry). It’s the elementary school at Malamocco, which bears his name. Latin quotations and oak leaves are all very well, but the school is dedicated to a local boy, and it’s there that his name will truly be kept alive.
I will trek down to Malamocco one of these days and make some photographs of the school. Meanwhile, here is map evidence that it exists.
