As I mentioned in my last post, Venice used to be infested with movie theatres, but time and tide and commerce wait for no man, and we all know that cinemas stay in business on a margin thinner than tissue paper. But it wasn’t always so. Lino took me on a walk around Venice to discover the movie theatres he remembered from days gone by.
Launching our voyage of discovery were two plaques I had long since noted (I can’t remember why I was there) on a meaningless little side street between San Marco and San Moise’. These announce to the few people who pass each day that two extraordinary events in Venetian history, and the history of theatre/spectacle/opera/public performances, took place there.
This spot was the site of the Teatro San Moise’, which like many cinemas was born as a regular theatre, with a stage and sandbags and so on. It had been established (as many theatres were) by a noble family — in this case, the Giustinian of San Barnaba — as an opera house in 1640 and, though small, was highly influential. (In 1668 it was enlarged to 800 seats.) Vivaldi and Albinoni and other musicians, Venetian or otherwise, held concerts of their music here, and it was also used for entertainments of the commedia dell’arte. In 1818 the theatre shifted to puppets, then was rebuilt as the Teatro Minerva.
There is nothing that even hints at an erstwhile theatre except this doorway:
I detect that this door now leads in a semi-secret way into the Hotel Europa Regina. Passing beneath this mythic goddess must — I hope — exert some positive influence on somebody.
Back to the plaques. The first one commemorates the defunct theatre in its musical incarnation:
It says: “From the theatre of S. Moise’ which stood here the evening of 3 November 1810 the genius of Gioachino Rossini 18 years old with ‘The Marriage Contract’ his first opera happily began his flight toward immortal glory. The Comune 1914.”
And just a few feet away, on the same wall of what is now partly shops and partly apartments, is this:
It says: “Here stood the Teatro Minerva (once San Moise’) where on the evening of 9 July 1896 the first public Venetian projection of film by the Lumiere brothers took place. On the first centenary the Comune of Venice 1996.”
As must be clear by now, movie theatres came, and then went. Their relatively brief life here was glorious. Following are most of the cinemas that Lino remembers. He didn’t favor me with any reminiscences about the back rows.
This building on via Garibaldi was once a cinema (though by the look of the bishop carved over the main door, that wasn’t its first job). I presume that the entrance to the theatre was under the bishop, but I knew it for years as a massive big store called “Il Bottegon” which closed last year. (Pause for respectful silence.) The shop entrance was the central gray steel gate, and it went on forever inside, crammed to the gills with everything you could ever need except pencils and paper. Anyway, to create this amazing emporium the renovators just ripped everything out and put in vast shelving, and left the projection room intact; it loomed above the cash registers, with the unmistakeable medium-sized square hole for the projector clearly cut into the sheetrock.Bird’s-eye view of the photo above. The map scheme will continue; I hope it’s helpful. It seemed like a good idea when Lino suggested it.Behind the church of the Pieta’ and across the street from the Hotel Bisanzio was the Cinema Arsenale.
The former cinema here is now an elementary school named for General Armando Diaz.
This trattoria across the street next to the church of San Zulian was once the “Olimpia.” I’ve seen this space go through a few different versions (the erotic museum didn’t last long), but never saw it as a cinema.
The “Ridotto” was famous in Casanova’s day as one of the more noted gambling houses cum brothels. Lino went to a New Year’s Eve party here when it was a theatre (it never evolved into a cinema). It has now been digested by the Hotel Monaco & Grand Canal.“Il Ridotto” at Ca’ Rezzonico by Pietro Longhi (1701-1785) gives an idea of the atmosphere in a ridotto, especially when wearing masks was permitted. There were a number of “ridottos” in assorted palaces, duly painted by the artists of the day.
The desperately trendy Caffe Centrale was once the Cinema Centrale.Happily for us, nobody bothered to obliterate the traces of what appear to have been a series of signs. I can make out the skeleton of the word “spettacolo.”
And I detect “centrale” here.
The Scuola Grande di San Teodoro lived a brief portion of its long life as a cinema named “Il Massimo” (the greatest, the maximum). There were a number of movie theatres operated by churches or monasteries, and this would, I surmise, have been run by the remnant of whoever is responsible for the building.
Plenty of people, including me, still refer to this supermarket as the Cinema Rossini. I remember it as the place where Lino and I saw “Titanic.” I nagged him into going because everybody in the galaxy was talking about the dang thing, and then we were walking to the theatre one gray Sunday afternoon and I suddenly had qualms. I said, “I don’t know if I want to see entertainment about a huge tragedy…..” to which he replied, “You wanted to go, we’re going.” And we went.The theatre concept is hanging tough, though — the supermarket is at the feet of the “Ponte del Teatro” and is bordered by a street named for “la chiesa o il teatro” (the church or the theatre — you get to pick?). A Multisala Rossini has been built behind the supermarket, so the movies live on, if in somewhat less imposing surroundings.The magnificent Teatro Malibran, named for the extremely famous soprano of the 19th century, Maria Malibran. It was inaugurated in 1678 as the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo by the Grimani family and was the most splendid opera house in Venice for many years. After the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797 it became the Teatro Civico, deteriorated, was restored in 1819, continued to deteriorate, was renamed Teatro Emeronitto and reopened in 1834. But it was still a mess; when the diva Malibran came to sing in 1835, she renounced her fee, telling the management it ought to spend the money on the theatre. I don’t know if the work was ever done, but they did change the name in her honor. (Meanwhile, she spent most of that year singing at La Fenice.) I don’t know at what point it became a cinema, but Lino remembers it in that incarnation. It is now very much restored to its former theatrical glory, and many productions of various types are staged here.
Yes, the Hotel Nazionale near the train station on the Lista di Spagna used to be a cinema. Lino went there once when he was 8 or 9 years old with his mother’s cousin, who was a fireman. On Epiphany — which translates as “more candy and presents!!” — the firemen organized a big party for all the children in the firemen’s families. Lino says that many organizations put on this kind of party for their members’ children — the railway workers also did it. When they called his name he went up onstage and got candy and also a hobbyhorse. Movie theatres were ideal for this kind of party because they were big, lots of space for all those little Venetians.
Let’s stop for coffee. The next episode will be a wander around Lino’s old neighborhood on the other side of the Grand Canal.
The former Teatro Italia, in all its glory, majestically surveying the Campiello de l’Anconeta on the Strada Nova.
A ridiculous amount of movies has been made in Venice over the last 100 years or so — Wikipedia lists 114, but that is a paltry and inaccurate number because the list omits many films, as well as the many films that have been made here in languages other than English.
For example, there is “Viaggi di Nozze” (“Honeymoons”) starring Carlo Verdone in which he plays an insufferable doctor who takes his bride to Venice on their honeymoon, but by the time they arrive in their suite at the Danieli Hotel he has become so unbearable that she throws herself out the window just to get the hell away from him. There is the fabulous “Vacanze Intelligenti” (“Intelligent Vacations”) with Alberto Sordi, in which he and his fruit-selling Roman wife end up at the Biennale in the summer heat and she, exhausted, collapses under a tree and is mistaken by the public for a work of art. There is also “Les Enfants du Siecle,” a French film about George Sand and Chopin in which Lino repeatedly rowed an old boat loaded with oranges past the facade of Palazzo Pisani-Moretta. These are just random examples, but you see that the list could go on and on into German and Spanish and probably Russian and, for all I know, Tongan.
But while we’re all accustomed to Venice being the star of innumerable movies, you may never have asked yourself if anybody ever went to the movies in Venice. They did. A lot. Back before cell phones roamed the earth and everything electronic took over people’s brains, going to the movies was just as much prime entertainment here as it was in Boring, Oregon and Sweet Lips, Tennessee. Perhaps you imagined the Venetians spending their free time floating around in boats, singing folk songs, but most people were sitting in the dark watching crazy things happen on a big square of silver-coated cloth. Venice was rife with movie theatres.
I managed to see a few movies in my early days in Venice (dubbed in Italian, as is almost always the case here), before the few remaining theatres gasped their last. A few small ones are hanging on, showings listed each day in the Gazzettino. “La-La Land” is here, with subtitles in Italian. Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” is also here (or was, a few days ago), in English.
All this has come to mind because of the renovation and reopening of the Teatro Italia, shown above. Ever since I’ve been here this splendid edifice has been closed, silent and empty. But there are plenty of Venetians who have vivid memories (especially of the back rows, I’m guessing) of the decades when it reigned as a movie theatre. Now people who go there will be having vivid memories of the mortadella and the rigatoni, because it has been revived as a supermarket belonging to the Dutch supermarket chain, De Spar. To its credit, the company has retained and refurbished the frescoes (did your hometown movie theatre have FRESCOES?), adding a touch of glamour to your search for scallopine and cheap wine.
A view of the interior when it was a movie theatre.
Let me give you a glimpse of this transformed emporium of fantasy and thrill, but I’m not going to stop there. As usual, I let myself get carried away, and so in the next episode I will be conducting a tour of the movie theatres that Lino remembers from the days of yore.
The sign at the entrance advises customers that there is video surveillance, it is forbidden to smoke, and furthermore forbidden to take pictures. The first two notices are normal, but the third gives one pause. Are they concerned that people will be snapping selfies by the salame?If you thought the exterior was amazing, just take a look at the entrance. As you see, I snapped some pictures before the guard politely told me that he would permit me to do this, so technically I wasn’t breaking the law.Do not omit to admire the frieze as you wander into the store.The decoration of the entryway.Mere lobby lighting. Wow.The space where the screen loomed has now been frescoed over. Pay no attention to that man behind the fresco…Make sure you’ve written down your shopping list, because you’re never going to remember everything you need in this dazzling environment.Laurel wreaths, or bunches of grapevines, or whatever the roughage is, looks wonderful on somebody’s head. Above the soft drinks.This, not so much. Sketchy for a theatre and even more so above Aisle 3.The balcony AND the projection room. Extremely cool.What is so fabulous isn’t that there’s a supermarket that looks like this (though of course that’s great) — it’s that there was a theatre that looked like this. I’d have gone and not even bothered to watch the movie.
Lino’s version is as basic as you can get, and even a three-inch square is enough to hold you for several hours. Chestnut flour, water, a pinch of salt, a scattering of rosemary.
Regional cookery is one of the zillion things that Italy is so proud of and so admired for. (End of preposition storm.) But the funny thing is that a dish will be super-famous as being from one place, and then you discover its stolen-at-birth sibling in a completely different region, and then you discover it again, and again, and sometimes even again. The reason is simple: People all over Italy have the same needs (eating) and many of the same ingredients, and what develops is something like a theme and variations.
Take castagnaccio (kas-ta-NYA-cho). Perhaps its most noted version is from Tuscany, but there are variations from Naples, Corsica, Emilia-Romagna, Liguria, Piemonte, Calabria, and even the Veneto — anywhere there are chestnut trees, in fact. The names may change along the way — baldino, pattona, ghirighio, castigna’, pane di castagna, migliaccio, gnaccia, and in Venice, “gardo” — but the essential ingredients originally couldn’t rise beyond the gravity pull of poverty: chestnut flour and water, and a little olive oil. Then came raisins and pinoli nuts and sugar, even wine and milk and orange peel and chocolate. But I don’t see how you can improve on the basics, which produce something super-dense, not too sweet, and loaded with winter-useful calories (193 per 100 grams).
Chestnuts were the perennial backup when you had no more flour of any sort, and not even polenta. When the countryfolk would burn the effigy on Epiphany (the “befana”), eyes used to be fixed on the direction the sparks flew. People still look, but now it’s more like a game, though it wasn’t always so. The doggerel makes that clear: “Se le falive va a marina / Tol su saco e va a farina / Se le falive va a montagne / Tol su saco e va a castagne” (if the sparks fly toward the sea (east), take your sack and go to make flour (the wheat harvest will be good) / If the sparks fly toward the mountains (west), take your sack and go gather chestnuts.”)
But like so many other “poor” dishes, castagnaccio is apparently being rediscovered by people who have had enough of smoked salmon and foie gras (just an expression — does anybody still eat foie gras?). Anyway, Lino is impervious to fashions and fads. He’s always eaten something, he’s going to continue eating it. Every so often the urge for castagnaccio will strike him and off he goes to acquire some chestnut flour. It is reliably available at the ever-amazing Mascari. (Full disclosure: I have no connection with this shop.) He doesn’t add either pinoli nuts or raisins, but sticks to the bare bones of the recipe, with a sprinkling of rosemary.
Lino remembers that there was a little shop at the corner of the Riva degli Schiavoni and Calle de la Pescaria which sold slices of gardo and also a “cake” made of chickpea flour. That was all, he sold nothing else.
The nameless shop is now the Ristorante Bar Vittoria and I would doubt that they offer anything chestnut-like to their customers.
As it happens, however, a bar-cafe in via Garibaldi has recently taken up the baton:
It says “Castagnaccio alla Toscana with raisins, pinoli and rosemary” and “Cecina alla Livornese,” that is, “cake” made of chickpeas (ceci) in the style of Livorno (also in Tuscany). That is a subject I’m not pursuing today.
The internet is full of recipes, but here’s the simplest version of castagnaccio, if you want to chance your arm:
Ingredients: 750 ml water, 500 gr chestnut flour, some fresh rosemary “needles,” a pinch of salt, 6 spoonfuls of extra-virgin olive oil, to keep it soft.
Heat the oven to 200 degrees C or 350 F. Put the flour in a bowl and add the water slowly while stirring. Spread a little olive oil on the bottom of the pan. Pour the batter into the pan and bake for one hour. (Note: The pan, or casserole, or whatever you’re using, shouldn’t be so broad that the batter only barely covers it. Use your judgment, but bear in mind that this isn’t going to rise.) The surface of the final product should have slight cracks or fissures.
Modify it as you wish, of course; I’ll never know. In fact, the heathen thought of topping it with whipped cream or ice cream did cross my mind, but I quashed it. We like the basics here.
A corteo is almost always preceded by a police boat which helpfully prevents collisions and hard words in the Grand Canal. This was, after all, a workday morning and plenty of people had other things on their mind than your funeral. (My, that sounded bad.) In any case, the first intimation of this corteo, just emerging slowly from the bulk of upstream traffic, is the police boat.
A few days ago (last Monday, if anyone cares) there was a funeral. In this city that hardly counts as news. But it was the funeral of a young man — I consider 61 to be young — who had had a solid if untrumpeted career as a racer. Umberto Costantini, nicknamed “Burielo,” was at the top of his game in his twenties, during the Eighties and early Nineties, and the newspaper was full of the glorious Venetian-rowing names, some of them much, much older than he, who came to do him homage.
The homage, according to what I read, was some of the best you could ever hope for, especially from this squabbling band. “A great athlete and a good man,” stated several re del remo, the greatest champions, some of whom had rowed with him. “In this world, full of controversy, he never argued with anybody,” said one of the greatest arguers of them all.
A few days before his passing, the paper reports, a group of the all-time great rowers went to visit him in the hospital. “Ostrega,” he said, using the preferred Venetian expression for wow, good grief, heavens to Betsy, “I must really be in bad shape if you’re all here….”
He wanted a corteo, or boat procession, for his funeral, like the one he participated in when Bruno “Strigheta,” his friend and fellow Burano native, died two years ago. And so it was.
Unhappily, it was on a workday morning, which cut into the number of participants somewhat. Not having been a rock-star name, that also may have left him somewhat unknown and unappreciated in the general rowing world. Even more unhappily, there were people who knew him who just went to work as usual — we passed two gondoliers who were also Burano natives, and racers, as we wandered around town, who were clearly planning to be in their boats soon, but boats full of tourists. That seemed harsh.
We thought about participating, but too many other factors intervened. So we stood at the vaporetto stop at the Ca’ d’Oro to watch the procession. The deceased had said that he’d like to have a corteo, and by gum, they did it for him.
As it happens, I have my own small memory of “Burielo” — small to me, but an event that was big for him. I hadn’t even heard of him till then. It was 1997, and I was watching the Regata Storica sitting in a boat not far from the finish line. Here the gondolinos came, thundering, so to speak, toward the finish line. It’s definitely the peak moment of a peak experience, the entire world was screaming and yelling and shrieking and so on.
Burielo was in the bow, and Bruno dei Rossi (“Strigheta”) was astern. They were in third place and rowing like mad to stay there, side by side, nose to nose, with the Busetto brothers, battling it out. The finish line was only, I’m guessing, 30 seconds away. Four men turbo-rowing — it was wild. But one man ran out of gas first: Burielo.
All at once, with that beautiful green pennant hopefully clutched in his (mental) hands, he stopped rowing, then collapsed. I remember seeing him crumple down in the boat. Just like that. Two boats passed as the gondolino slid forward on its own momentum — I can’t do justice to his state of mind, not to mention his partner’s — and they came in fifth. No pennant, and definitely no glory. The ambulance zoomed up and he was headed — in another sort of turbo-manner — to the hospital, where he was checked in for a serious tachycardia.
That was the last time he rowed a gondolino, that’s for sure, and evidently the last time he raced, period. You can understand that it would have been difficult to qualify for the required medical certificate. Maybe he didn’t even try.
The human part of me is very sad this happened. The secret mad-dog competitor part of me is sad that it happened before they could rip that green pennant from the (mental) hands of the Busettos.
The ten-oar gondolone, or “big gondola,” of the Francescana rowing club is rowed by some of the biggest names in the racing pantheon, some of whom were also his partners at one time or another. (Bruno “Strigheta” preceded him two years ago to the cosmic finish line.) In the bow, Gianfranco Vianello “Crea,” and astern is Franco dei Rossi “Strigheta,” his old partner Bruno’s brother, with whom the deceased had won the race of the “galleons” of the Four Ancient Maritime Republics. There were also Bepi Fongher, Giovanni Seno “Scherolin” and Luciano Tagliapietra “Panna,” three of his former race-mates, Palmiro Fongher, and Rudi Vignotto. Only Vignotto is still winning races, but they’re all still rowing, which counts as a victory, in my view.Not everybody rows at the same speed (some rowers always think that being in a boat means it’s a race), so the relatively few boats here began to spread out. The motorboat to the left of the frame is the usual hearse, which probably brought the casket to the gondolone and will be waiting to carry it onward after the funeral.Come on, everybody, this is a funeral cortege, not a wander through the park. Though admittedly an eight-oar crew on a ten-oar boat is going to go faster than these vessels.
And so they passed out of view, turning left before the Rialto Bridge into the rio del Fontego dei Tedeschi, and on to the basilica of SS. Giovanni e Paolo (may I note, yet again, that nobody calls it “Zanipolo,” no matter how exotic it sounds). A vast crowd was waiting at the church, but we were not part of it.And good night, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye.
I forgot to mention that he had a life beyond racing. He was a molecante, a type of fisherman who catches crabs and cultivates them in submerged wooden cages called vieri till they reach the stage where they shed their shells and become moeche (soft-shelled crabs) and can be sold at the market for a freaking king’s ransom.
The general procedure is this: A fisherman (which used to be most, and now some still, men on Burano) goes out into the lagoon and strings his nets along poles he drives into the mud. He goes out and checks what has run into the net. He divests the net of whatever is in it — all sorts of fish, and lots and lots of crabs. (You can see these little crabs running around the shallows any time you are out in a boat. Lino says that if you walk around in the semi-soft mud and then retrace your steps, each footprint will contain a crab. He doesn’t know why. I confirm that I have seen this.)
The fisherman separates the various critters and sells them, except for the crabs. He’ll sort out the good ones, and put them in the vieri. Every day or so he’ll pass to check on them, and takes out whichever are ready for market, tables, and unnumbered Swiss bank accounts. They are currently selling at the Rialto for 60 euros per kilo, or $30 per pound, more or less. I don’t know how much the molecante makes from that. My experience of life leads me to assume that it would be dramatically less than that, but that’s not the point of this little cadenza. The cadenza is that Burielo used to do this, and now (I hope) he’s doing it in heaven, because he loved it.
In a side canal by Mazzorbo, which is near Burano.I’m imagining that this is Burielo’s corner of heaven.And every so often the poles are pulled up and the nets brought to land and strung up to dry for a while. A windy morning in April is an excellent moment for this.
