I’m sorry to start the year this way, but not nearly as sorry as the people who are involved.
Riccardo Torta — “Ricky” — if you’ll cast your minds back, spent 16 years in prison and a psychiatric hospital after killing an agent of the Finance Police on May 31, 1973. They had confiscated his boat because of his trafficking in illegal cigarettes, so he was angry. He spent the next two decades telling people he never meant to do it, he didn’t know why he did it, it was just a joke.
Now it’s 2016. He’s been living in Mestre for 20 years in an apartment by himself, and by all accounts not keeping up with his meds.
He has become very, very big, tall, heavy, which could make him scary, except that the neighbors know him mainly as a sort of strange person but who’s usually keen to lend a hand — you know, the gentle giant. He sometimes does the shopping for Nelly Pagnussat, 78 years old, a little old lady on the second floor of his building. She also lives alone, although she has married children. She sometimes fixes him something to eat. Just setting the scene.
Friday evening around 8:00 PM he rings her doorbell. She lets him in — after all, they’re friends. He even calls her “aunt.”
He kills her with a hammerblow to the head. Then he takes a chainsaw and dismembers her body. He puts the pieces in four big black plastic garbage bags.
Here are some sea otters, if this helps.
Meanwhile, Nelly’s daughter is concerned because her mother hasn’t answered the phone for two hours, so she and her husband go over. They, and a neighbor (an 83-year-old lady. Nice!) enter the apartment and find Ricky standing there, with the bags and the dripping chainsaw.
The daughter’s husband says, “Where is my mother-in-law?” Ricky replies, “She wasn’t feeling well.” Then he runs out and barricades himself in his fourth-floor apartment.
Every person in uniform in Mestre descends on the block, which is cordoned off; the tenants of the building are requested to leave, and the gas in the building is turned off, just in case he might have discovered some matches meanwhile. SWAT teams in heavy assault gear climb the stairs and position themselves outside his front door. A psychiatric specialist begins to negotiate with him,
After three hours of talking through the door, he gives himself up and they take him away. He’s in prison on suicide watch. The newspapers are like pots boiling over.
Three days ago, Ricky went to the hospital for his therapy (I presume pharmacological). He had been under increased observation during the past year, but recently had seemed no longer to suffer from hallucinations. True, the neighbors knew he was more than a bubble off plumb — he would sometimes wander around his apartment terrace nude, or occasionally throw a bucket of urine off the balcony. Also, really loud music at night.
The hospitals for the criminally insane have been closed by law for several years, the plan being to house mentally ill prisoners in small “communities.” But the Veneto Region is way behind in opening these facilities; a few weeks ago, Emilia-Romagna, the region next door, registered a complaint because former inmates from the Veneto were being sent to the facilities there. But in Ricky’s case, what is there to be said? He’d served his sentence and he was out, like anybody would be.
Forty-two years of good behavior have been noted, but wherever he goes next, I’m assuming he won’t be coming out again.
Good-bye to all this for Ricky. Or whatever morning looks like in Mestre.
I know it seems like I just got back, so to speak, but Christmas is bearing down on us and we are fleeing to the mountains where we will alternately celebrate and combat it with cheese, apple strudel, needlepoint, TV, hiking, and sleep.
Happy holidays to everyone who reads my scribbles. You have made this a wonderful year for me.
It’s been three years since my excellent adventure on (and near) Mt. Kilimanjaro, and “Dreamers and Doers,” the book which was produced by the women on my trip and many other women, is now out in e-format. The photography by my partner in crime, photographer Karen Kasmauski, is worth it all by itself.
Some of the stories are wonderful, even unforgettable (a word I rarely use). I’m thinking of the blind Australian woman who climbed the mountain as part of a fund-raising benefit for the organization that provided her seeing-eye dog. What it took for her (and her guide, who literally talked her through every single step) to accomplish this is something that doesn’t seem possible. But they did it.
Have a look at these sites and consider buying it — proceeds go to a project to provide schoolbooks to Tanzanian children.
“Fire in the Oil Warehouse,” by Francesco Guardi, 1789. Not made up, the fire or the painting.
The last thing on this mortal earth that the Venice firemen ever want to deal with is a fire.
If you leaf through a thousand years of Venetian history, you can see that fire has been about a skillion times more damaging to the city than water ever has been, or ever could be, not that I’m promoting acqua alta. But you can accommodate water, one way or another — besides, you get fair warning when it’s coming, and you know that after a few hours it will go away all by itself. But you cannot accommodate a fire. There have been conflagrations in Venice that can match some of the worst you’ve ever heard of, at least in places not named Chicago or London.
In 1514 the entire Rialto market area was leveled by fire, leaving only the church of San Giacometto untouched. The Doge’s Palace was carbonized, as they say here, to various degrees three times, in 1483, 1574 and 1577, the last one leaving so little that there was serious discussion of demolishing the walls and just building the whole thing over. (Plan rejected, happily for us.)
And there was the olive oil warehouse behind San Marcuola that caught fire from a lantern in 1789. I don’t think there’s any way to put out an oil fire, at least of that magnitude. Four hundred families were left to pick through the smoking ruins. Not to forget the lumber warehouse that caught fire at Barbarie de le Tole in 1686, which incinerated the neighborhood leaving only one house standing.
And my all-time non-favorite, the fire that started in San Severo in 1105 and took a tour of something like half of the city. Get out your maps: It started in the house of the Zancani family at San Severo, burned the neighborhood, then the flames moved on to San Lorenzo, San Provolo, Santa Maria Formosa, onward to San Giovanni Nuovo, San Zulian and San Basso and around the Piazza San Marco up to the church of San Geminiano, and proceeded to San Moise’ and Santa Maria Zobenigo. There the strong wind blew sparks across the Grand Canal. San Gregorio caught fire, Sant’ Agnese, San Trovaso, San Barnaba, San Basilio, then on to Angelo Raffaelle and San Nicolo dei Mendicoli; the fire on the San Marco side, not done yet, marched to San Maurizio, S. Paternian (now Campo Manin), San Luca, San Vidal, and San Samuele. Bring me an acqua alta that can hurt like that.
Today the firemen probably spend more time in the water than they do around those banal but occasionally really bad fires caused by short circuits, flaming food and arson. The lagoon is their beat: Pilings gone adrift, boats that have capsized or sunk, and other nautical mishaps are what the firemen usually deal with, and yesterday morning we came across such an event in the rio di San Giovanni Nuovo as we were walking from Santa Maria Formosa toward San Zaccaria.
The tube is still in the sunken boat, and the backwash is roiling, so they are still hoping at this point to raise her enough to begin pumping the water out.
First we heard the roar of the fireboat’s engine, all set to pump like crazy. Then we saw it, next to its waterlogged victim; by the look of the work already in progress, we’d come in toward the end of the second act of this drama, which means we had no idea of what had happened in the first act, nor who the dramatis personae were. But we could recognize a logistical problem which for some reason was more difficult than usual. I can say that because, as Lino explained it to me, if they had executed two little steps at the beginning, they’d have been home for lunch in no time. (I will try to describe his solution later.) As it was, in the absence of a team leader, everybody got into the act, and you don’t need to be a fireman, or a boat, to know that when too many people are trying to come up with a solution to a problem, the problem wins.
Short version: They evidently tried to lift the entire boat, which, considering the weight of the water, was discovered to be impossible. They couldn’t raise the boat even two inches above the surface of the canal to be able to pump out the water in the boat (we walked by when they were at the point of renouncing the effort), so they ended up deciding to tow it away. By the look of it, this procedure would have been more or less like towing a dead blue whale which had swallowed five Zamzama guns, with cannonballs.
Lino, who has also dealt with his fair share of submerged boats, told me that the boat was (briefly) on a modest slant. Blocking the upper side, they only needed to raise the lower side enough to start pumping. He made it sound easy, and considering how many times he and I have undertaken maneuvers with extremely heavy boats all by ourselves, he gets Olympic-level credit for understanding physics. Still, I give the firemen the benefit of the doubt because firemen are my heroes, and nothing I say should be taken as denigrating or belittling them in any way, much less to imply that I could have done it better. But still, it wasn’t going well — even I could see that.
They haven’t given up on their rigging yet, as we see by the men leaning over the side of the boat, grappling.Considering an alternative…..Motor turned off, the focus now shifts to the small brown motorboat which has been tapped to tow. I never knew what the relationship was between the brown and the white boats but evidently there was some link, otherwise I suppose the man in the brown boat wouldn’t have gotten so involved.Throw that line.And heave-ho, pulling the boat into some kind of position. I didn’t understand the design of Plan B, but no matter. The usual small crowd of spectators has formed — nothing can happen here without a little audience forming.Looks like everything is in position, or almost. The brown boat has some work to do to get in position and tied to the white one, but progress hass definitely been made. I’d have stayed to watch it all (for instance, how long the small motor on the brown boat was going to hold out), but we had to get back to the program.
Speaking of cannons, and lifting, a Venetian patrician named Giovanni Zusto once devised a way to lift an entire ship to the surface — a ship carrying cannon, which is what brought this feat to my mind — after it had sat in the mud for three years.
You should know about this, to have something astonishing to think about whenever you get tired of marveling at Venetian engineering skill ashore. On April 1, 1783, the “Fenice,” complete with 74 cannon, sank in the Canal Spignon, which is just inside the inlet at Malamocco. That location means mud and currents.
So the aforementioned Zusto — once again, amateurs save the day — designed a system of enormous rafts which provided the basis for this gigantic hauling-up. On July 30, 1786, the Fenice rose again. The designs are on the second floor of the Naval Museum, which is closed for renovation. Here they are; have a look, and rethink how hard your day has been.
I cannot interpret any of this for you; all I understand is big boats, anchors, platforms, capstans, counterweights and/or pulleys, and that’s it.
