Yes, I have returned to my mooring here and have been grappling with the holiday trappings — more mental than physical. Translation: I just haven’t felt like doing or writing or thinking anything, really.
But the ghosts of Calvinists Past have reared up and made harrowing threats if I continue to indulge this revolting lethargy. And I always respond to harrowing threats, in case you ever need to know. Hideous predictions about the afterlife usually do the trick.
In any case, Christmas in our lobe of Venice this year is so low-key that it’s hardly noticeable. The atmosphere in the city as a whole is so far from festive that I’m not going to go into it at all. But I don’t need lights and spangles to know that it’s just about show time.
We will do the traditional Christmas food and possibly the traditional staying-up-late, though that’s becoming more optional as the years go by. Then we will go to the mountains for the New Year phase.
And then we’ll all be back here together, not making it up.
The Nativity scene at the F. Morosini Naval School has once again focused on the lagoon. The innovations here are the starfish as stars (no surprise there), and the comet’s tail is the shell of a pinna nobilis (fan mussel) painted gold. The cradle for the still-in-transit Baby Jesus is a clamshell. It looks pretty comfortable, at least to me.
One creche (or presepe, as it’s called here) isn’t enough at the Naval School, where the chaplain and cadets put heart, soul and all sorts of useful bric-a-brac into their scenes. The lifebuoy adds a touch of metaphor to the arrangement. As is usual, the figure of the Bambin Gesu’ is only installed on Christmas Day.The woman in command of this family was getting everything ready a week early, from underwear to reindeer.This curious but strangely appealing effort at spreading holiday cheer didn’t last long. An hour later they were gone. Why? Were this in contravention of some municipal ordinance? Or did the family suddenly discover that it really needed these three balls inside?Humans are preparing to gorge themselves over the next few days, but a little egret (Egretta garzetta) has already started noshing. The vaporetto dock is an excellent place to spear anguele (Atherina boyeri). When the birds are happy, I’m happy. I wonder if they’d like some panettone, we’ve got three of them already. It’ll take me till Candlemas to finish them if nobody helps me.
The silence in not-making-it-up-land is because I am in the US for a month of my annual R&R.
I brought a folder of clippings with me, all excellent post material (that is, excellent material — I have no idea if the resulting posts would have been excellent). I may or may not get to them because it’s astonishing how little I think of Venice when I’m back on my native heath. It’s extremely relaxing, kind of like being in a mental thermal pool.
“The Vianellos beat everybody,” the headline states. “The foreigners increase.” According to the article, there are 4339 people in the Comune of Venice with the last name Vianello. I’m sorry to see that the Barbarigos and Mocenigos have gone the way of the great auk, though some once-noble families (Moro, Dona’) are on the list.
Not a game at all, but shards of information I consider interesting, in an ephemeral sort of way. My favorite kind.
Meeting people here, or even just reading about them in the paper, will fairly quickly give you the sensation that there is only a handful of last names in Venice. Reading Venetian history has the same effect. There were 120 doges, and every five minutes it’s a Mocenigo or a Morosini or a Barbarigo or a Contarini (I feel a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song coming on).
In daily life nowadays, it’s Vianello or Zennaro or Busetto or Scarpa, all at some point from Pellestrina, where so many with these surnames dwell — and have dwelled — that the town is divided into four sections, each named for one of those specific tribes. This situation was created by doge Andrea Contarini, who in 1380 sent the four eponymous families from Chioggia to Pellestrina to reconstruct and inhabit the former town which had been destroyed by the Genoese in the “War of Chioggia” (1378-1381).
The density of these four names in Pellestrina is such that the post office finally gave permission to put nicknames on addresses, to give some hope of distinguishing between the scores of individuals with the same first and last name, some of them even living at the same location.
In the Comune at large, Costantinis and Penzos abound, and every year there is a bumper crop of D’Estes and Dei Rossis. Each name has its own provenance; some of them are obvious (“Sartori” means “tailors,” “Tagliapietra” means “stonecutter,” with which Venice had to have been infested) and some are more obscure (“Ballarin” meant “sawyer,” and “Bastasi” were the porters, specifically for the Customs or the quarantine islands).
As we see, there are more Hossains now than Senos or even than Chens. But after 500 years they might well be on the list of Venetians, if there’s still a Venice.
I’ve been here long enough — and it doesn’t mean you need to have spent a LONG time — to recognize the provenance of many of these names. If you hear one of these, you have a good chance of knowing where the person comes (or came) from:
A few tidbits from the article, which are not evident in the table of numbers but are obvious to anyone living here:
First is that during the past ten years, the number of individuals bearing each surname has diminished. That’s just part of the well-known shrinkage of Venetians.
Second — also fairly obvious to locals — is the addition of foreign surnames. Of course, my surname is foreign too (German-Swiss), but I’ve been happy to disappear among many Venetians whose last names also begin with “Z,” and they aren’t German, either: Zane and Zanella and Zuin and Zuliani. It’s great down here at the end of the alphabet, I’ve finally got company.
As you easily notice, Muslim and Asian names are becoming more numerous. (I realize that “Muslim” is not a nationality, nor a geographical area, but while the bearers of these names are most likely from Bangladesh, I decided not to guess).
So where would the “Vianello” clan come from? According to my dictionary of Italian surnames, it springs from Viani, which isn’t a place, as far as I can determine, but a basic root-name. Lino hypothesizes that it could derive from “villani” (pronounced vee-AH-nee in Venetian), which means farmers, tillers of the soil — “villein,” in the feudal terminology, a partially-free serf. You can still hear someone around here vilify another person by calling him a “villano,” and they don’t mean “villain” — they mean clod, churl, oaf.
“Rossi” means “reds.” It’s the most common surname in Italy, though in the Southern half it is often rendered “Russo” (the second-most common surname in Italy). It most likely came from a personage with some strikingly red attribute, such as hair, beard, or skin. Or all three.
“Scarpa” — It means “shoe,” so I’m guessing their forebears were shoe-makers, though then again, it’s possible that it was once somebody’s nickname (in Venice, at least, nicknames are fairly common and the person bears it for life and even sometimes leaves it to his children.) However, another hypothesis holds that it could be a variation of Karpathos, the Greek island known as “Scarpanto” in Venetian, and which formed part of the Venetian “Sea State” from 1306 to 1538, plenty long to germinate names. Thousands of Greeks lived in Venice, so the place name may have shifted to a personal name.
There are lots of names that come from places, sometimes Venetianized, such as:
Visentin (vee-zen-TEEN): Vicentino, or from Vicenza
Piasentini (pya-zen-TEE-nee): Piacentino, or from Piacenza
Veronese: from Verona
Trevisan (treh-vee-ZAHN): from Treviso
Furlan (foor-LAHN): from Friuli
Schiavon (skyah-VOHN): from Schiavonia, later Slavonia, which is now the easternmost part of Croatia. The Venetians were known to trade, among other valuable merchandise, in slaves, which often came from Central Asia or the Balkan hinterland. “Schiavo” (SKYA-voh), conveniently shortened, means “slave.” Slav – Slave. Not made up.
The names may change, but the activity described on a plaque inside the Arsenal remains the same regardless of time, nation, or blood type (translated by me): “5 June 1743 Gabriel di Ferdinando was the Adjutant of the Admiral of the Arsenal He was banished under threat of hanging for being an unfaithful administrator guilty of enormous extremely grave detriments inflicted in the management of the public capital.”
Compare this sunset view to the one of two days ago. No comment required.
Yes, the haze has evaporated, or migrated, or flown — anyway, it’s gone.
Yesterday afternoon the wind veered around to the northeast, where the bora lurks. A northeast wind may be fierce, and even dangerous, and whatever else you want to call it (especially if you live on the northeastern edge of the city, where you get it straight in the teeth), but I call it just about my favorite wind.
Perhaps you have never thought about the various winds, and their characteristics. Here’s a thumbnail: “Scirocco,” southeast wind. Warm and damp and, if it’s strong, it becomes an unindicted co-conspirator of acqua alta.
“Garbin,” southwest wind, known in Italian as libeccio. Its special trick is to bring fog — I mean real fog, not the haze of the past few weeks. It can also blow like blue blazes.
“Bora,” northeast wind. Cold and dry. That’s why I love it. I can deal with the cold, as long as it brings the dry. As for force, it can be ferocious, though here we don’t usually get the extremes that can make the bora life-threatening in Trieste. Not made up.
There are many fine variations of wind as you work your way around the compass, but those are my main players. When I look at the weather forecast, I don’t primarily care whether it says rain or sun, or even cold or hot. I look to see which direction the wind is predicted to come from, and its speed. I can deduce most of the other attributes from that, at least as far as my modest needs are concerned.
Oh sorry, that was redundant. All my needs are, by definition, modest. Example: Comes the bora, Erla is happy. You can’t get much simpler than that, at least if you’re a person who really doesn’t care about rubies and platinum and Densuke black watermelons and lavender albino ball pythons, like humble, honest, hard-working, plain-speaking little me.
Turning the other direction, I see not only sun, but shadows, for the first time in several eons. This isn’t just air you can breathe, it’s air that knows what to do with your laundry. You can’t see me here, but believe me, I’m happy.
