Over the past decade (or so) there have been periodic swells of indignation and revulsion toward the monster posters screwed (or nailed, or glued, or whatever — I’m sticking with screwed for obvious reasons) to many facades in or near the Piazza San Marco.
The posters’ reason for being was not to inspire anger, because there’s enough of that around already to supply everybody in the city with two tons per year. It was to provide money, via the advertiser (politely referred to as “sponsor”), for the restoration and repair work which was supposed to be going on under the poster.
The billboard on the Ala Napoleonica — the stretch of building facing the basilica — measured 78 feet (24 meters) long, occupying somewhat less than half the 187 feet (57 meters) of the entire facade. However noble its intentions may have been, that’s still a honking great lot of commercial space to tack onto a world-class monument.
But now it’s gone!
Before we rejoice, which we certainly will, let me mention that it was there for eight years. While that fact is sinking in, I pause to ask myself — or anyone listening — what degree of restoration could have been required on a sheet of stone, however ingeniously carved or damaged by airborne pollutants, that would require eight years. Seventy-eight feet is big when you think of it as the length of the blue whale, but it’s not really all that long for a building. It’s the length of a tennis court.
The sponsors changed periodically, but the billboard remained, as they say here, a punch in the eye. Still, you can get used to almost anything. The only reason I noticed this ad was because of the nifty red spot. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have paid any attention. In any case, I wouldn’t have bought their product, so it seems like a waste of 78 perfectly good feet.
So a little arithmetic: 78 feet repaired in 8 years, means that they did nine feet a year. That’s not even one foot per month. I’d wager that archaeologists unearthing prehistoric tombs with eyebrow brushes get more done in a year.
Naturally I’m indulging in a little cadenza there. It’s probable that the team wasn’t working every day for eight years. Or even every month.
But let’s move on. Why was the poster removed? Presumably because the work was finished, but one presumes at one’s peril here. The work might have been finished six years ago, who knows?
One reason might have been the cumulative effect of protest from Venetians, Italians, Europeans, and world citizens of assorted types. Protest, though, is an unreliable weapon; it either fails to fire, or is surprisingly inaccurate, or isn’t strong enough to pierce the armor of its target. I’m finished with that metaphor now.
It didn’t hurt that Ugo Soragni, the Regional Director of the Superintendency of Cultural Goods (Beni Culturali) had recently taken an interest in the situation. I interpret that to mean that he looked at the maxi-poster and said “Hold hard! And what culture does this belong to?”
But what is the determining factor in almost every decision, or lack thereof? One syllable…starts with “s”…we never have any…sounds like “bray”…”fray”…Schei! Yes, a city councilor reviewed some figures and pointed out that the maxi-poster did not appear to be the fountain of eternal money that had been supposed.
Now we’re on to something. The poster was ugly and unprofitable? Off with its head. And its scaffolding.
This is the scene this afternoon. The facade looks better already, even as the Frankenstein-swaddling is removed from the building’s face. But evidently this prime piece of edificial space will never be safe from somebody’s urge to use it to publicize something. Even if it’s only an innocent exhibition that’s being advertised, this expanse of stone is apparently beautiful only insofar as it’s flat and vertical, and facing the Piazza San Marco.Naturally the story doesn’t end so neatly. The flank of the Marciana Library is currently condemned to the same treatment. And it appears to be even larger than its recent neighbor on the Piazza.
Nuances — I love them, whether they’re in colors or in words. If you look carefully, you’ll see that almost every color in this scene is some shade of grey.
Being a word person, and having a daily need to understand what’s being said around, or to, me, and also having a need occasionally to communicate some fact or feeling of my own, it’s to be expected that I’d be listening pretty much all the time to the wonders of the Venetian language. Which, as you know by now, is what I mostly hear spoken around the neighborhood (as opposed to Italian), and which is a wizard’s trove of phrases and terms that are utterly Venetian.
I’m not saying that similar expressions might not be heard (with different accents and spelling) elsewhere in Italy — certainly the concepts are universal. But there are so many Venetian ways of putting things which are perfect for the thing described that I sometimes struggle to recall what might correspond to them in English. Or even in the language of the divine Dante, which is something the let’s-rewrite-the-nizioleti squad quickly discovered. Certain things only work in Venetian.
These phrases express myriad nuances of human behavior, in terms which are often intricately bound to what was, at one time, the ordinary stuff of everyday life here.
Here are a few of the more common ones, which I, or somebody, is almost certain to use in the course of a normal day, or couple of days:
The death of Ganelon. Little did he dream that his infamy would live on in Venice for a millennium and more. (The Roland Tapestry, projet-roland.d-t-x.com/pages/pagesGB/01prefaceA.html)
Magansese(mah-gan-SEH-zeh): This is my latest discovery and it’s a beaut. It means “two-faced,” “treacherous,” “dangerously, unscrupulously untrustworthy.” There is a lighter expression which you might use more commonly, which is to call someone “una bandiera di ogni vento” — a flag of every wind — a person who goes whichever way the wind, public opinion, fashion, happens to be blowing.
But to call someone magansese is bigger and darker, and it comes from a certain malefactor of the Middle Ages, no less, known in Italian as Gano de Maganza, or Gano from Mainz. In English, he’s known as Ganelon. He betrayed Charlemagne to the Muslims in 778, which is taking etymology, not to mention vituperation, back a breathtaking distance. (The whole story is recounted in the Chanson de Roland, which I know you remember becauseof all those Chanson de Roland bubblegum cards you collected when you were a kid.)
A traitor, in a word. A fatal, scheming, hideous traitor. One that died more than a thousand years ago. Just think — a person so bad that even when everybody’s forgotten who he was, the stench of his villainy lives on, perpetuated by everyday folks needing the perfect word to vilify their so-called friends.
If there’s more than one — they sometimes travel in packs — the plural is magansesi.
“Tarring the Boat,” by Edouard Manet (1873). (The Barnes Foundation). If you’ve gotten yourself impegola’d in some situation, this is what you feel like — one hopes without the fire.
Impegola‘ (im-peg-oh-AH): It’s a verb form taken from pegola, or pitch. To say that you find yourself “pitched” doesn’t mean you’ve been blackened, nor that you’re in danger of having feathers stuck all over you and then be run out of town.
You would say that you’re impegola’ (or impegolada, if a woman) when you realize that you’ve gotten yourself involved in something that’s awkward or unpleasant in some unanticipated way, but that you would find awkward or unpleasant to get out of. Stuck, in a word, just as pitch was mixed with tar to waterproof all those thousands of wooden ships that kept the Serenissima in the game. Stuck in a particularly tenacious way which makes you discontented. “I offered to give her little boy a few English lessons for a week and now I’m impegola’ with his whole class every day for a month.”
You could also say that somebody else has impegola’d you. In any case, you’re stuck and you’ll have to find a way out on your own.
Cascar in covolo (cas-CAR in co-VOH-yo). Fall into a trap. Not a huge, menacing trap, probably, but if you’ve experienced this you’ve been tricked, shnookered, a little bit hoodwinked. You can do it to somebody else, too — make them fall into a covolo.
You can arrange your nets in a number of ingenious ways, but the endgame is always the same: being funneled into the covolo. (“La Pesca nella Laguna di Venezia, ” 1981).
The “covolo” is a neat tubular construction for accumulating the fish which have let themselves be induced to swim along a stretch of net which you have tied to poles, only to discover that they have obliviously swum into a container you attached to the last pole, from which there is no way out.
This covolo has certainly carried many fish to their destiny, but here it’s been decorated more cheerfully for Christmas. Maybe these are the spirits of the fish. In any case, you can see how the entrance (on the bottom) makes it impossible to exit.
If you have fallen into somebody’s covolo, they’ve tricked you in some way. It could be a practical joke, or a neat way of getting you to agree to do something before you realize what’s going on. You in turn could induce somebody to fall into a covolo. It doesn’t have to be serious or life-threatening. But once the falling-into-it has occurred, it can take some doing to get out. If you agree to the phone company’s too-good-to-be-true sales pitch without reading the fine print, you may well discover you’ve fallen into their covolo, along with a batch of other fish.
Far gagiolo (far ga-JYOH-yo). To “do” or “be” or “behave as” gagiolo. This is what someone does who is trying to pull a fast one. (Not to be confused with making you fall into the covolo. Just go with it.)
Somebody of whatever age who attempts some nifty little gag which ought to succeed because of its unexpectedness, or its audacity, or just plain luck, is trying to do a gagiolo. When it works, people may smile. When it fails, people may still smile, but sardonically. When the jig is up on some piece of reckless chutzpah, someone might say “Wow, you really thought you could do a gagiolo.”
A clunky example might be the person who gets his buddy to punch his time card so that he (person A) can quit work early.
Or better yet, the kid who says the dog ate his homework, and even brings his dog to class hoping to convince the teacher that its evident gastrointestinal distress is the result of ingesting five pages of algebra. Doing a gagiolo doesn’t depend on whether it succeeds; it’s enough to have tried. But you don’t get extra points if you succeed, either. The tinge of shiftiness will discolor any triumph you might be inclined to enjoy.
But wait, I hear you cry. What, or who, is a gagiolo? I can answer that. I have discovered that it was the name of the pirate who swooped down (along with his men) in the year 973 and stole the girls from the church of San Pietro di Castello in mid-ceremony. This is a swashbuckling tale with a happy ending for the Venetians, whose rapid pursuit succeeded in retrieving the girls, along with their jewelry, and their virtue (I think). And it was the beginning of the “Festa de le Marie,” which was celebrated on February 2 every year thereafter until 1379.
Seeing that Venice had so brilliantly out-swashbuckled Gagiolo and his henchpirates, it’s only natural that he would have become a byword, one intended to be pronounced with the tiniest bit of a sneer. Venetians are still dissing him 13 centuries later.
These are four perfect musettos (“musetti”) in the butchershop window. Alberto has written that they are “lean and petaissi,” intending it to sound like the two things on earth that you can’t resist. Better musettos should be petaissi than people, I always say.
Petaisso(pet-ah-EE-so). Sticky, in a gummy sort of way. If you make meatloaf and mix the meat and egg and other ingredients with your hands, the material has become petaisso. So have your hands.
What use could this word have? Well, the butcher on the fondamenta has a sign in his window that advertises his musetto, whose quality is evidently superior because they’re said to be “petaissi.” Kind of gluey, due to the pork skin mixed into it, which is claimed to be part of its appeal.
Other things can be described as petaisso — maybe the viscid pavement after the acqua alta recedes, for example. But its ideal use is to describe a certain sort of person, or behavior. It’s basically when you overdo being nice, or complimentary, or helpful — to the extent that you either make the other person uncomfortable or you embarrass yourself. Writing a thank-you note that is just a little bit too grateful or appreciative could be a small example of being petaisso; or writing a note that’s just fine, but then following it up with a present. And then following it up with a phone call.
Petaisso behavior is at its worst when it is seeking, or disseminating, gossip. A person can be petaisso when she just has to find out that last little bit about why you came back early from vacation, and when she has to share this information with all sorts of other people. It’s not merely that she’s a gossip — a petaisso is a sticky sort of gossip that you can’t get off your hands, just like the raw meatloaf.
I suppose men could sometimes be petaisso, but they have a smaller repertoire. I don’t think they care about clothes, children, or boyfriends, but you could find yourself stuck with a man who wants to tell you every intimate detail about his last blood test and his prostate. Some men of a certain age seem to be convinced that this is important information which is desperately sought by their victim. And they become just as petaisso as a musetto about it.
Impesta’ (im-peh-STA). In Italian, the plague is la peste. As you know, it was a catastrophically fatal and contagious disease that devastated much of Europe in various periods, and Venice was no exception. To call someone “impesta'” is an ugly thing indeed; it not only means that in your opinion the person is already afflicted (ghastly) with the plague but is probably spreading it (even worse). You wouldn’t say it to someone’s face but you might be driven to say it about them. “This impesta’ never answers my phone call when he sees its my number, he’s been avoiding me for a week because he owes me money.” You should be really angry or exasperated to say it, and it’s never used in a humorous or affectionate backhanded way, like some other denigratory words.
You might also hear someone say that someone is “Brutto/a come la peste” — as ugly as the plague. No laughing matter, around here. I recommend that you avoid trying these words out, they could really backfire.
In some people’s mouths, these never stop clacking.
Sbatola(z-BAH-toe-a). I truly love this one. I can’t decline it for you, but “sbattere” is a verb which means “beat” or “bang”, the go-to word for the racket made by unsecured shutters in the wind, or a desperate person at your front door at midnight as the posse is closing in. Now imagine that sound being created by somebody’s jaws as they talk, and talk, and talk. To say that somebody’s “ga ‘na sbatola” means that when that person starts — and he or she is always in “start” mode — he or she will not stop, probably not even when you just walk away.
This is not ranting, this isn’t free-associating, this is sheer abundance of one-sided conversation which must, at all costs, be expended on friends, acquaintances, friends of acquaintances, acquaintances of friends. All it takes is to ask this indefatigable person how he is or how things are going or what he’s having for lunch or where he went to school, and you discover that you might as well have asked “What’s the plot of “War and Peace?”.
This picture has no significance — I just put it in because I like it.
Nothing like a palazzo, but something that was much more useful: A converted 19th-century grain warehouse.
Up to now, my idea of the average hostel has been deduced from the average hostel-dweller, at least as seen around here in the summer.
Every sweltering day the vaporettos carry payloads of dauntless wayfarers and their gear, 80-pound backpacks that look as if they’d just arrived via the Old Silk Road lashed to the chassis of a 2 1/2-ton 6×6 truck. Their owners don’t look much better, pounded like Swiss steaks by summer heat and malnutrition and the cumulative effect of too many languages and sleepless nights during their seemingly free-form peregrinations. Their clothes appear to have forgotten what it ever meant to be clean. These travelers might have credit cards and laptops and tablets these days, but going to a hostel still struck me as meaning they were essentially going to be sleeping in a multi-bed hangar, with a bucket by their heads to catch the rainwater coming through the roof.
Wrong again.
There has been a hostel in Venice since the Fifties, and it was (I’ve been told) of the Old School. I never visited it, but I read its rules once somewhere and was sorry to learn that in addition to everything else that seemed to suggest the aftermath of a festival as painted by Brueghel, the paying guests were required to get out by 11:00 AM and take their stuff with them. That seemed harsh.
But no more. Not long ago I got an e-mail from Generator Hostels, alerting me that they had re-done the “Ostello” on the Giudecca, and inviting me to take a look at it.
I have never written about a commercial operation on my blog. It’s been a point of pride. But this philosophy, to which I am still faithful, runs head-first into my desire to be useful. If the new hostel is a good thing, I ought to know about it.
So I went. I was shown around by Operations Manager Keti Camillo, and even if she hadn’t been so helpful, I’d have been impressed.
Bear in mind that I’m not risking the claim that this is the best hostel on the planet, because I don’t know. But I do know that for Venice, this is a remarkable lodging resource.
This is not an infomercial. I haven’t been paid anything by anybody. I am merely letting you know about this place because I think it’s amazing, and I would happily stay here myself.
Naturally I consider that the maximum compliment.
I recommend visiting a new place on a grey, foggy, rainy day. If it can overcome that, you can assume it will be even warmer and more appealing on sunny days. Here, the bar faces the entrance. Makes an excellent first impression.There’s something mysterious about how chairs salvaged from somebody’s backyard heap come to look so cool.
Most of the ground floor is just one warm, eclectic little nook after another.This nook between two other nooks is occupied by this reworked four-poster bed which evidently has power to draw people onto it and keep them there, prone, for hours. Certain hours, anyway.This is the dining room, done up refectory style.So you’re ready to sleep. The landings/floors are color-coded and given Venetian names.Hallways: Wide, bright and clean. Like everywhere else in the building. These are not words I normally associate with “hostel.”Of course there are shared rooms and bathrooms. But they’re really clean, and there appear to be enough for everybody. By which I mean: Not just one toilet for 40 people. Bonus point: The mattresses are wider than usual for single beds. There may still be a snorer in the room, but nobody can help that.But there is a private double room with private bath. There are also some private triples and quads, but I didn’t see them.It’s not exactly an order. More like a strong suggestion.
Here’s what we’re getting today for a refreshing change of meteorological pace: Rain.
It was raining yesterday, too, and it’s expected to continue for another two, or maybe three, days.
Jan. 14: Changing perspective does nothing to alleviate the grimy appearance of the world. In Venice there are not 50 shades of grey. There appear to be about three, all too closely related to be allowed to marry.
Well, you say, at least it’s not fog. This is very true. But the grey remains. And the fog is expected to return.
I think that all the grey clouds in the northern hemisphere decided to come to Venice on holiday. They got bored, hanging day and night over Oslo and Bydgoszcz and the Kaliningrad Oblast. So here they are and they’re really enjoying their vacation.
Jan. 15. What can I say? If I say I wish we’d get snow or hail, it would sound like I want things to be worse. Maybe I just won’t say anything.
“Oh, we don’t want to do anything,” they all agreed; “We want to relax, look around, just chill for a while in the most beautiful city in the world that we’ve all heard so eternally much about. We’ll just hang out and be all grey and dismal while we’re at it.” All these clouds either bought a one-way ticket because they have no definite plans to go home, or they drove here in a friend’s car and now they’ve lost track of the friend. It happens.
But here’s something wonderful: I heard the year’s first blackbird yesterday morning. As you know, this is a pivotal moment for me. I won’t attempt a sonnet in praise of this avian avatar but I bring him forward as a sign that spring is still a possibility.
Obviously not Shelley’s famous skylark, but for me the unmistakable outline and color of the blackbird does the same job for me. Whether this bird’s spirit is blithe maybe open to discussion, but I’m enchanted by whoever created this image on the parapet by the Giardini. Sing on!
