Venice: I am not making this up

Venice running dry? Not yet

February 23, 2023 9 Comments

The Bacino Orseolo, near the Piazza San Marco, could obviously use a little dredging. But as long as there are even a few feet of water, the gondolas will get through.

About ten days ago, I said to Lino, “Welp, it’s just about time for those wild articles that come out every year yelling ‘Oh-my-God-there’s-no-more-water-in-the-canals-Venice-is-dyyyyiiiiiinnnnnnnng’ to start appearing.”

And sure enough, just as soon as the exceptional low tides began to suck the water out of the canals, the television/online/daily newspaper news in many places began to wail.

Unhappily for the interested public, the people who really would like to understand what’s going on, these articles are not helpful. For one thing, there is a serious drought afflicting the mainland, and photos are showing rivers running dry. Rivers dry, canals dry — the drought has hit Venice! Logical! Obvious! Wrong!

Rivers and Venetian canals are not at all the same, for the simple reason that the Venetian lagoon isn’t fed by rivers, streams, lakes, or rain. It is fed by the Mediterranean Sea, Adriatic department. The canals are tidal: Six hours in, six hours out. No water at the moment? It will be back shortly.

Every Venetian knows that in January and February there will be exceptional low tides. This is no novelty, they even have a nickname for the phenomenon: le seche de la marantega barola.

I can’t overstate this: The low tides are NORMAL. They are predictable. The only thing that changes is the time at which the tide begins to fall or to rise, and the expected maximum depth. And then you plan accordingly. By “you” I mean people whose work depends on using water. If you live in Venice and the water takes you by surprise, you can’t be paying attention.

The lowest low tide this year, so far, was Monday at -68 cm below mean sea level. I was impressed; I’d never seen it that low. But this is nothing!

The Tide Center maintains a trove of historical data, and guess what? Between 1874 and 1989 there were plenty of times that the tide dropped even more dramatically — ranging from -90 cm (4:30 PM on February 24, 1876) to – 124.5 cm (January 18, 1882, at 4:10 PM). Almost all of these exceptional low tides were in January and February, with a few in December and March. We know they are coming! They always come! And then they leave!

Too bad the reports never show the same canal, six hours later, brimming with water. But that would spoil the whole story.

Our little boat, with Lino providing scale and glamour in his Carnival tricorn hat.

Late afternoon and the water is gone! Help!

Go through a few days of this low-tide/high-tide cycle and it begins to seem normal. Because it is.

See you next January, when we’ll go through this again. I’ll bring popcorn, we can watch it together.

Tourism, Venetian Events

Carnival strikes again

February 8, 2023 12 Comments

“Carnival hotels sold out in 600,000 for the festival.” I didn’t investigate this — 600,000 people will be staying in hotels? Unlikely. Perhaps a comma after “esauriti” could have clarified the statement. Still, I don’t doubt that that many people could be Venice-ing in some way and to some degree till Feb. 21. Can’t say we weren’t warned.

If you should happen to hear a loud rasping sound, it’s not a swarm of locusts warming up for mating season. It’s Venetian merchants rubbing their hands together. It’s Carnival time again!

The first weekend has just passed, but it seems to have gotten off to a curiously restrained start. The Gazzettino says there were 75,000 people, which is more than I’d want to spend a weekend with, but fewer than the 100,000 they report from pre-Covid days.

The novelty of an evening boat parade in the Grand Canal , a monster show on what appears to be a disguised dredge being pushed along by motor (the oars were fake — no wait, the oars were real, but the rowers were fake) did not enthuse the Venetians. It was a massive floating Las Vegas.

The boat parade the next morning, by Venetians who were rowing, was shorter than in past years, and there were fewer boats, as well. There were objections and protests about that, too, because truncating the trajectory meant that the mob scene that was so festive in the Cannaregio Canal was reduced to a simple mini-mob in the Erbaria at Rialto. Naturally all the merchants along the Cannaregio Canal have made their voices heard. Their palms are no longer rasping.

The uber-traditional “Flight of the Colombina” over Piazza San Marco was not held. Some explanation about the piazza being all torn up for the high-water-defenses work does not convince me, nor many others, either, but in any case no Colombina flew. Not Las Vegas-y enough? It used to be one of the major draws of the entire festival. Just more things I don’t understand.

No matter. We’ve got Carnival down here in via Garibaldi and environs, and that’s plenty entertaining for me. It’s wonderful how you can dress little kids up as anything and yet they still know exactly who they are. Some of them are pretending, but none of them is as good at it as some adults I know.

My thoughts are going no deeper. You can certainly upholster yourself as Giacomo Casanova, if that’s your thing. My own Carnival is kids, galani and frittelle.

The Christmas lights are keeping the festive spirit high in via Garibaldi.

How can one little word contain so much carnival?

You can have your newfangled frittelle filled with cream, zabaioni, and even pieces of apple. The classic Venetian variety is a heavy, dense, somewhat cake-like object. There’s nothing inside but raisins.

Galani (known elsewhere around Italy as bugie or chiacchere, among other names) have reached their culinary peak at the Pasticceria Melito just below via Garibaldi. The secret is rolling the dough to a translucent sheet, then deep-frying it. Carnival means nothing without this apotheosis of fat and sugar.

Bags of confetti (“coriandoli” in Italian) and other festive trifles are on sale in the supermarkets.

Go in for a bottle of laundry detergent and some toothpaste and come out with your Carnival costume.

The faithful ambulant amusement park has permission to stay from Christmas till Carnival, and if the weather cooperates it really adds to the madcap atmosphere.

Best of all are the shows — marionettes, magic tricks, juggling. The parents seem to love them as much as the kids do, though the dogs are a little harder to impress.

Are we going to be stuck here much longer?

The puppet dog was a huge success. He never obeyed commands, and they even found a way to rig him up so he peed. The kids were ecstatic.

Night falls by 6:00 PM, and yes, the show must, and does, go on.

The aristocrats manque’s can strut around the Piazza San Marco all they want. I like it better down here.

Problems

surfing the Grand Canal

August 17, 2022 22 Comments

This image of one of the “surfisti” was published in La Nuova Venezia. Fun!

Here’s something I learned today: Electric surfboards exist. They don’t literally go in the surf, but are big rectangles of plastic with a battery-powered motor and a cord to hang onto, and you just zoom away having the water-skiing time of your life without having to bother with attaching yourself to a motorboat. I guess it could be compared to an electric scooter, but on the water. Or a jet-ski that you stand on. Or a turbo-charged paddle board without the paddle.

This much is news to me. What isn’t news is that somebody (two somebodies, actually) decided to bring their toys to Venice and try them out on the Grand Canal. It happened this morning (Wednesday, August 17). What also isn’t news is that imbeciles have some primitive instinct that compels them to come to Venice in the summer, like the wildebeest have to surge across the Serengeti in May. If you are an imbecile with money, you will get there before all the ordinary, common-garden-variety idiot tourists who do mundane little stupid things like jumping off the Rialto Bridge, or cooking your lunch hunkered down around your camp stove in the Piazza San Marco.

Two men aboard these entertaining vehicles suddenly appeared in the Grand Canal, as I said, and after zooming from Rialto to the Salute they somehow managed to disappear before anybody had means, money, or opportunity to nab them. Mayor Luigi Brugnaro was livid and posted this on Twitter (translated by me): “Here are two overbearing imbeciles who are making a joke of the city … I ask everybody to help us identify them and punish them even if our weapons are blunt … there is urgent need for mayors to have more power to ensure public safety! To whomever identifies them I offer dinner!”

Well, they got caught, and it didn’t take more than a few hours. Bulletins didn’t name who gets the credit — and the dinner — for tracking them down, but it may be a while before these two bright sparks will be feeling that rush of adrenaline and endorphins and serotonin and oxytocin and dopamine they were savoring this morning.

They are two Australians who now, at nightfall, have had their boards confiscated (total worth 25,000 euros, or 36,662 Australian dollars), and been fined 1,500 euros each (2,344 Australian dollars). It’s only money and they almost certainly can afford it, but the mayor has initiated legal proceedings against them for “damage to the city’s image.” I don’t know what that is likely to add up to, but I can see lots of lawyers’ fees and whole lots of time being spent on making an example of them.

Naturally I’m as glad as the next person to know that they have been hauled away in chains and leg shackles, but my gladness is curdled by the thought that if it seems incredible that somebody would do this, it is equally, if not more, incredible that they weren’t stopped in flagrante. Along the entire stretch of the Grand Canal (3,800 meters or half a mile) there was not one carabinere, state police, local police, lagoon police, firefighter, dogcatcher, anybody at all with a badge and a walkie-talkie who was on the scene, ready to intervene.

I know it’s an old joke to say that you never see one when you need one, but if I were the mayor I’d be spending less time dudgeoning about these two cretins, and instead be chairing a serious meeting to find out where the hell everybody was. It’s invigorating to want — what was his phrase? — “mayors to have more power,” but it seems to me that if people were on their assigned jobs at their assigned times and places, the mayor wouldn’t need more power. The mayor’s supposed to make the system work, not BE the system.

I can imagine scenarios more serious than electric surfboards that would have had urgent need for a rapid intervention (baby falling into the water comes to mind), and yet, nobody’s on hand. “Please leave a message at the tone….”

Oh wait. The shell-game shysters have returned to their traditional places to pluck the unwary tourists ready to gamble. Maybe that’s where the police were. If not there, they must have been out patrolling the myriad motorboats causing extreme motondoso this year, though the waves make me doubt it. If not there, maybe they’re going around checking store-owners’ certificates of fire inspection.

The Grand Canal is Fifth Avenue! It’s the Champs Elysees! You can’t have Fifth Avenue with no police officer in sight. Something goes wrong on the Champs Elysees — there must be at least one policeman patrolling. But here in Venice we have the Grand Canal with nitwits running wild in broad daylight and the mayor has to turn to Twitter to ask for help finding them. Am I wrong, or is that just a little bit dumber than speed-surfing on Main Street?

Venetian-ness