Accademia Bridge | Venice: I am not making this up

Now tourists are robbing tourists?

July 3, 2023 11 Comments

Tourists want beautiful glass, so this shopowner sometimes has to dust everything, or wash it with Windex, or whatever she’s doing. The visitors I’m talking about aren’t interested in glass, though.

The story about making money off tourists has taken a few turns since my recent post. It would probably be more accurate to call the following characters “short-term visitors” rather than tourists, because their purpose in being here does not resemble in any way whatever the typical tourists are seeking.

First, there are what journalist Elisio Trevisan, in his report for the Gazzettino, calls “beggar-commuters.” We are now learning that an increasing number come to Venice from various Eastern European points on what you might call, not a vacation, really, but a sort of brief work-abroad project. They come on the cheap Flixbus (which is great, by the way), set themselves up as beggars, eat at the community soup-kitchens, sleep in doorways, and can make as much as 100 euros per day. They manage to wash up at some public source of water before the return trip (the bus driver won’t let them board otherwise) and go home to their families with enough to live on till the next trip becomes necessary.

Then there are the regular thieves. They too are coming from elsewhere; they also are not exactly tourists, but tastes on vacations vary. Some people take a break and go surfing, or look at the Mona Lisa, or run with a batch of bulls, while these intrepid pilferers come to Venice to steal for a while. According to Carlo Mion writing in La Nuova Venezia, they come over from Lombardy, the region next door, and are usually organized by family or clan.

This egret, who seems to have adopted our riva, is also on the hunt, but not for money. He’s looking for anguele (ang-WEY), the Mediterranean sand smelt (Atherinus hepterus). I imagine that anguela mothers are warning their spawn about him the same way I’m warning you, though I suppose their main advice would be “Dive! Dive!”

The Carabinieri have been studying them and their systems. They are basically from the Balkans and eastward (Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and also a contingent of Roma). They dress in a credible way; the women wear panama hats and big scarves (to cover their faces from surveillance cameras), daypack hoisted on their chests and with a city map in hand (to cover their busy hands). Also, they look very touristy this way. Favorite targets: Americans, Koreans, Japanese. During one brief shining period there were also cash-laden Russians. In any case, a clever faux-tourist can gather as much as 300 euros in a day.

In one recent case, it was 700 euros. Two Bulgarian women lifted the wallet (that also included her documents such as passport, I assume, and perhaps also credit cards) of an 80-year-old American woman. The victim wasn’t aware of anything amiss, so I don’t know who raised the hue and cry. In any case, the filchers were taken away by whichever uniformed officer was on duty. The hearing is scheduled for the end of July — “in theory.” That doesn’t sound encouraging. In any case, whatever happens, they will be back. Or their friends and relatives.

Years ago there was a spate of street gamblers playing the shell game around the city, especially on the Accademia Bridge. (This sort of thief has not reappeared so far.) I read in the newspaper that one day lightning-fingers managed to milk a gullible player of $5,000. It’s not funny in any way, but I have to admit that, at least in this case, that the victim, as well as his trickster, must have become a LEGEND in that Serbian family. Every couple of months somebody will want to hear uncle tell the story again of that time in Venice he peeled the money off the tourist and that’s how come they’re living in such a nice house, with a garden and two cars. A boisterous toast to uncle and tourist.

I hope this is the last time I’ll be droning on about the situation. So just take every precaution, and then take some more.

Venice: Worth seeing. Your valuables: Worth keeping.

Events

Ricky: Names and dates

February 23, 2013 No Comments

Sharp-eyed reader Janys Hyde, who has lived in Venice twice as long as I have, read my report on Ricky and his mania for dropping things off the Accademia Bridge. She sent me a copy of the story as it was recounted in an article in 2011, which ran in the Nuova Venezia. I wanted to add these particulars to the sketch (it was all I knew at the time) I wrote a few days ago.

Here it is, translated by me:

May 31, 1973

Two finance officers and the folly in the Grand Canal

It’s May 31 of 1973, toward 2:50 AM, when the boat that was in service, with the Commandant of the Operative Naval Section of the Guardia di Finanza, Lieutenant Carmine Scarano, and two finanzieri, Alberto Calascione and Vincenzo Di Stefano, is traveling along the Grand Canal on their way to an intervention, passing under the Accademia Bridge.

A few individuals launch from the bridge a slab of travertine which strikes the boat and the two finanzieri dead center. They were moments of terror; the only one to remain unhurt is the Commandant who immediately realizes that the boat, without anyone steering, is heading for the embankment.

With a rapid movement he gains control of the boat and stops it, perceiving at this point the lifeless body of finanziere Calascione and hearing the cries and groans from finanziere Di Stefano who is wounded on the arm.

The Commandant manages to give the alarm and call for help, but unfortunately there is nothing that could be done for Alberto Calascione who, because of the grave injuries to his head, dies shortly after his arrival at the hospital.

Finanziere Di Stefano is kept in the hospital, his physical condition improves, but the memory of what has happened will never fade.

Alberto Calascione and Vincenzo Di Stefano were recognized as Victims of Duty (“wounded in the line of duty”) and of organized crime.

In various editions of Memory Day that have followed (I am still on the track of this commemoration; the paper uses the English phrase which is hard to back-translate into holidays I recognize), Vincenzo Di Stefano has never missed the occasion to commemorate, at the place of the attack, his colleague Alberto.

Venetian-ness

Inside each vaporetto, a million stories

February 18, 2013 3 Comments

800px-Accademia_bridge — The Accademia Bridge, looking toward the Accademia.Galleries. It may not look so high from this angle, but it was high enough. (Photo: Honeydew)

As I have said (many times), riding the vaporetto, while frequently annoying, or crowded or cold or suffocatingly hot or drenching — being crushed into a mass of people riding outside in the rain is so invigorating — it is also prime territory to see people we know.

I like this. I’m so used to it, either seeing someone I know, or at least someone I can identify, that I wasn’t even aware of it until one day when I got home from a large circuit doing errands more or less around the city. As I walked over our bridge, it suddenly struck me. “Weird!” I thought. “I didn’t see even one person that I know.” That it occurred, and that I noticed it, were both clear signs that I had passed through another airlock into the depths of Venice.

Usually, though, we run into, or past, people Lino knows. Which means “has known.” Forever.

Last night we were trundling home on the faithful #1 vaporetto. Now that Carnival’s over, the ratio of locals to tourists has increased again, briefly, in favor of the former. So it didn’t start out as surprising when Lino recognized someone.

Then the saga began to unfold.

It went like this:

A matronly, moderately zaftig woman was the last to come inside. As she sailed majestically along the aisle, she left the doors behind her wide open. It’s fairly cold these days, so it always astonishes me that someone doesn’t connect the concepts of “warmth” and “closed doors.”

So even though we were several rows back, I got up to close them, and sat down again next to Lino making the little huffy sound that escapes me when I fulfill this task for someone too (fill in appropriate word here) to close them.

“And she’s a Venetian,” he remarked. This sometimes happens, which makes it even harder for me to understand. But that’s not the point here.

“You know her?” I offered the usual rhetorical question.

“Sure,” he said. “She lived in my old neighborhood” (near campo San Vio). “Her brother was a really close friend of Ricky.”

And Ricky was…..?

“He’s the one who killed the finanzier (member of the Guardia di Finanza) by dropping a stone from the Accademia Bridge.”

I stared at him.

“He was a very sketchy character,” Lino went on. “He was all involved in drugs and smuggling and I don’t know what. So he really had it in for the Finanza.

“So one night he called the headquarters of the Finanza on the Giudecca, all worked up, saying ‘Somebody’s set fire to a boat in the canal! You’ve got to come quick!'”

So two agents on duty leaped into one of their fast launches and zoomed across the Giudecca Canal and up the Grand Canal.

“Meanwhile, Ricky had taken a loose piece of marble” (one of the rectangular slabs of Istrian stone which delineate each step on a stone bridge here). “He carried it up to the top of the Accademia Bridge and waited for them to pass. At just the moment they started under the bridge, he let the stone fall. It killed one of the agents right there.”

Naturally he was found, tried, and put away. “Sixteen years in the criminal insane asylum,” Lino said.

And then……

“I saw him around the neighborhood after he’d gotten out. He was walking along with a beer bottle in his hand. He started to cross the Accademia Bridge, and as he went up, he put his hand out over the rail and casually let the bottle drop.

“Sixteen years, and they hadn’t cured him of anything.

“Still, he had had an extenuating circumstance. Because once a long time before, he had jumped out his first-floor apartment window into the canal and saved somebody who was drowning.

“If he hadn’t have done that, they’d have given him life.”

IMG_8657_1 steps — You probably never noticed these rectangles of gray-white stone (unless you slipped on one in the snow or ice), in which case you’d never have thought about their potential as the murder weapon. This is good.