The once-terrifying snaggly old crones are becoming cuter by the year. It’s almost like a competition by now, and if it keeps up like this the Befana is going to end up looking like a golden retriever puppy.
January 6 is the Feast of the Epiphany, which puts an end to the Christmas holidays (which seem to have begun in late August) by the sugar-laden nocturnal passage of the Befana. At some point in history, someone — probably two years old — mangled the word “Epiphany” and it became Befana (beh-FAH-nah) and so she has remained.
I entertain myself in two ways during this interlude.
The first is by conducting a completely unofficial census of the Befane that I see in bars, cafe’s, even supermarkets. There are so many of them you’d think that January 7 was officially going to be Take-a-Hag-to-Work day.
Would you accept candy from these women? Of course you would.This Befana hasn’t fully evolved from her original terrifying stage. But she’s on the right track.This is what the Ur-Befana is supposed to look like. That’s what makes her generosity with candy so wonderful — she looks like somebody who’d rather leave you some barbed wire. If the Befana is softened to the point of resembling your favorite stuffed toy, the essential frisson is lost.And speaking of candy, the tradition is that if you’ve been a bad little person, she will leave coal in your stocking. Some blithe spirit, excited by having been able to make candy that looks like coal (carbone) has lost the plot because this year we now also have fake polenta and cheese. What child has ever been threatened with polenta or cheese for having been bad? If you must be creative, at least make the fake candy look like something unnerving — fried fruit bat, maybe, or jellied moose nose.
The second way in which I entertain myself in this period is by admiring the underpinnings of the lagoon, as revealed during the exceptional low tides which always occur about now. This is the completely predictable and normal phenomenon of late December-early January, and the exposed mudbanks are the seche de la marantega berola (the mudbanks of the little old Epiphany hag). The newspaper sometimes runs a big photo with an overwrought caption that leads the uninitiated to think that the world has come to an end. Venice without water in the canals? Man the lifeboats! Oh wait — there isn’t enough water to float them. While it’s easy to imagine the inconvenience caused by acqua alta, not many people (I suppose) pause to imagine the inconvenience inflicted by not enough water.
Or let’s say there’s enough water, technically speaking. But the distance between our moored boat and the edge of the fondamenta is so great that we either have to plan ahead and bring a ladder (made up, I’ve never seen this), or just schedule our activities in a different sequence. There have been plenty of times we’d have gone out rowing, but the prospect of having to disembark when the water is 21 inches below the normal mean level just spoils the whole idea.
As you see. Actually, plenty of people drive a big nail into the wall as a primitive but effective step up. We keep meaning to do it, but so far sloth has overcome good intentions.
But never fear. The tide will return to its normal levels, and the Befana will be back next year. I promise.
Even with your eyes closed you can easily tell that the tide was extremely low yesterday afternoon — all you have to do it walk up or down the gangway at the vaporetto dock. It may not look like it, but this was definitely a 45-degree angle, and if you were pushing someone in a wheelchair you’d definitely have to call for reinforcements.Up until two days ago I’d never seen mud in the Bacino Orseolo. Just pull your gondola up on the beach and have a barbecue.People sometimes ask me how deep the water is in the canals. I always inquire, “When the tide is in, or when it’s out?” You can see the range of options here on this exposed wall (the exposed bottom is also impressive, in its way. I’d certainly never seen it till two days ago). The lower, uniformly brown stretch of wall is almost always underwater. The upper layer is covered with green algae which flourishes with intermittent dunkings and dryings as the tide rises and falls.Yes, there is this moment at the turn of the year which makes one almost long for acqua alta. Do not quote me.
Lino’s version is as basic as you can get, and even a three-inch square is enough to hold you for several hours. Chestnut flour, water, a pinch of salt, a scattering of rosemary.
Regional cookery is one of the zillion things that Italy is so proud of and so admired for. (End of preposition storm.) But the funny thing is that a dish will be super-famous as being from one place, and then you discover its stolen-at-birth sibling in a completely different region, and then you discover it again, and again, and sometimes even again. The reason is simple: People all over Italy have the same needs (eating) and many of the same ingredients, and what develops is something like a theme and variations.
Take castagnaccio (kas-ta-NYA-cho). Perhaps its most noted version is from Tuscany, but there are variations from Naples, Corsica, Emilia-Romagna, Liguria, Piemonte, Calabria, and even the Veneto — anywhere there are chestnut trees, in fact. The names may change along the way — baldino, pattona, ghirighio, castigna’, pane di castagna, migliaccio, gnaccia, and in Venice, “gardo” — but the essential ingredients originally couldn’t rise beyond the gravity pull of poverty: chestnut flour and water, and a little olive oil. Then came raisins and pinoli nuts and sugar, even wine and milk and orange peel and chocolate. But I don’t see how you can improve on the basics, which produce something super-dense, not too sweet, and loaded with winter-useful calories (193 per 100 grams).
Chestnuts were the perennial backup when you had no more flour of any sort, and not even polenta. When the countryfolk would burn the effigy on Epiphany (the “befana”), eyes used to be fixed on the direction the sparks flew. People still look, but now it’s more like a game, though it wasn’t always so. The doggerel makes that clear: “Se le falive va a marina / Tol su saco e va a farina / Se le falive va a montagne / Tol su saco e va a castagne” (if the sparks fly toward the sea (east), take your sack and go to make flour (the wheat harvest will be good) / If the sparks fly toward the mountains (west), take your sack and go gather chestnuts.”)
But like so many other “poor” dishes, castagnaccio is apparently being rediscovered by people who have had enough of smoked salmon and foie gras (just an expression — does anybody still eat foie gras?). Anyway, Lino is impervious to fashions and fads. He’s always eaten something, he’s going to continue eating it. Every so often the urge for castagnaccio will strike him and off he goes to acquire some chestnut flour. It is reliably available at the ever-amazing Mascari. (Full disclosure: I have no connection with this shop.) He doesn’t add either pinoli nuts or raisins, but sticks to the bare bones of the recipe, with a sprinkling of rosemary.
Lino remembers that there was a little shop at the corner of the Riva degli Schiavoni and Calle de la Pescaria which sold slices of gardo and also a “cake” made of chickpea flour. That was all, he sold nothing else.
The nameless shop is now the Ristorante Bar Vittoria and I would doubt that they offer anything chestnut-like to their customers.
As it happens, however, a bar-cafe in via Garibaldi has recently taken up the baton:
It says “Castagnaccio alla Toscana with raisins, pinoli and rosemary” and “Cecina alla Livornese,” that is, “cake” made of chickpeas (ceci) in the style of Livorno (also in Tuscany). That is a subject I’m not pursuing today.
The internet is full of recipes, but here’s the simplest version of castagnaccio, if you want to chance your arm:
Ingredients: 750 ml water, 500 gr chestnut flour, some fresh rosemary “needles,” a pinch of salt, 6 spoonfuls of extra-virgin olive oil, to keep it soft.
Heat the oven to 200 degrees C or 350 F. Put the flour in a bowl and add the water slowly while stirring. Spread a little olive oil on the bottom of the pan. Pour the batter into the pan and bake for one hour. (Note: The pan, or casserole, or whatever you’re using, shouldn’t be so broad that the batter only barely covers it. Use your judgment, but bear in mind that this isn’t going to rise.) The surface of the final product should have slight cracks or fissures.
Modify it as you wish, of course; I’ll never know. In fact, the heathen thought of topping it with whipped cream or ice cream did cross my mind, but I quashed it. We like the basics here.
One thing that everybody loves about Venice is that it seems so old. Of course, it is old. It’s kind of like a Byzantine/Renaissance/Baroque/Neo-Classical Lascaux Caves, except that it’s inhabited.
I pause to say that I know there are at least 14 continuously inhabited cities in the world that are far, far older than Venice. I was just making the point that many visitors are struck with astonishment at the fact that Venice was ever created, an emotion I believe the cave paintings also elicit. But I’m getting off the point.
One thing that makes it feel old when you’re living here is the endless cycle of the same old things, and when I say that I don’t mean the Befana (with its utterly predictable brief annual cluster of highly-charged articles about the dangerous effects of the air pollution caused by the bonfires’ smoke), or the feast of the Redentore, or other celebrations.
By “same things” I mean issues that just keep coming up, that continue to be transformed in a shape-shifting way by assorted groups, interested parties, and random changes of circumstance, but that never get settled. Even in the rare instances when a problem appears to have been resolved, before long we discover that it has spawned new problems. And the cycle begins again.
In the few days since 2015 began, the Gazzettino has filled its pages with a new crop of the old. Such as:
Adriatic (“mare”) to the right, the lagoon to the left. The conca, or basin, is item #4. The scogliera, or protective barrier, is #5. I had to take geometry twice in order to pass, but this still looks awkward to me. The ships’ captains tend to agree.
MOSE: No, this time it’s not about the gates themselves, nor about the billions that were stolen to pay off its many participants, collaborators, and well-wishers. Now it’s about the conca, or basin (#4 on the image above), which was dug at the inlet of Malamocco to permit the passage of ships on the occasions when the gates are raised.
For one thing, it’s too small.
It has been designed to accommodate ships up to 280 meters (918 feet) long and 39 meters (128 feet) wide. These dimensions are already too small for the largest cruise ships, the ones that certain groups want to compel to enter the lagoon by way of Malamocco instead of by the Bacino of San Marco. So a mega-cruise ship wanting to come to Venice would have to hang around outside in the Adriatic until the tide turned and the gates were lowered, to let them continue with their plan to unload thousands of passengers and take on more. Having to delay entry sounds like a new problem has just replaced the old.
But it gets worse. The fundamental problem isn’t size. It’s the positioning of the scogliera (skoh-LYEH-ra), or protective barrier, in relation to the basin. Stick with me here, because in the world of engineering “oops!” this is kind of special. And whatever you may think about cruise ships, we now have to consider the needs of real grown-up working ships that haul containers and petroleum and grain and coal (for the power station just on the edge of the mainland); these are ships for which time really is money.
The curve and position of the barrier built to shield the basin from wild stormy water (the kind you might well have if there is an exceptional acqua alta underway) makes it difficult — in some cases, perhaps impossible — for even smaller ships to navigate themselves into a perfect straight line to enter the basin.
“About 2,000 vessels (note: That’s nearly six per day) enter and exit the lagoon each year,” said Alessandro Santi, president of Assoagenti Veneto, the maritime agents’ association. “Of these, at least 350, in the current state of things, would be prevented from entering the basin.” They’d have to wait outside till the tide turned and the MOSE gates were lowered to allow them to enter by the usual channel.
Solution! Construct an additional rubber barrier (I have no further details) against which the ships could lean — a sort of fulcrum — to help them position themselves to enter the basin. I’m referring to the ships which can, in fact, enter the basin, which as you see isn’t going to be all of them.
Projected cost: 15 million euros ($17,669,900). That’s one heck of a patch.
Speaking of cost, the news has just come out that the completion date for MOSE has yet again been postponed. It is currently predicted to be finished in mid-2017, and will cost an additional 2 billion euros ($2,355,980,000). Unless it turns out to cost more, of course.
So why is this an old subject? Because it’s yet another aspect of a project that wasn’t planned correctly, but construction just went merrily along anyway, and now everybody is having to find ways to resolve problems that didn’t ever have to exist.
Encrustations — paper, in this case — to rival the pilings in the water at low tide. This wall is at Rialto, but the phenomenon is all over the city.
DEGRADO: The terse but expressive and useful term degrado (deh-GRAH-do) means “degradation,” and it finds innumerable uses. And I will keep this entry short because the subject deserves a post all of its own, if I could find the strength.
Degrado is a hydra-headed monster composed of graffiti, broken pavements, disintegrating nizioleti, and now strata of aging posters stuck up all over walls. The city of Venice, and myriad individuals, put up these pieces of paper with or without permission, and these announcements of all sorts of events, needs or offers stay there because once the moment has passed, who cares?
The city says it cares, and since 2012 has spent 856,000 euros ($1,008,360) to pay a private company named A.R. Promotion to affix posters and also to strip away the accumulated crud. But evidently the announcements breed at night and produce more old posters, or somehow the private company isn’t keeping up. Or perhaps even starting, who knows?
Even the vertical pipe to the right has been pressed into service.
Breakdown of payments made: At the end of 2012 A.R. Promotion won the bid to do this work for one and a half years for 456,000 euros. A few years later, the same company got the job for about two years for 400,000 euros. The age of some of the posters indicates that in either one or other of these periods, the company somehow didn’t catch everything.
Let me say that having to hack away layers of gummy paper over a period of years does not speak well for the paper-hangers. Because while one could criticize the ability of A.R. Promotion to remove paper, one could much more justly criticize the cretins who put up the pieces of paper in the first place.
But back to the subject of payment for services rendered, or not: Cecilia Tonon, president of the volunteer group Masegni e Nizioleti, has raised her hand to ask why the city is paying for a service which evidently isn’t provided, when squadrons of members have turned out more than once to do a large amount of this very work for free. (I participated in one clean-up project, which I’ll write about another time.)
No answer has yet forthcome.
Intermission: News from the trial of the Indian couple who murdered their Iranian roommate, Mahtab Ahadsavoji, and dumped her body in the lagoon. The Indian girl has been identified as the culprit, and has been sentenced to 17 years in prison. Her boyfriend got a smaller sentence because he merely helped dispose of the evidence. Appeals will drag on.
BUDGET: For years now we’ve had to listen to the municipal choir singing the Anvil Chorus, financial version, whose refrain is “No ghe xe schei” (there is no money).
We found out last year that the reason there was no money was because it had all been gift-wrapped and given to politicians and businessmen involved in the MOSE project.
So now there really is no money.
After working his way upstream through heavy fire from outraged city employees facing drastic cuts, attempting to make the budget balance in some miraculous way (“miraculous” meaning “money from Rome”), the emergency governor, Vittorio Zappalorto, has had to say it isn’t working. The city is 60 million euros ($70,855,800) in the hole.
“The situation is unsustainable,” he said. “We’ve reached a point of no return, The next mayor is going to have” (I freely translate) “one hell of a hideous job.” The Casino’, once an endless font of funds, is also now crouching over its begging bowls. The sale of palaces is almost the only option for raising money, but so far they are being sold at slashed, fire-sale prices, or not being sold at all.
The island of Poveglia (www.verdieuropei.it)
POVEGLIA: Remember the popular groundswell, funded by citizen contributions, to acquire the island and restore it for the use of the Venetians rather than let it be sold to one of those terrible foreign companies which would transform it into a hotel?
All stuck in lawyer-land. The city put the island up for bids; the highest bid, from a private businessman, was snubbed by the city as being ridiculously low. To which the bidder has replied, “But you had no higher bids in this auction. So?”
In any case, the groundswell of Venice-for-the-Venetians emotion hasn’t been heard from in quite some time, considering that since last June 4, when the sky fell on Venice, much bigger problems have overcome everybody. It would be extremely difficult, in the current climate, to get anybody excited about an abandoned island.
BIG CRUISE SHIPS: This is an issue that’s so photogenic that it cauterizes people brains, rendering them incapable of thought. In battling to ban the ships from passing in the Bacino of San Marco, the enthusiasts have created a much larger problem, which is how to keep the port economy going when some cruise lines have already canceled their plans to come to Venice in 2015.
The no-big-ships people haven’t given any sign of caring much about the port itself, but they are baffled as to how to they feel about the digging of the Contorta Canal (officially named the Canale Contorta S. Angelo). But it seems clear to almost everybody that deepening the canal will create so many more problems than it solves that it makes my teeth grind all by themselves.
The tug of war about approving the Contorta canal is going to continue for an unspecified time. Another year, anyway, I have no doubt. There will be flourishing crops of claims, counter-claims, and recriminations.
Meanwhile, due to the canceled cruises, 300,000 fewer passengers are expected this year. This means people may very well be laid off or fired, and all the rest of the ripple effect that doesn’t need describing. There is also the loss of income from the taxes paid by the ship companies to be considered. Nice.
But what I don’t understand is why the ships are vilified as ugly, and therefore deserving of death, when everyday ugliness like graffiti just keeps rolling along, singing a song.
Old? New? Is there a difference?
In case you’re wondering what a “hydra-headed monster” might look like, here is an image of the mythological Hydra being demolished by Hercules. For every head that was cut off, two grew in its place. It’s kind of a metaphor. (“Hercules,” by John Singer Sargent, 1921. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.)
The tree has served its purpose, and now it’s on to the mulch-mill, or wherever trees go to be reincarnated. Of course this isn’t the correct way to dispose of your spare timber. When Lino was a lad, nobody had trees at Christmas — they had broth with homemade tortellini and were thankful. When trees began to be used, they were often disposed of in the same way as much of the other trash: with a splash. Nowadays you’re supposed to work it out with the garbage collector, but as you see, that’s irksome for some people, who’d rather haul it to the curb, so to speak, and just leave it to its fate.
The high tide of the holidays has washed over the calendar, the budget, the crumpled handful of tomato-stained to-do and to-buy lists, and as the tide retreats into the new year, I thought I’d give a tiny review of the two weeks (it seems so much longer) just past.
After so many holiday seasons here, I don’t have much to say that’s new. Christmas, New Year, and the ineffable Befana have passed in orderly single file, and here we are, facing the next 12 months. The holidays don’t end on New Year’s Day, they drip on for another few days till the day after Epiphany, which my calendar says is dedicated to St. Raimondo de Penafort, who must be the patron saint of children going back to school.
If the panettone is gone, can the box be far behind? Obviously not. Hardly anything says “party’s over” like a busted panettone-box. The panettoni are now on sale at drastically slashed prices (2 for 7 euros? You could stock up now for next Christmas!). But anybody who has managed to finish one is glad to see the box disappear. My own experience is that I love the first two wedges, and after that it’s an increasing struggle to get through it. The person who left this dismembered box is happier than I, because we’ve still got two more panettoni in the gift pile and we can’t fob them off on anyone, even as a gift. Yes, I know: If only all problems were this innocent, not to mention easy to resolve.This is a cry for help. It may also demonstrate a buyer who seriously misjudged demand, and/or let a producer beguile him with a price that was even more drastically low. I’mi imagining the seller saying something like “Buy 2,000 panettoni and you pay a mere 50 cents each.” I wonder if there’s a dead panettone dump somewhere, a mountain of rejected Christmas confectionery. I hope never to know.
How to beguile the dead-air space between New Year’s and Epiphany? The old-folks’ club of Castello East, which undertakes some very charming initiatives for the neighborhood kids, came up with a new idea this year. On Epiphany Eve (last Monday), they arranged for some of the carnival rides which are here for their annual two- to three-month stint, to open at 10:00 AM, and they were free for children up to 11 years old. I think it was a very likeable idea, even if not very many kids made it out into the sunshine from their festive lairs (fancy way of saying “beds”).
This is the usual method of advertising local events — just type it up, print it out, and stick it on a wall somewhere. It says: “Elder Group Castello-East, Monday 5 January 2014 The group of elderly in collaboration with the operators of the carnival-rides on the Riva Sette Martiri offer a turn on all the rides, cotton candy and candy to children not older than 11 years old. From 10:00 AM to 12:00. Whoever wants to contribute candy or chocolate is very welcome; just come to the group’s headquarters.” I took a bag of candy to the clubhouse, my tiny contribution to the revels. I’m not responsible for anybody’s teeth.Free candy and cotton candy? Just what played-out parents and grandparents want: Kids in sugar-shock before noon.
I realize that the modest turnout was probably due to sheer sloth on the part of the kids. But I also think there was another drawback: Sunshine. I’m convinced that half, if not more, of the fatal fascination of these rides is that you indulge at night, when the lights are at their most dazzling and you’re out late in the dark. Taking a ride in the daytime is like somebody giving you an apple as a treat when you really want a deep-fried Mars bar.
